It could also be more critical than a “rendering farm,” the massive computer hardware installation that makes data-heavy industries like digital special effects firms happy to be here. (The VEDC is working on one of those as well.)

Lee Malleau, who was unveiling the VEDC’s Economic Action Strategy, said Vancouver is emerging as a key hub of the video and digital special effects sector, along with Los Angeles and London. But unlike those two cities, Vancouver lacks reasonably-priced housing.

Creating that housing will be essential, Malleau said, if the city is to continue to attract international talent, whose wages will go much further in cities with cheaper homes.

Two commentators pursue this argument in today’s real estate section of the Vancouver Sun, where columnist Bob Ransford points to “hidden taxes” in the form of community amenity charges as a key cost driver. But when the public creates value in the form of a rezoning, shouldn’t the public get most of the benefit?

Ransford is feeling the pain of developers who pay top dollar during land assembly only to find that the amenity charges levied by the city push their final selling price too high. Should the public guarantee profits by reducing its take? Would that help reduce prices?

(Ransford’s column includes some incisive commentary along another line from UBC commerce professor Michael Goldberg, who has long argued Vancouver’s densities are far too low to support cheaper housing. This is an issue that I agree needs to be confronted. Current community expectations are so restrictive, if public hearings are any indication, that most future major housing development will be built outside Vancouver.)

Not to be outdone, Peter Simpson, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association, takes the space right above Ransford to finger red tape for high housing costs. Of course, approvals should be timely and fees should be limited to cost recovery. But surely we’re not talking about cutting quality and safety standards, are we?

Ransford and Simpson like one thing the mayor has done: his appointment of Olga Ilich to co-chair his task force on housing affordability. (For some reason, the Sun identifies her as “multimillionaire developer Olga Ilich,” presumably to signal her trustworthiness to Sun readers still stinging from Robertson’s victory.)

Ilich’s qualifications for the post, including her work on social housing, were outlined in more detail by the Courier‘s Allen Garr, but the folks over at The Mainlander aren’t fooled: Ilich is not only a multimillionaire, she’s a leader of the city’s “real estate oligopoly.”

Clearly, this task force project will not be dull.

Former city planner Nathan Edelson did a remarkable job of summarizing Jim’s planning career, one of several major careers he’s had so far, for the audience at the award ceremony. To his credit, Edelson reported the controversies as well as the achievements. His conclusion:

“In my view and that of so many others in the Downtown Eastside, throughout the city of Vancouver and indeed across Canada, Jim Green is seen as an incredible community builder who makes efforts – sometimes extraordinary efforts as with the Woodward public process – to engage local residents in decision making, but who at the end of the day gives  priority to concrete results.”

Read the full text of Edelson’s tribute here.

But when the panel of eminent judges released its decisions last night to a packed auditorium at SFU Woodwards, there was only one point of agreement. This proposal received both an honorable mention and a win in the “people’s choice” category.

When the proponents’ names were unveiled — neither judges nor online voters knew who developed the proposals — the team included a remarkable group including Norm Hotson, Larry Beasley, Jim Green, Margot Long and many more.

Here’s the city’s summary of the entire contest:

December 2, 2011

Viaducts competition winners announced

Vancouver’s viaducts were the centre of attention last night as 15 concepts, ranging from the practical to the highly imaginative, were recognized at the finale to the re:CONNECT ideas competition. Designs were as diverse as creating wide boulevards, monuments and museums to building recreational canals and adding new parks.

More than 100 entries were received in the competition offering creative possibilities for the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts and the Eastern Core, an area that stretches from Northeast False Creek to Clark Drive

A design jury, made up of renowned international and local urban experts, selected winners in three categories for the two competition entry streams – free and fee: Connecting the Core, Visualizing the Viaducts, and Wild Card.

The free stream (no cash prize) was a low- barrier stream directed toward people from any background who could enter without a fee. The fee stream, which required an entry fee and awarded cash prizes, was directed more at design professionals such as architects, engineers, as well as urban planners and their skill sets.

The jury was made up of five industry professionals: Allan Jacobs, globally-renowned urbanist and planning consultant (Berkeley, California); Rob Bennett, Executive Director, Portland Sustainability Initiative (Portland, Oregon); Joe Hruda, Member of the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (MAIBC), architect and founding partner at CIVITAS (Vancouver, BC); Tom Hutton, professor at the Centre for Human Settlements and School of Community and Regional Planning, UBC (Vancouver, B.C.); and Patricia Patkau, MAIBC, architect and founding partner of Patkau Architects (Vancouver, B.C.).

The People’s Choice award winners were also announced last night, chosen by the public who were invited to pick their favourites in each category by voting online. The competition attracted entries from across Canada and 13 other countries. More than 15,000 votes were received online, along with over 1,500 comments.

For details on the winning entries, visit vancouver.ca/reconnect

While no decisions on the viaducts are being made through re:CONNECT, the ideas the competition generated are intended to spark dialogue and help inform and inspire planning for this part of Vancouver.

The viaducts options will feed into the public consultation for the Transportation Plan update in spring 2012. Planning work to develop policy directions for the Eastern Core will continue in the New Year, with a report to Council anticipated in summer 2012.

With Suzanne Anton’s NPA crew offering voters a Vancouver version of Harris’ “common sense” platform in the Nov. 19 election, Lorinc’s deep analysis of “How Toronto Lost Its Groove and Why the Rest of Canada Shouldn’t Gloat,” published in the latest issue of The Walrus, makes for unsettling reading.

Harris’ first blow came in 1995, according to Lorinc, with a botched amalgamation of a dozen cities into the Greater Toronto Authority, a “smaller government” scheme that left the region with 25 mayors, 244 municipal officials and a destructive competition among larger municipalities for economic development and senior government funding.

The second hit came in 1997 when Harris “relieved” municipalities of education funding obligations but handed them the cost of public transit and housing. (Although Lorinc holds up Metro Vancouver’s governance system as a model, it arguably has many of the same deficiencies.)

Of course, Vancouver is not the GTA and a Vancouver election is not the same as an Ontario election. But the “common sense” philosophy is a direct link between Harris, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and the NPA platform. All in all, it’s a cautionary tale.

Tamara Frank installation at West Pender Place

When Dutch artist Tamar Frank turned on her major new light installation at 1409 West Pender in July, early reviews were so positive she declared herself astounded and “almost bashful at the way people are complimenting me on the work.”

Frank is an internationally-recognized artist whose work has been installed in many countries.

But that public acclaim was not forthcoming from some neighbours of four or five condo towers south of the new building just opened by Reliance Properties, which paid $400,000 for the light work as part of the public art program.

By early August, nearby residents were bombarding councillors with angry e-mails, insisting that the illuminated display, that lasted all night, was keeping them awake. In many cases, nearby residents lacked blinds and had the LED display flashing into living rooms and bedrooms.

(I met with some of the affected residents in August and went down at night to see the display for myself. From the street, the lights seem muted, but passersby have a hard time comparing that experience to that of neighbours, who see the building at close quarters from higher floors.)

So far, Frank’s work remains up for all to see, albeit on reduced hours. Take a look.

You can be the city planner and city engineer: create a new vision for key lands bounded by Yaletown, Chinatown, Strathcona and right out to Grandview Woodlands that ensure a properous future for the city.

City residents will vote on the People’s Choice idea in an online ballot Nov. 21 to 25.

The Wild Card prize is just one of three “streams” of prizes totalling $10,000 designed to trigger wide public involvement — and professional input — on the final development of these critical elements of the city’s future.

All the tools you’ll need to make your submission are on the city’s site.

The ideas competition flows from the two-year debate on the future of the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, the remnant stump of a freeway project the voters rejected in 1971.

With an engineering report confirming that the Viaducts could be reduced or eliminated as rapid transit investments continue to reduce vehicle traffice, the way is open to a new plan for this area.

There are some boundaries: the city wants to protect the flats for jobs, goods and services must still flow, there are some view corridors.

 But the “wild card” option can be right outside the box — and could be the winner.

That’s a total of 23 rezonings totalling about 2.2 million square feet in the entire city.

The whole story was summarized at council today in these reports on revenues generated by development charge levies and community amenity contributions.

The other 98 percent of development permits were outright approvals without rezonings.

Total capital spending on public benefits totalled $390 million, with about $31 million from DCLs. The community amenity charges totalled an additional $27 million.

Those revenues help pay for amenities as diverse as public art, dayvare, heritage preservation and affordable housing.

Conclusion: despite the perception among some that City Hall has become a rezoning machine, relentlessly densifying the city, the overwhelming majority of development is not rezoning at all.

Equally significant: most public benefits are paid for from regular revenues, not density bonuses.

A vocal business lobby has been seeking to turn Coquitlam’s dissent into a compete rethink of the RGS.

Coquitlam is the only municipality refusing to provide its consent to Metro’s new plan, which has been years in the making. Metro sought binding arbitration to resolve the outstanding issues. Chong ordered a non-binding process instead.

But that doesn’t mean she is content to see the process stall, she told NDP MLA Scott Fraser during debate on her ministry’s estimates. She expects Coquitlam and Metro to find consensus, as the region did with every other municipality.

Here’s the excerpt from Wednesday’s Hansard, page 1540:

Hon. I. Chong: The parties to the agreement — Metro Vancouver and, of course, the local government, which has not yet signed on — are currently working towards designing the process. In that discussion they’re having, the approach they’re taking right now is to agree upon those items that are either in dispute or those items that they wish to look at. There will have to be some agreement as to what it is they’re going to look at.

It will not be full out, open everything, go back to square one, and let’s start all over again. I don’t think anybody actually wants that to take place right now. That’s why I agreed to the non-binding dispute resolution process. I had heard that there were some issues in dispute. There were some areas of concern, but they were not that large and broad that a binding process would necessarily facilitate a good, open discussion of it.

Going to a non-binding process means that it also allows Metro Vancouver and the local government to really identify and put on the table those areas. Everyone’s clear on what it is they’re going to discuss and what they’re going to resolve, so that that local government can sign on and that therefore it can truly be a fully consensus agreement for a regional growth strategy.

S. Fraser: Thanks to the minister for that. I guess I’m going to seek a little bit more clarification on that issue and just touch on another one too.
The 46 public meetings, the 2,000 members of the public, the business community, etc., that were involved and all of the discussions with municipal councils. There were 38 different meetings with municipal councils that participated in this — a large, large process — and presentations and stakeholders of every colour and stripe.

That process concluded. The public consultation process concluded as part of this whole growth strategy process. That consultation process was deemed concluded in late November and by early December, with a formal public hearing held at four venues around the region.

Again, can the minister confirm and maybe consult with staff? If there were a suggestion that that be reopened again by any party, it would be a problem, would it not? Wouldn’t that potentially invalidate the work that was closed and concluded?

Hon. I. Chong: In case I wasn’t clear, I don’t expect that we would go back to square one. The parties currently are designing the process. They will make a determination, because they are the affected parties, as to what they believe are the areas in dispute, the areas that they wish to discuss.

I have been advised that there are some limited areas that they wish to look at. It’s not as broad as going back to the very beginning of developing the regional growth strategy. That’s why I’m understanding that they are very close to agreeing to what is to be determined for public meetings or hearings, what areas of discussion are going to take place.

I’m looking forward to their advising me as soon as possible, because I think everybody knows that it’s in their best interest to start moving that process along as quickly as we can.

According to BC Business Council economist Jock Finlayson, it’s Metro Vancouver itself, the regional body that oversees water, liquid waste, garbage and overall land use.

Finlayson is the latest business leader to slam the Regional Growth Strategy in the Vancouver Sun, blaming  hapless Metro Vancouver planners for a scheme he says will maintain the region’s low median incomes.

Metro planners have been accused of many things, but this is the first time they have been called out for perpetuating poverty.

“The RGS is essentially a land use plan,” Finlayson complains, “dressed up as a strategy for managing growth.”

Vancouver’s median income is 20th out of 28 urban areas in Canada, he says, making us a low-income area along with Toronto and Montreal. That’s what the RGS should tackle.

“A well-balanced regional growth plan would include commitments to build an economic climate that attracts and retains jobs, to smart and efficient regulation, to value-for money in services and taxation, and to coordinated, region-wide efforts to bolster the Lower Mainland’s competitive position in a North American context.”