Brian Jackson, Vancouver’s soon-to-retire planning director, gave a frank view Thursday of the challenges the city faces as it struggles with housing affordability, development and anticipated growth.

In a profanity-sprinkled speech to the Urban Development Institute, he went on the offensive, confronting developer unrest over the city’s controversial Community Amenity Contributions program, demands for a new citywide plan, and the deeply personal sniping levelled at him from some ex-planners, bloggers and media.

“Stop listening to the haters,” he said, adding the city’s planning community is besieged by people who disagree with its basic planning and development goals.

Jackson, who leaves his post at the end of November after three years, said he believes the city needs to review and simplify the CAC program, in which the city extracts money or agreements for community improvements from developers who want bonus density or their properties rezoned.

The system in Vancouver has come under fire from developers who feel it is often arbitrarily imposed, driving up the cost of housing. The UDI recently complained to the provincial government, asking it to enforce provincial regulations governing such developer contributions. They say they don’t have similar problems in other cities, where the program is more defined.

Jackson told the audience of about 500 that since his arrival three years ago, he has helped change the program to make it easier, but it still needs work.

He also believes the city should remove the requirement for such contributions in projects that involve heritage revitalization, rental properties and office projects.

“Council has strong policies for wanting more rental housing, more office development and for protecting heritage,” he said. Insisting on CACs in those cases may not be beneficial.

“I also think the city needs to fix the way CACs are calculated. It takes far too long and is far too complicated. It has to be fixed, and fixed soon,” he said, adding he told Mayor Gregor Robertson changes were needed.

Jackson also strongly rejected calls for the city to conduct a new citywide plan, saying his department is awash in stacks of plans and policies.

He said council was being pressured to conduct another city plan, an exercise he thinks is unnecessary.

“We don’t need any more red tape,” he said. “We have all the plans and policies we need to guide development.”

Jackson told the audience it would cost the city at least $6-9 million, take more than three years and halt major rezonings all over Vancouver if council were to order another plan.

“Is everybody ready for a three-year freeze on development?” he asked.

Jackson also debunked what he called deliberate misinformation by some who suggest the city’s growth rate is out of control or that CACs were driving up the cost of housing. In fact, he said, the annual population growth rate in Vancouver is expected to decline to three per cent in coming years, as opposed to a high of 9.1 per cent in 1991.

He noted that in the last 30 years, 189,000 people had moved to Vancouver, but 150,000 are expected over the next three decades. “I don’t know about you, but this tells me that growth is not out of control.”

Rezonings requiring CAC contributions account for just three per cent of the nearly 1,400 overall development applications the city receives, he said.

Still, Jackson said the city will need to be creative to create more affordable housing. One way, he said, is to rezone arterial roads like Nanaimo, Main, Fraser and Arbutus streets for townhouses.

“Simply put, we need more townhouses. It won’t be easy because it is adjacent to single-family neighbourhoods and this is uncharted territory,” he said. “It will be hard, gritty and messy and it will take some time. It will mean talking to people in our single-family neighbourhoods for a type of development they have not seen before.”

Jackson said he had been subjected to an unusual level of personal attacks that other planning directors never had to endure. He said the attacks have grown in the last year, particularly around two planning exercises, the Grandview-Woodland community plan, and the 36-storey Brenhill development, a case that went to court but was eventually resolved in the city’s favour.

In April, a number of planners, ex-planners and activists wrote an open letter to Robertson attacking the Brenhill development and suggesting that Jackson ignored established planning principles. He also came under criticism over the way the city demanded CACs from developers to pay for the necessary public improvements such as daycares, libraries and parks.

Jackson did not identify his critics by name, but said they consisted of ex-planning staff, bloggers and armchair critics. He said he was considering writing a book about those same people “who now come see me separately on behalf of clients for higher density and bigger buildings ... or academics who rally against CACs and then approach me privately to use CACs to build academic buildings.

“Don’t you get it? There is a very interesting book here, one that I’ve called here, ‘Don’t Be So F--king Hypocritical.’”

Jackson said attacks became so personal that friends of his in the planning community around North America where aghast.

“These same colleagues who have been emailing me after they heard that I had resigned are saying they would never apply for a job in Vancouver given the level of discourse that is out there in the community now,” he said.

Anne McMullin, president and CEO of the UDI, said she appreciated Jackson’s frankness and his view that the CAC program needed to be reviewed.

“I think the things we applaud is his view that they have to fix the CAC problems now,” she said. “There has to be a more transparent, clear process for CACs.”

jefflee@vancouversun.com

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