On Erick Villagomez’s block near Commercial Drive, seven new construction projects have sprung up in the past year. They’re houses, he explained, crummy, ugly ones with no redeeming, sustainable design. To Villagomez, the owner of environmental residential-architecture firm Metis Design/Build, they symbolize the great divide in Vancouver’s building future.

At one extreme, Villagomez said, there are megaprojects such as the Olympic Village in Southeast False Creek, which is on course to set a new standard for B.C. in green planning. At the other extreme, he noted, 95 percent of the city has been built under circumstances that are very different from those of the Millennium Group development.

“Go to a spec home builder and tell them you want LEED,” Villagomez told the Straight in a phone interview, referring to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green-building rating system. “They’ll be like, ‘What the hell is LEED? I don’t know what the hell that is.’ But the irony is, they’re the ones that build the Vancouver Specials, all these duplexes, that replicate their little models, and they pretty much create the vast majority of the city.”

While the average builder is still handcuffed by bylaws that discourage green building through cost and complication, Villagomez said, the Olympic Village is cutting-edge.

“It’s doing a good job of what it’s supposed to be doing, which is testing environmental systems,” he said.

That’s confirmed by Ian Smith, the City of Vancouver’s manager of development for the Southeast False Creek and Olympic Village project office. Since 1995, the Southeast False Creek site has helped Vancouver define what sustainability is. And, he said, the Olympic deadline helped push the city to make it happen. Because the green components were written into the planning, they materialized before the financing crumbled. So the green part—unlike the affordability and economic stewardship aspects of the plan—was never compromised.

LEED Silver for all private buildings on the site? Check. LEED Gold for all civic buildings? Yep. LEED Platinum for the community centre? That’s still the projection. Energy use will be reduced by 50 percent, Smith told the Straight, thanks in part to a sewer heat-recovery system. Water use will be 50 percent lower than normal.

“Overall, it just gets better,” Smith said.

Even the Olympic Village’s most prominent green critic, John Irwin, says it’s pretty good. Sure, he would have liked to see “green walls”, a more productive community garden, different trees, and a few other features. He pointed out that LEED scores were boosted by two facts: the site is a brownfield (former industrial or commercial land), and it’s close to transit.

“It’s a moderated success story,” Irwin told the Straight. He’s the founder of the Southeast False Creek Stewardship Group, an ad hoc think tank of green gurus that advised the city’s planning department on the project. “When you live in a world with cruise ships in the Arctic and freighters in the Northwest Passage, I don’t think we really grasp the ecological crisis we’re in, or we’d be willing to make bigger changes.”

Chris Shaw, spokesperson for Olympic watchdog 2010 Watch, said the City of Vancouver isn’t coughing up the goods on exactly which green features are being delivered. All of his freedom of information requests to the city for the minutes of in camera meetings with the Millennium Group have come back blank, he told the Straight. So the public just has to take their word for it.

While Smith admits that the site could be improved, he said there’s still an opportunity to do that. The Olympic Village is just Phase 1 of the three-phase project, which will eventually house up to 16,000 people.

“Thirty years down the road, the Olympic Village will still be seen as something cutting-edge. And the Olympics made us do it. There’s always some new technology coming out of Germany or Sweden to be better, more green. But taken all together,” he said, “it’s pretty impressive.”

As for Villagomez’s point that this pie-in-the-sky stuff doesn’t help 95 percent of Vancouver, Smith said the city’s licensers and inspectors have “had their eyes opened” by the Olympic Village’s green planning process to what’s possible.