A commentary by a city planner and urbanist advising cities across Canada and around the world. He was the founding president of the Council for Canadian Urbanism, a frequent global writer and media commentator on better city-making.
Recent coverage regarding Victoria city council’s public hearing Thursday for the Roundhouse at Bayview Place in Vic West has inspired me to share a different perspective.
I’ve been a city planner for 32 years, including almost six years as Vancouver’s chief planner. I’ve advised many cities on better, more sustainable city-making across Canada and all over the world (including many like Victoria), as far away as Auckland, New Zealand, and Oslo, Norway, and as close as Langford and other Island communities.
I occasionally agree to provide advice to private sector projects, and I’ve been advising the Bayview community-building project for several years.
It’s an important site being considered at a really important time, reflecting what I call the “Five Crises” in my advice to cities.
We’re in a housing crisis, a climate crisis, a public equity (including classism) crisis, a public-health crisis (fuelled by too much car-dependent sprawl, and built-in inactivity by design), and a public-finance crisis (with big municipal tax increases and brutal per-capita suburban infrastructure costs).
We’re also in a time where post-pandemic downtowns like Victoria’s are struggling to be the successful economic engines and city hearts we need them to be. Downtowns need a lot more people living in and around them.
Tackling these many overlapping crises in smart, ambitious ways is imperative for our present and future. We need to challenge ourselves to do much more, much better, much faster.
I’ve watched Ken and Patricia Mariash (the community builders for Bayview) meet with hundreds of community neighbours, reaching thousands over many years, in events and through their “open door” approach and regular public lunches in the community. In my experience, that’s unusual, and a good thing.
Neighbours who have chosen to participate in the process with the applicants have become better informed with the facts and aspirations about the community-building vision, and have helped shape that vision.
Some who oppose the project are pitching “simple answers” they’d rather see instead, but the truth is that this is one of the hardest Canadian projects I’ve seen.
Between contaminated soils, exciting but complex heritage buildings with walkable shopping, big aspirations for affordable housing, and a need to build great public places that can also potentially accommodate passenger rail in the future, it has been an incredibly challenging exercise requiring real creativity.
Some objectors have pitted the important heritage aspirations on the site against the amount of density that’s needed to make the project actually work. This is a false choice.
The project needs enough density (which, remember, are homes we badly need) to make financially viable all the expensive public costs and aspirations, including heritage restoration. It also needs the kind of population that will attract retailers to give a vibrant second life to those heritage buildings. And let’s be clear — retailers won’t provide those local, walkable shops and services without that population density.
Preserving community heritage and character isn’t about preventing badly needed and responsible change, or claiming to be OK with a different proposal that actually isn’t viable at all. It’s about doing change well, with smart design, while understanding the real-life requirements and balancing acts that achieve many important public goals.
The heritage buildings aren’t threatened by the proposal. The proposal is how they will be preserved and rehabilitated, remaining the defining features in this new urban place, with exciting new purposes.
There’s a reason why the site has seen little activity since the previous 2008 zoning was put in place — that zoning wasn’t viable or buildable.
The city’s own economic analysis confirms that the proposal that council will consider Thursday offers a lot more public benefit than rezonings require, including the daycare and additional rental housing that council recently requested while simultaneously reducing the density. And that’s without counting the “once-in-a-generation” land donation for below-market affordable housing that the applicants have offered.
Community opposition to complex proposals is normal, and an honest and transparent civic conversation helps council make an informed decision. Unfortunately, the recent misinformation about the proposal has made council’s work harder.
As a professional who champions authentic public engagement, that’s a big problem. It has the effect of unfairly confusing and scaring people.
Victoria needs a lot more homes. There are few sites like this anywhere in Canada, and no other sites like this in Victoria, a stone’s throw from a downtown that needs a lot of help.
The proposal for the Roundhouse site is well planned and designed, sustainable, walkable, multi-modal, civic, vibrant, diverse, heritage-centred, and more. It reflects everything that Victoria city council has asked it to achieve in their two previous reviews at committee of the whole.
We all have a big responsibility in circumstances like this to be ambitious. The urgency of the moment calls for it.
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Note to readers: A previous version of this opinion piece included an outdated rendering of the project. The image has been updated.
