VANCOUVER—In 2019, Vancouver is set to start a new citywide planning process that could change the look and feel of city neighbourhoods – or protect the status quo.

And both city councillors and residents are set to resume a debate over whether single-family zoning needs to be rethought: Do leafy neighbourhoods of detached houses, now worth upwards of $1 million, exclude most residents? Or are they important sources of rental and multi-generational housing?

Some urbanists are looking south to two American jurisdictions that have recently made laws or proposed that single-family zoning be tossed out altogether. On Dec. 7, Minneapolis’ city council approved a citywide plan that included upzoning single-family neighbourhoods to allow duplexes and triplexes, according to the StarTribune.

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In Oregon, the speaker of the state legislature has drafted legislation that would mandate that cities with populations over 10,000 allow up to four units to be built on single-family lots, according to Willamette Week.

In December, Vancouver city council debated whether to rescind a bylaw that allows duplexes in nearly all neighbourhoods (council voted to keep the current bylaw, but establish a trial period and study the effects).

Minneapolis has set a bold example of how to find the political will to rethink the hallowed single-family neighbourhood, said Nathanael Lauster, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia.

“In the United States, (single-family zoning) is definitely more linked to race and racial segregation and explicitly put in place in part to maintain racial segregation after historic attempts to zone for race failed,” said Lauster, the author of The Death and Life of the Single Family House.

In Canadian cities, zoning is “not as connected with racial segregation and the explicit segregation of the African American community,” Lauster said.

But zoning’s role in excluding certain populations did “cascade” into cities like Vancouver. Harland Bartholomew, the American city planner who drafted Vancouver’s first city plan, also worked extensively in the United States.

With its decade-long experiment in allowing a house, basement suite and laneway house on all single-family lots, Vancouver is already ahead of the game compared with many North American cities, Lauster said. But Minneapolis has gone farther by allowing separate ownership of the three units now allowed on a lot.

Residents opposed to duplex zoning in Vancouver raised the spectre of land value rise, loss of character homes and loss of older homes that provide rental housing or house multiple generations of the same family. Opponents are also skeptical that adding more density to neighbourhoods will make housing more affordable.

But as the population of many of the city’s single-family neighbourhoods have stayed flat or declined, the city’s chief planner, Gil Kelley, said the consultation process for the citywide plan will make it clear that all neighbourhoods are expected to accommodate population growth.

In Vancouver, the call to open up the city to denser forms of housing has been made by both the right and the left. On the left side of the political spectrum, OneCity councillor Christine Boyle has argued that rental apartments and social housing should be allowed in all neighbourhoods.

Hector Bremner, a former Vancouver city councillor who ran for mayor, ran on a platform of opening up all neighbourhoods to multi-family housing, but his critics often linked his policies to real estate industry interests. In the weeks leading up to the election, developer Peter Wall was revealed to have paid for an anonymous advertising campaign supporting Bremner.

If Vancouver wants to head in the direction of making single-family zoning a thing of the past, Lauster said Minneapolis showed the exercise needs to be led by left-leaning activists and a progressive city council that frames the debate in terms of equality and social justice.

Vancouver’s current city council is a mix of left, centre-left, and centre-right, with three Green councillors holding the balance of power and sometimes siding with the centre-right NPA and sometimes with Boyle, COPE councillor Jean Swanson and independent mayor Kennedy Stewart.

NPA councillor Colleen Hardwick introduced the motion that called for duplex zoning to be rolled back, but ultimately other members of her party did not support that move.

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The community consultation process also needs to include people who don’t live in single-family neighbourhoods, Lauster said, and councillors, activists and city staff need to make an effort to hear from everyone. That’s something Kelley has also emphasized will be important as the city starts consultation on the citywide plan.

“Any city you go into, the conversation revolves around those who are already there and those who have been there for quite a while and have a way of viewing things,” Kelley said in a previous interview.

“It often doesn’t include people who want to live in a neighbourhood or want to live in Vancouver…They tend to be younger, they tend to have a mix of incomes.”

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