The Vancouver city planning commission has asked city council to fund a neighbourhood-amenity mapping project at a cost of $30,000. In a report going to council’s standing committee on planning and environment on Thursday (May 1), the advisory body is asking council to set aside the money to help better understand how to adapt old buildings to modern uses.

“Today’s challenge is not simply saving old buildings from demolition, but understanding what characteristics of these old structures have made them adaptable to change, and then incorporating these features into contemporary design techniques,” the report states.

The project would be a partnership with Smart Growth BC, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to creating compact communities to enhance livability and sustainability. The commission has also asked council to approve an additional $18,100 to conduct a public-engagement series called A City Built for Change. It would include a five-part speaker and event series focusing on such matters as EcoDensity, long-term sustainability, community engagement, participation, and education.

There’s no mention of the series covering the topic of adapting to a world in which peak oil production has been reached, which was a major focus when former NDP MLA Bob Williams was a member of the planning commission. The commission’s planning for peak oil led to a book, Strategic Sustainable Planning: A Civil Defense Manual for Cultural Survival, by Richard Balfour and Eileen McAdam Keenan, published last year by Old City Foundation Press.

> Charlie Smith

COPE councillor David Cadman will use the May 1 planning and environment committee meeting to push for a one-to-one replacement policy to help preserve the social-housing stock in the Downtown Eastside.

The motion, referred from the April 29 regular council meeting, notes that homelessness in Vancouver has increased by 19 percent since 2005. Cadman also states in his motion that the City’s housing centre has determined that 1,597 new units of market housing were set to be built in the Downtown Eastside between 2005 and 2010, but only 557 units of social housing for that same period. A replacement policy would see the ratio of market housing to social housing move from 3:1 to 1:1.

“We absolutely need that,” Wendy Pedersen of Carnegie Community Action Project told the Straight by phone regarding the replacement policy. “And it is already in the city plans.”

At the same meeting, NPA councillor Peter Ladner will introduce a motion to look for flexibility in the rules governing the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District. Currently, the city has a requirement that any new project with a floor-space ratio greater than one must provide at least 20 percent of the area for social housing.

> Matthew Burrows

Many young people who live in cosmopolitan, multicultural Vancouver probably have no idea that there was a time when people couldn’t live in certain neighbourhoods if they belonged to certain racial or religious minorities. May is Asian Heritage Month, a time to remember the struggles of the pioneers who faced significant racism as they tried to build their lives on Canada’s West Coast.

A British Columbia Civil Liberties Association position paper noted that as far back as 1911, a judge ruled that “the alienation of property on the basis of racial consideration was inoperative and, further, should not be entered” in the land-titles registry. However, because this decision was unrecorded, provincial registrars did not remove covenants based on race. Jewish people, aboriginal people, and people of Asian descent were routinely barred in covenants placed on land titles in B.C.

As UBC history professor Henry Yu has pointed out in public lectures, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that Chinese people started moving into neighbourhoods such as Shaughnessy and the British Properties in significant numbers. Many of those who bought these homes were wealthy, apolitical Hong Kong immigrants. They probably never saw themselves as civil-rights pioneers, but they did help desegregate the region.

> Charlie Smith