VANCOUVER -- Three former Vancouver planning directors say the Metro region, and Vancouver in particular, are ill-prepared to deal with the inevitable growth expected over the next 40 years.

With as many as seven million people expected to be living in Metro Vancouver by 2050, Larry Beasley, Ray Spaxman and Brent Toderian say city politicians are not doing a good enough job planning for future growth, and instead are engaged in "Easter egg hunts" and "ad-hockery and crisis management" by focusing on single issues such as bike lanes and laneway houses.

Speaking at an Urban Land Institute series looking at Vancouver in 2050, Beasley said the city's growth has come to a standstill and that no effort is being made to create a city-wide plan necessary to direct growth over the next 40 years. The city is not creating enough supply to meet demand for various forms of housing, he said.

"The plans have to stay about 10 years ahead of the market or else there's going to be ad-hockery and a sense of crisis management and doesn't that sound like Vancouver city council dealing with planning issues in the last few years? I think it does. I think we are about 10 years behind," said Beasley, who retired from the city in 2006. "That economic engine, that civic economic engine we represented has come to a stall."

Toderian and Spaxman, who were both fired by Vancouver councils for differences of opinion over planning, said they worry the city is putting too much emphasis on solving here-and-now issues at the expense of long-term growth.

"I feel as if I am on an Easter egg hunt. Council is rushing off after density, they're rushing after lane housing, they're rushing after cycle paths. They're all rushing after the latest panacea that happens to offer some solution but isn't," said Spaxman, who was Vancouver's director of planning until he was fired under Mayor Gordon Campbell's term in the late 1980s. "There has to be a major shift in the way our municipalities are managed. The management cannot just be solely bottom line. There has to be a whole reorganization of the principals of management."

Toderian said he's worried "we are replacing a city by design with a kind of urbanism by checklist or urbanism by paint-by-numbers."

"Increasingly the discussion is about design being something that's nice to have as long as it doesn't stand in the way of achieving a certain number of social housing units or a checklist kind of approach," said Toderian, who was fired in February by the Vision Vancouver council.

Vancouver is now just trading on its good looks, said Beasley, who teaches at the University of B.C.'s urban planning institute as well as works in Moscow and Abu Dhabi.

The institute's series last week was the first time the three former directors shared a stage together talking about their individual and collective concerns.

"I come back to Vancouver and more and more I worry that here we have become incredibly complacent about the future we are going to face," said Beasley. "To me there is no question. I don't feel vague about it, I don't think it is unknowable, we are going to have a big affordability problem in this city. That affordability could in fact be the defining reality and image in this city by 2050. It is already becoming the alternate image of this city that goes along with the beauty and all that."