In Defense of Our Planners

If you have read many of my posts, you may see that I pick on government regulation alot. I spend alot of time picking on zoning - and a little time on building code - but not that much on developers or property owners, flippers or speculators - and until now have generally been avoiding cultural overlays.

In a recent conversation with an reputed planner in town; I thought it was time to come clean, to explain my thoughts. Cultural overlays play a huge part in this - when I suggest that most people value walkable communities over parking, I do believe that - I believe that their actions, how they spend their time and money betray that. But, I do not believe that most people have spent any significant amount of time considering parking though, beyond that they wish that there was more of it specifically where they currently happen to be looking for a parking stall. 

So the same person can show up at a Public Hearing or Planning session and say they want more parking, but also want safer pedestrian streets, and also want more shops and restaurants, and more vibrancy - but not understand that rules that govern this realm nor understand that some of the things they want cannot be had without large compromises in another. It is not uncommon to the human condition to want mutually exclusive things. 

I am not a fool. I know that many Canadians, Kamloopsians, Europeans, many People - aspire to an auto-utopia of easy parking, driving and safety. Despite the choking pollution and quicksand of developing world traffic; one of the first vanity purchases of a new middle class in the developing world is often a Car. I have sat for hours in Delhi traffic with the metro whizzing every few minutes overhead, while each person of means sits at a standstill in the traffic below. 

However, I also know that if you dive into the subject, you will find that no City, no matter how many freeways and parking lots are built can ever build enough. Los Angeles is proof. Amsterdam is the proof of the opposite. Like all Utopia, Auto-Utopia does not exist.

It is not possible for all of us that want - safe streets free of poverty, affordable single family homes, on large lots, with well taken care of yards - to have them. The "American Dream" of the White Picket Fence Acreage has been diminished to the two car garage on the treeless Cul-De-Sac. And wanting for something does not make it possible. Like romantic partners, children, parents and the lottery of life; we almost certainly get nothing of what we want without sacrifice and compromise. Even given limitless resources. Knowledge of these compromises and their tradeoffs is the job of our planners to try to achieve the best outcomes, whatever they might be politically at the time (happiness for the majority, happiness for a minority, other...)

In our Urban environment the path towards success,  is one which many Kamloops planners have done an exemplary job of laying out in more than 30 years of Community Plans. The planners have seen visionary futures and spectacular outcomes - there is hardly a fault I could find in the compromises that the planners have made in the plans. However the needle towards solving the problems of unsafe streets, vacant and boarded up buildings, high housing costs, and increasing traffic congestion continue to all get worse, rather than better. Little in the built environment has changed. The fault does not lay entirely with regulation and regulators.

A North Shore project that did not go ahead, a 10-plex beside a bus stop and grocery store, perfect affordable housing for folks unable to afford to drive - was denied support from planners because it did not include "adequate" parking or amenity space for the tenants. Of course, instead, the would be tenants were denied any housing as well as any amenity space; because the property remains vacant and boarded up now. 

In rebuttal, a planner commented that if the City relaxed these rules, the developers would just pocket the profits instead. I appreciate this argument; in the current massive supply shortage, giving a big increase in FAR or reduction in minimum housing size, being granted an exception to the regulatory requirements is often either a windfall profit, or what makes the business case actually work. The projects that actually proceed can sometimes be the windfall profit scenario. However, when developers underprice, either to rent or sell, there is plenty of speculators lining up to sub-lease or resell at a quick profit. This happens too in government subsidized housing. So even all altruistic, public, non-profit Developer cannot escape the economic opportunism in the North American real estate market.

I have also seen a number of projects, where a would-be Developer or City Councilor buys or inherits land, using their charisma and connections, achieves Development Permit approval for more than was allowed by-right on the land, and then put it back on the market at a much higher price for the value 'they provided' through the permit process. In this case, the new developer now has to pay the higher land price, and increase the price of the land just increases the price of the new apartments in turn. This type of flipping ties up permitting time for years, and the eventual project may be stuck for years in order to wait for the value of finished apartments to rise high enough to pay the flip cost. Further, hundreds of hours of City Staff time can be wrapped up re-permitting the same project, multiple times, through multiple owners, each time the new owner scraping the cream and profit off the top.

We need rules. But the rules that we have right now are not delivering what we want them to deliver. They are not delivering more housing with any speed. Often permitting a project takes longer than building a project  - made worse if there is a flip and it has to re-do the process again. Soft costs (designers, lawyers, permit fees, taxes) are often nearly 50% of the cost. We need new rules. Our City Planners need new rules. No one can possibly feel validated in their job running the same wheel around and around again, for the benefit of connected, charismatic rich people. 

The Congress for the New Urbanism has for 31+ years been driving planning and zoning reform. Helping cities move away from zoning that does not deliver what it is intended to do. There is heaps of good data and real world experiments in thousands of cities for us to learn from. We would not be reinventing the wheel. The works of Alain Bertaud in the primary; Jane Jacobs, Andres Duany and Charles Marohn as well. 

If what we need is housing, we should not be making parking and landscaped space the gatekeeper of new housing in areas which can easily support it (North Shore, Downtown, Brock Center, TRU area). If land speculation is driving up home prices, we should be moving towards weighting land values in the property tax system rather than improvement value which currently creates an incentive to do nothing, and is a risk to funding development. Or we could provide relief/rebate to capital gains taxes on Development Lots if the project proceeds in a reasonable amount of time. If time to permit is a problem because of the complexity of the rules, we need simpler rules that are easy to understand. The very process of Development Permits is allowing/encouraging the flipping process to be as or more lucrative than actually building the housing. 

The Planners have a fantastic vision for our future. They have done the homework, they know what concepts and compromises have worked and not worked in other places. What they lack is the right tools and systems for success. Some of those are cultural overlays and assumptions like cars and parking above all else - others are embedded in financing rules at a Federal Level, or Building Permit rules at a Provincial Level. Many are things within City Councils control like creating by-right up-zoning, OCP checklists and land-use reform that gets rid of redundant and pointless rules that we are keeping around despite not knowing why they even occurred in the first place. 

I would argue that the current system harms more people trying to do the right thing, than regulates profiteering billionaires. I would even tend to argue that the high regulation actually serves the profiteering developers more, as the ones with the most power, best lawyers and most charismatic lobbyists benefit most from this system.

As a disclaimer and qualifier, land-use bylaws have nearly nothing to do with life and safety. They are completely about utopian visions of ideal living arrangements based on the fashionable intellectual ideal of the day. 

Zoning reform will not magically fix all the challenges in our City and its redevelopment - but at least it will allow those who want to do the right thing to not be penalized for it. Just as only a small amount of those experiencing homelessness are responsible for most of the property crime; and a few motorcycle riders deafen the rest of us driving in loudly in first gear; and only a few skateboarders have vandalized property - right now we penalize everyone trying to do the right thing, to protect ourselves from a few people who take advantage of the system.

And further - changing the culture, to help people understand that they in-fact do prefer walkable vibrant areas, we have to actually create a few that folks can choose to patron over the stripmalls. When someone on vacation walks Disneyland, or Sun Peaks, Whistler, or the Mexican All Inclusive - their thoughts are not on the inconvenience of walking aimlessly on a pretty and safe street, built at a pedestrian scale, but simply on their enjoyment of the space. So too do we treat parks, or the Sea Wall this way. We don't think Riverside Park or Kenna Cartwright would be improved by a 4 lane road - we just simply enjoy the spaces for what they are.

Nothing in construction and development happens quickly - and as we move at a snail pace towards a more pedestrian future some things will get better, and some things will feel worse. And slowly the culture will change just like it did all over Europe. Not by screaming from the top of an ivory tower that everyone else should do better - but because the average person simply finds themselves in places they find charming, and choose to live there, take lunches there, move their office their, shop or open their shop there.

I don't think my time is best spent on my writing trying to convince someone to change their views about something they simply do not care about - which is why I avoid talking about cultural overlays. If the average person is not listening to my message, it falls on deaf ears. But planners are in the position to put pressure on the system, from within. But we are putting pressure from outside, as active citizens. You must be an active citizen to have read this far.

So too I will not be able to prevent or influence the prevention of opportunists taking advantage of our housing system. What I do know is where I have, and seen others, trying to provide housing, or fulfil the stated aims of our Community Plans, and received friction if not outright denial by the permitting systems. Those systems are responding to our cultural overlays.

If anything, I think that we need to provide out Planners with more agency to be creative, and progressive, and try out new ideas. Our councilors and public need to find ways to get to Yes, instead of defaulting to No and support our planners and the plans that they have worked with the community to publish. The planners in our town almost entirely are fantastic people who have a great body of knowledge and expertise, and need to be given the agency to actually deliver on the plans that they have spent lifetimes and careers working on.