Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Harmon Moon, who is a resident of Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
This past Sunday saw an angry crowd gather outside Vancouver City Hall. Infuriated by the City of Vancouver’s plan to allow 30,000 new homes along the new SkyTrain extension, various Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) groups came together to demand a pause on the Broadway Plan, in the name of preserving their nostalgic view of Mount Pleasant and Kitsilano’s quiet, tree-lined, residential streets.
The fight over the Broadway Plan is a familiar one to those who follow Vancouver politics and is emblematic of something I call “Bonsai Vancouver.”
Bonsai, if you’re not familiar, is a Japanese art form in which an artist takes a young sapling and, with a pair of shears, prunes it down to their desired size.
Leaves are plucked, branches are stripped, and buds are snipped until the sapling resembles an ancient tree, at one-tenth scale. Thus cropped, the bonsai is transferred to a shallow pot and put on display, to be appreciated as a living statue and conversation piece.
It’s remarkably reminiscent of how the City of Vancouver has treated its neighbourhoods over the years. At some point in the past century, Vancouver decided that the end goal was a perfectly manicured city. Vancouverites were promised access to a quiet, suburban low-rise house — white picket fence and all — with unobstructed views of our mountains, oceans, and forests.
To deliver on this promise, the City picked up its shears and set to work.
Apartments were banned on over three-quarters of residential land, and restrictive view cones were instituted to limit the skyline, while larger buildings had floors slashed away for fear of casting their shadows darkening the sidewalks below.
Today, any branches, buds, or leaves that don’t fit into this vision of a picturesque urban bonsai are now rapidly hacked away.
Bonsai Vancouver has become such a key part of our city’s identity that it’s now self-regulating.
Fearing the loss of the perfectly designed neighbourhoods they were promised, NIMBY municipal parties and neighbourhood associations have wholeheartedly joined in the pruning process, reacting furiously to even the mildest suggestion of increased height or density.
While high-rise towers have been a particular focus of NIMBY ire, even low-rise apartment buildings with six storeys or less — the same ones Broadway Plan opponents now claim to want — have been repeatedly cancelled in the face of neighbourhood opposition.
The thing about bonsai, however, is that your sapling is a living thing — one that still wants to grow.
Bonsai artists must constantly trim their trees to prevent natural growth from ruining their deliberately cultivated aesthetic. So it is with Bonsai Vancouver, with the notable difference that this city wants to grow much bigger and faster than even the most ambitious tree.
Every year, thousands of new residents flow into Metro Vancouver from both within and outside of Canada — and with the rental housing vacancy rate sitting at less than 1%, Vancouver needs to grow to accommodate them.
Unfortunately, Bonsai Vancouver has been so effective over the last century at pruning its new branches that the city has very few places available to grow.
A Vancouver City Hall less hostile to apartments might have allowed its neighbourhoods to adapt to increased demand by gently upzoning over the years, allowing people to fill into modest apartment units rather than vying for space in a limited number of single-family detached houses.
Instead, an obstinate insistence on preserving low-density neighbourhoods has left the city with a very small supply of homes to serve a rapidly growing population, plunging us into our current housing crisis.
Developers are now stuck trying to fit decades of pent-up demand onto smaller and smaller parcels of land, resulting in the 20+ storey towers NIMBYs so love to hate.
In the end, life finds a way, and Bonsai Vancouver’s endless attempts to stamp out new growth have resulted in only the strongest and most obtrusive branches breaking through.
This brings us back to the Broadway Plan, which represents Vancouver City Council finally giving in to overwhelming pressure and tilling a patch of soil for the city’s natural growth.
Its tall buildings are an enormous change from the carefully manicured suburban idylls promised by Bonsai Vancouver, but it’s a change for the better.
The Broadway Plan is not perfect, but 30,000 new homes will enable people to build their lives in Fairview, Mount Pleasant, and Kitsilano, making the neighbourhoods better with their contributions to local businesses, services, and culture.
A well-kept bonsai is a beautiful thing to look at, but Vancouver deserves better than a strange, stunted, ornamental half-life.
If we want to live in a great city, we must let it grow.
Pruning a bonsai tree. (Virrage Images/Shutterstock)