After moving to Vancouver in Spring 2024 to begin his role as the City of Vancouver’s new chief urban planner, one of Josh White‘s first priorities was to explore every neighbourhood.
By mid-July 2024, just two and a half months into his tenure, he had visited all 22 neighbourhoods.
“Because I’ve been here as a visitor lots of times, I’ve seen the highlights of the great neighbourhoods and places, like in and around downtown Vancouver. But going further afield, when you find or see other places that are a little bit off the beaten track from the tourist destinations, that’s a lot of what makes Vancouver great,” White told Daily Hive Urbanized in a previous interview this year.
White is Vancouver’s second chief urban planner to hail from Calgary in recent memory, following Brent Toderian, who previously held the role from 2006 to 2012.
Before taking on his current role, White served as the director of city and regional planning for the City of Calgary, and had previously held other positions in the planning department overseeing Calgary’s growth strategy and development permit approvals.
Josh White. (Queen’s University)
What sets White apart from his predecessors, however, is his political experience beyond the confines of a municipal planning department. Up until 2015, he served for five years as a senior policy advisor to then-Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, where he played a key role in advancing the mayor’s policy agenda, including overseeing planning, development, housing, and transportation issues.
Another unique aspect of White’s background is his private sector experience, which is not always found in the career of an urban planner for a municipal government. He worked for urban planning firm Urban Strategies prior to joining Nenshi’s office, and he was the head of planning and development for Toronto-based real estate firm Dream Unlimited from 2015 to 2019, which is perhaps best known for the Waterfront Toronto development.
For clarity and brevity, this is an edited and condensed version of the questions and answers from Daily Hive Urbanized’s previous interview with White:
With experience in both the private and public sectors, including your work in the private sector before transitioning into municipal planning roles in Calgary and now Vancouver, do you feel this dual perspective offers you unique insights into the dynamics of both sides when shaping policy? More broadly, what do you believe you bring to the table, and how does your approach set you apart?
I think maybe partly because of that [private sector] experience, I certainly have an outlook around city building that takes an attitude that we’re all in this together. Whether you’re in the private sector or public sector, whatever your specialization is, you might be an architect or landscape architect or engineer or planner, no matter what, we’re all kind of in the same business.
We need to have a “we’re all in it together” approach in mentality and partnership. Of course, there’s healthy tension that exists between the applicant and the City, and as a regulator, but the operative term needs to be healthy tension.
No good outcome has come from acrimony or bureaucratic churn. It requires a productive relationship.
And so I think having been on that side of the table, I’ve been an applicant, worked in an elected official’s office, and have been a consultant in the private sector. I’ve been in the same sphere of city building, but from a lot of different points of view. That has certainly given me a diversity of experience that can lend itself to this type of work, but also a perspective that I think is necessary for us to be successful.
This is sort of a partnership mentality, because I firmly believe that is what’s going to get us to better outcomes — from working with all the stakeholders, including the development community, our elected officials, and our partners from across the city.
What have you learned from your new team at the City of Vancouver, whether it be your colleagues in the planning department, elected officials, and policies and strategies that are already underway?
One thing I would say is Vancouver has a fairly unique planning regime. The people who work here… it’s a really, really strong leadership team and group here that’s led the municipal government to a lot of success, in terms of how we built our city.
But I think we also all know that we have a lot of challenges to confront that requires us to adapt as well about how we do our work. We have a system that has a lot of layers of policy, a lot of complexity, and it’s sort of heavily negotiation based. And I think our future looks a little bit different than that, right?
We still want to be heavily focused on great city-building outcomes, but we need to design our policies, processes, and systems to be able to scale in the way that we need to deliver the outcomes we are tasked with. A lot of that centres around making sure we get more housing built, and so there’s a lot of work to do, which is sort of a fallout and consequence of the new provincial legislation, but also just of our own volition. We need to understand that we’re operating in a different environment than we were 10 years ago.
The imperatives are different, the challenges are different, and our systems need to modernize in a way that’ll allow us to get to those outcomes easier. Everyone understands that there’s a lot of will and alignment. Right now, it’s just about the way. It’s about implementing the things that we need to do to get to those outcomes.
And that’s everyone’s focus, not just mine within the department, but certainly also across the leadership team of the whole City, as well as City Council. They understand the imperatives, and I’m here to help lead the way towards those things.
Are there any strategies or initiatives from your previous role in Calgary that you believe would be successful if implemented here in Vancouver?
I think Vancouver has a lot of accolades for very good reasons for a lot of it, the things it has achieved in city building. Some people have asked me, “What can someone from Calgary bring to the table?”
And, you know, Calgary, it’s very livable, and they are highly ranked for livability. Also, it has some really strong city-building outcomes. It has its foibles like any other place, but what it has is done really well.
What I think I’ve been a part of there is building really effective processes — processes, systems, and supporting policies that help get things done and is outcome focused. It is less process-focused and more outcome-focused, and with systems that are designed to get out to outcomes efficiently.
Right now, we have a system where we kind of rezone by default. We have relatively low density zoning, and then through a rezoning process and public benefits approach, based on land lift, we extract the public benefit.
The system where we’re going to is different, where we are going to zone more land. We’re going to have a formulaic or predictable kind of public benefit or development charge regimes, less negotiated, and more simplified where rezoning is required. So you’re not doing like development permit type detail at the rezoning stage, and instead allowing more of that finer detail to come through the development permit later. What it also allows you to do is more concurrent processes.
That’s how a place like Calgary functions now, and that’s the trajectory we’re going to. So what I’m hoping is I can draw from a lot of that experience leading and operating in a system like that in getting Vancouver to that type of development and planning and development regime. I think there’s a lot of lessons that can be drawn from successful experiences in Calgary in designing those types of systems and processes.
For more than a decade, due to the previous oil crash, and now compounded by the pandemic, Calgary has basically been ground zero for offices vacancies for major cities in North America. Downtown Calgary’s leased office vacancy rate has consistently hovered at about 30% over these years. Downtown Vancouver’s office vacancy is currently only about one-third of that, and it has been deemed as the healthiest office market in North America for years. Based on your experience in Calgary, how do we navigate Vancouver’s pandemic-induced office vacancy issues if it becomes more prolonged?
The energy downturns created a very severe vacancy issue in downtown Calgary. 45 million sq ft of office space, 30% vacancy, and $16 billion lost in real estate asset value over a couple of years from 2016 to 2019.
Vancouver’s not facing the same type of acute office vacancy crisis. It’s performed better than almost anywhere else in North America, and it’s quite a different office and employment environment here.
Especially in the city of Vancouver, employment space is relatively scarce. I think there’s a lot of value in kind of ensuring that we have a long-term eye to making sure we have enough employment space so that we have a balanced economy in our city — that we’re not just purely residentially focused, and that there’s lots and lots of job opportunity.
We need to create opportunities for that to grow within our city, notwithstanding the fact that we do need to understand and appreciate this sort of short-term issue that we’re dealing with a higher vacancy at the same time and not be blind to that. But we also need to have a long-term view of growing our economic base within the city of Vancouver through making sure we have enough robust office and employment space.
City Council recently made historically significant changes to relax the protected mountain view cone policies that limit building heights. While planning for these changes was already underway before you assumed your role, how do you approach balancing the intangible factors, like view cones and shadowing regulations, with the need for the tangibles of more residential and job space?
I think planning and city building at its heart is that exercise of weighing trade-offs between different outcomes that you want at the same time. There’s very rarely sort of like a purity of outcome.
You don’t have cities of unfettered development. You also don’t have cities that have completely unfettered views or things like that. And so, it’s about finding that sweet spot — that right balance between multiple imperatives at the same time. That was really the exercise that we went through. Based on City Council’s direction is, we have multiple objectives.
What’s the needle we can thread to kind of preserve and maintain this unique characteristic? You might call it less tangible, but it’s kind of an intangible characteristic of the identity of Vancouver, and it manifests in some tangible ways.
For example, you have a view from this spot to maybe the twin mountain peaks of The Lions. That’s a tangible outcome that we’re trying to figure out. We can be really thoughtful and intentional about weighing the trade offs — like if we move the origin point of the view cone, or if we can adjust the edge of the view cone that’s not kind of central to the core of what we’re trying to preserve.
By doing that, we can unlock significant housing potential. We can intentionally weigh that trade-off and make a decision.
So looking at the view cones, we did that. We’ve shown our homework on each and every decision that we’ve made, kind of starting with the principle that public views matter, tangibly and intangibly. But also, we know that the view cones are not meant to be a static policy.
The city evolves, and the skyline evolves. And so, the policy also needs to evolve. And we need to do that diligence to understand those trade-offs.
Those figures that were posted, that the view cone changes will enable up to 215 million sq ft of additional housing and job space, are indicative of the fact that we were able to land what we think was a very reasonable set of trade-offs. In totality, it will allow us to move forward with more housing, but also maintains that public value of views in a city like Vancouver.
What about the building shadowing considerations on parks that are even blocks away in some cases, as well as shadowing on streets and other public spaces? What about the recent city-wide building shadowing policy changes that were a part of the view cone amendments?
I think in a city like Vancouver, especially during the shoulder seasons when the temperature is cooler, public space can feel relatively scarce. Ensuring that these spaces remain usable is an important public value.
But again, it’s about the trade-offs, right? We want to make sure that whatever regulation we put in is consistently applied and is not sort of unduly restricting our ability to deliver development and housing. So the approach we took was we didn’t touch downtown because that’s really complex, it’s on a different axis than the rest of the city in terms of its solar orientation. It’s way more complicated.
We might have different public expectations, but across the rest of the city, we had sort of a litany of 14 or 15 different policies and different standards. In these early actions, we thought it would be productive to create a consistent approach.
By using the Broadway Plan’s shadowing standard, which was industry tested, it’s the most dense and most intensifying area of the city outside the downtown peninsula, and the solar access policy that’s been applied is working reasonably well.
It’s enabling development to go forward, but also the vast majority of the sites are just not impacted by the policy. At least as a short-term step, we could apply that with some consistency across the geography of the whole city and kind of rescind and replace the sort of kind of patchwork of different policies that we have. Now, of course, like anything, that’s not static.
If we find that adjustments are necessary, we apply discretion, particularly when there is minimal shadow impact. In some instances, we’ve already relaxed certain restrictions to ensure we can achieve positive housing or development outcomes without compromising the overall vision. We are applying some discretion to make sure that works. City Council also directed us to look at the 10 am to 2 pm shadowing standard.
Again, it’s just about balancing those trade-offs. We don’t want to be too punitive against development, but we also understand that there’s some public value in making sure that our valuable parks and public spaces have a reasonable amount of sunlight in a city where it’s not always the most abundant resource year-round.
With the provincial government requiring cities to limit certain types of public hearings, how much more time will this free up for your staff to focus on other priorities?
The lack of public hearings themselves, that’s not really much of a time saver because you still have to take it to City Council for approval.
But what I will say about the provincial changes at large is it points us towards a system that will save us time. It will create greater efficiency. On the whole, I would say those are changes we want to lean into, recognize their purpose, and be productive in implementing them so that we can achieve the outcomes for housing that those provincial legislation changes are intended to achieve.
Vancouver is trying to be a productive partner in that. We recognize its purpose and we want to implement it in a way that is going to achieve more housing.