Dunbar a case study of disconnect between council and residents
by Carol Volkart
To Coun. Adriane Carr, the city’s new villages plan is the happy outcome of intense public consultation during the Vancouver Plan that brought it into being.
To Dunbar resident Olivia Edwards, the plan is a shock and surprise she’d never heard of until she got word of a villages’ open house the day before it happened.
What’s playing out in Dunbar, where the city is planning to create four new “villages” that will substantially change the area, is a case study of the disconnect between Vancouver city councillors and the residents they’re supposed to represent. It’s the opposite of TEAM’s core principle of consulting and working with residents about changes to their neighbourhoods.
Under the villages plan, the city wants to transform 25 low-density areas with small retail components into “vibrant” complete communities where people of all income levels live within a five-minute walk of their daily needs. To do this, the city will boost the retail areas and encourage a variety of housing, including multiplexes, townhouses, and up-to-six-storey apartment buildings within 400 metres of the shops.
Although villages have been in the works ever since the Vancouver Plan was approved by the previous city council in July of 2022, they’re only just coming to public attention now.
Flares started going up in October of 2024 when the city launched the Villages Planning Program, an 18-month process that will create area plans for the 17 villages expected to receive council approval in 2026. (The remaining eight villages are being done on other timelines.)
It’s a massive project: The 17 villages alone cover 13 percent (about 600) of all blocks in Vancouver, compared to the 500 blocks in the Broadway Plan, a separate major initiative.
While councillors have embraced the program with praise and excitement, on the streets of Dunbar, it came as a surprise to many. And not a welcome one.
In emails, mail-list posts and at a Dec. 15 open house at the Kitsilano Community Centre, residents questioned both the engagement process and the concept of villages itself.
“We already have villages and Dunbar is one of them. Why not actually spend some time in Dunbar and find out our needs instead of telling us what we should have?” Edwards wrote in a Dec. 14 email to Vancouver City Council after learning of the next-day open house.
“Any monies that were going to be spent on creating these ‘villages’ within a village should be spent on renewing or reinvigorating our villages already here,” she said. “We are losing many businesses to sky-high rents and leases and heavy taxation. There are too many empty storefronts. Spend your money on reducing business taxes so mom and pop stores can thrive here.”
Edwards, who is a member of the Dunbar Residents’ Association board but was writing as an individual, said she was stunned to learn that the Dec. 15 open house was the last of several this fall. “I haven’t heard anything about them and I consider myself well informed,” she wrote. “I listen to the news on TV and online every day and am a board member of the Dunbar Residents’ Association.
“Why were resident associations not informed of this process going on? We disseminate information to our residents through our newsletter, and our website. One of our members caught wind of this coming open house yesterday and emailed us.”
In a Dec. 20 email response, city planner Mateja Seaton outlined the city’s outreach attempts, which besides five open houses and two online information sessions this fall included mailing postcards to “every owner, occupier and business in the villages (granted we were impacted by the Canada Post strike, though the full extent is unknown.)” There were also paid social media ads on City accounts; notifications to all neighbourhood houses; hand-delivered posters to all businesses in all villages “as much as was within our control;” poster distribution to all community centres and libraries; a Talk Vancouver survey; a project webpage launch, and Talk Vancouver and Vancouver Plan newsletters.
Seaton also said this fall’s was just the first of three engagement processes, with the “major engagement opportunity” in the next phase. Seaton encouraged those interested to visit https://www.shapeyourcity.ca/villages to get on the mailing list and fill out a survey by Jan. 10.
In a follow-up comment to DRA board members, Edwards noted that if notification packages went to neighbourhood houses and not community centres, Dunbar wouldn’t have received one because it has no neighbourhood house. “I just find the whole notion of calling and spending so much energy and dollars on the idea that these pockets of shops are to be called villages ludicrous! I just don’t get why the Mayor and Council are doing this.”
Those at the Dec. 15 open house, which covered all four “West” villages (centred at 16th and Macdonald, King Edward and Macdonald, 33rd and Mackenzie, and 41st and Mackenzie), made similar points.
“Why not protect the villages we have instead of driving out the businesses and creating new villages somewhere else?” asked filmmaker David Fine, who is producing a documentary about the impacts of the Broadway Plan. He said recent changes allowing towers in once-protected retail areas there will raise land values and taxes for existing businesses, making it even harder for them to survive.
Fine was also skeptical of the villages’ engagement process.
“We give our opinions and nothing seems to change based on that input,” he said. “That makes us feel like you aren’t actually listening and that this is essentially performative."
There were plenty of other criticisms. “It's just a big scam,” said one posting to the Dunbar mail list. “Name it something nice like villages and people won't notice that it's essentially upzoning the whole city for multiplexes and 6 storey apartments.”
Participants’ notes on a city whiteboard at the open house were also mostly negative. “Doing one open house the week before Christmas doesn’t demonstrate much wish for input,” said one. Others asked how hard the city had tried to inform residents about villages during the long mail strike, and why city staffers at the event weren’t even taking notes.
Regarding the villages’ concept itself, one contributor said six storeys is “too high/dense for a village and neighbourhood,” and another called the plan “an attempt to displace long-term residents from their homes and add to developers’ profits.” The villages’ one-size-fits-all planning also came under attack: “Homeowners in the west side villages did not sacrifice, work hard, settle there to raise their children to have a six-storey block spring up beside them with little strategic thinking behind the city plan. There needs to be leadership in evaluating these areas individually. Each one is different.”
The criticism isn’t only from annoyed residents. Ask architects with a strong knowledge of urban design about the villages plan, and you get responses like this:
“It’s nuts, the whole thing is nuts,” said Bill McCreery, who is so passionate about seven-minute walkable communities that he’s come up with his own plan for 23 neighbourhood centres in Vancouver. Unlike the villages plan, it’s based on main shopping streets, with six-storey multifamily buildings radiating out from the shops, stepping down gradually to four-, three- and two-storey buildings into single/duplex areas, which could be retained.
“It’s not just densification willy-nilly,” he said, adding that six-storey buildings are fine when done with consistency and order, but are not comfortable beside a house.
“The important initiative must be to ‘focus’ higher densities so more people can walk in less than 7-10 minutes to shop and transit. This also supports local businesses and keeps land prices lower.”
Both McCreery and Dunbar resident Brian Palmquist, an architect who comments on civic issues on the City Conversations substack, agreed the plan looks like an effort to open broad swaths of the city to six-storey apartments.
“I feel our planners have so little expertise in, wait for it, planning, that they are throwing open everything to anything in the hopes there will be some ostensibly positive outcomes they can point to as successes,” said Palmquist.
Both echoed Edwards’ concerns about the impact on already-struggling main-street shops.
“This is going to make it worse, far worse,” said McCreery. “It will create another retail hub that will mean the people who were going to shop on Dunbar are not going to shop there.” Palmquist said that’s why he supports McCreery’s “sensible” concept to densify around existing main-street retail. Policies boosting retail elsewhere “will detract from any areas not so blessed,” he said.
As for hopes that the villages will enable lower-income people to live in areas like Dunbar, Palmquist said such an outcome is “very unlikely. The west side land premium (probably $50-100 per buildable square foot) is enough to rule out housing for lower income folks.”
In contrast to this tsunami of criticism, listening to the Oct. 22 city council discussion on villages is like entering another world.
“Thanks for this great and exciting work ahead,” Coun. Pete Fry told staff, while Mayor Ken Sim called the plan “supercool.” Coun. Mike Klassen offered “kudos to our team” and praised “the idea that we would begin to have these wonderful village nodes across our city allowing for many positive things to happen.” Carr happily recalled residents’ enthusiasm during Vancouver Plan consultations, especially around the villages concept. “People across the city were so excited to be asked what they wanted their city, their neighbourhood, to look like, and they gave such great ideas, especially around the local villages’ areas, these walkable complete communities. This is a follow-through from that incredible engagement.”
Councillors’ questions to staff were tentative and polite, easily satisfied by reassurances and vague generalities: Staff were looking into the issues, working with other departments, and would know more as the process unfolds.
Nobody questioned the impact of villages on struggling high streets. Nobody asked whether it’s realistic to expect affordable housing in pricey areas like Dunbar. Nobody pressed for a more definitive estimate of when the vaguely promised amenities for villages might actually arrive.
For Sim and Coun. Lenny Zhou, the question was whether villages couldn’t happen faster. Noting they’re already in the Vancouver Plan, Zhou asked why it will take 18 months to make them a reality. Sim asked whether there’s anything the city could do to speed up the process. Staff held firm that 18 months is already a tight timeframe for planning 17 villages and consulting the 65,000 people who live in them.
The Villages Planning Program debate ended in a flurry of positivity, thanks and praise. The vote in favour was unanimous.