As Vancouver develops, can Champlain Heights preserve its unique forested area?

Good morning, 

Nate with you today. It’s the season of trips and I’m getting in on the act! I’m prepping for a Gulf Island bike trip this weekend, a music festival next month, plus a little getaway to Vancouver Island. My philosophy with summer travel has always been to stay in B.C. – we grind through the wet seasons for the summer payoff after all, so why leave the province at its most delightful?

I’m so excited and thankful that I get to do these fun things, but it’s also been a while since I’ve travelled and the extra tasks – on top of keeping all my usual ducks in their somewhat tidy rows – are building up. 

If only I could do some casual mitosis and split myself in two – one to write newsletters and the other to cook, clean, walk the dog, and plan trips. For now, I’ll keep dreaming and earning that vacation time. 

Today, we’ve got a hefty housing story for all our fabulous readers, plus all the usual bits, bobs, and scuttlebutt from around town. 

Let’s get to it!

— Nate Lewis, Vancity Lookout

As always, you can send your tips, leads, and story ideas to Nate at [email protected].

PS - If you find this newsletter valuable, please consider forwarding it to your friends. New to the Lookout? Sign-up for free. 

WEATHER

Wednesday: 17 🌡️ 12 | 🌧️

Thursday: 16 🌡️ 11 | 🌧️

Friday: 17 🌡️ 11 | 🌧️

THE LOOKOUT RECOMMENDS

The watch list: There are a lot of new restaurants opening up in the city. A few on my list that I plan to visit are Angel Pastifico, Maenam owner’s latest spot Sainam, an izakaya restaurant Nom Nomo, and French bistro Chez Celine. 

Get out and meet people: It seems like there’s always a new group starting for people to meet. I’m not sure how old this one is, but Coffee Club speaks to me as someone who loves coffee. They describe it as a Coffee Club Rave, which I’m less keen on. But they say you get unlimited coffee, plus live music, so at this price, why not check it out!

ICYMI: Nate wrote a comprehensive review of some big changes happening in terms of development in the city, directed by the province. It means fewer and different public consultations. But it also means your neighbourhood may see more changes. You can read it here.

— Geoff Sharpe, Lookout managing editor

SPONSORED BY COASTAL JAZZ

Wide range of free concerts usher in the summer vibes this week

Summer officially begins June 20, just in time for the 40th Vancouver International Jazz Festival! This year the Festival features over 180 shows including 50 free events from June 20 to July 1 across Vancouver and the North Shore.

This weekend's Downtown Jazz returns with free concerts and a two-day block party outside the Vancouver Art Gallery. The new Bentall Centre Happy Hour Series runs June 23 - 27 with free concerts from 4pm - 6pm. Granville Island is the hub for Festival activity, with afternoon and evening shows at Performance Works, Ocean Artworks and the Revue Stage -- plus downtown patios, clubs, and North Shore venues features various live jazz performances throughout the Festival's twelve days. It's summer in the city at its best.

NEIGHBOURHOOD

As Vancouver develops, can Champlain Heights preserve its unique forested area?

Walking into a public information session in Vancouver there are a few things you expect to see: rows of poster boards with project details lining the edge of the room, city staff lingering around the boards (identifiable by their business casual attire), and public participants milling about, talking to staff and each other in small groups. 

The latest version of this was in Champlain Heights for the city’s Social Housing Initiative (SHI). The initiative proposes pre-zoning certain parts of the city to allow for faster construction of social, supportive, and co-op housing, and provide more certainty for non-profit housing developers and their financiers. 

Expectations held true during a session about social housing at the Champlain Heights Community Centre on a mild mid-June evening… except the third thing. 

Around 50 people formed an impromptu circle in the centre of the room, with community members taking turns to address each other about their concerns over the potential impact of development on the many forests, trails, and parks that link their unique neighbourhood. 

Sparked by Grace Nombrado's energetic organizing, the large public discussion was out of the norm for standard city engagement practices. Nombrado is the founder of Free the Fern, a grassroots group that stewards parts of the trail network, and has been engaging extensively with the city about the SHI proposal. 

Nombrado said she felt there was some confusion and discord among the participants about the format of the event and decided to take control of the situation using her “teacher voice,” gathering people together to say their piece and hear each other’s concerns. 

Several participants told Vancity Lookout the situation was typical for how community members usually communicate. 

“That's not a weird one off,” Cole Reintsma, one of the people who spoke to the group, told Vancity Lookout. “That's a natural thing to happen around here. That's the way the community is around here, in terms of having these discussions, being heard [for] anybody that wants to talk.” 

Damian Assadi agreed. Assadi grew up in Champlain Heights and is now deeply involved in environmental stewardship and community building in the neighbourhood, with leadership roles in the Everett Crowley Park Committee and the Champlain Heights Community Association, the latter of which operates the community centre. 

For Assadi, the history of advocacy is deeply rooted in the neighbourhood, exemplified by the formation of Everett Crowley Park, a former city garbage dump. It’s no surprise to Assadi that Free the Fern, which he’s also part of, has sprung up from those fertile grounds of neighbourhood stewardship and advocacy. 

One of the biggest points of concern is around those neighbourhood trails, which don’t have any official protections from being developed. The trail network exists in a strange limbo, owned by the city but not designated as parkland.  

During the first round of public engagement – despite the city not having an in-person info session – Champlain Heights community members submitted a notable amount of comments, accounting for just under 15% of all the comments received from across Vancouver, according to the city. The need to consider ecosystems in the neighbourhood was one of the primary concerns. There was also a petition, organized in part by Free the Fern, that garnered 392 signatures to maintain and protect the trail system as a sensitive ecological corridor. 

Their advocacy led the city to update the proposal to include language about the conservation of the existing forest and trail system, which includes the city’s only designated National Healing Forest site.  

“Development proposals under this initiative must consider the existing trails, including a buffer and interface with any new buildings,” staff wrote in the updated proposal, in response to public feedback from the community. However, the city-wide map still shows the trails included in the zoning area. 

“The trails and forested area provide access to nature and recreation opportunities, support biodiversity and ecological health, and create space for social cohesion in the community,” the city told Vancity Lookout, saying they are currently conducting an ecological inventory across Vancouver to identify areas that environmentally sensitive to development, and plan to include those findings in the city’s new official development plan.  

However, there’s still concern about the lack of concrete protections for the trail system, particularly around the word “consider,” in the updated proposal.  

“That's not comforting. That language, it means nothing, let's be honest,” Reintsma said.  

Reintsma recently moved into one of the complexes near the trails. She works as an environmental educator and holds a master’s degree in environmental science. 

“My passion is connecting people to nature. It's not a matter of not wanting to welcome more people to this neighbourhood. We want this neighbourhood and the trails here to be what they are for all of Vancouver,” Reintsma said of her concerns with SHI. 

“A lot of people don't know where [Everett Crowley] park stops and where the trails begin… that's how incredible these trails are, that you can be on the trails and not realize that you're outside of the park,” Reintsma said. The amount of green space in Champlain Heights is striking, with far more canopy cover than any other East Van neighbourhood.   

“I'm not saying don't develop. We all need somewhere to live,” Reintsma clarified, saying her concern is about maintaining the green space and wildlife corridors, particularly for birds, that currently exist in the neighbourhood. 

Champlain Heights happens to already have 15 social and co-op housing developments in the area, which makes up 15% of the city’s entire co-op housing stock. The high concentration of social housing, and the trails, are part of a unique legacy of a master planned community, built across 614 acres of forested city-owned land in the 1970s and early ‘80s as the “first attempt to provide a balanced approach to the housing problem,” a city planner said in 1970, according to Montecristo. 

“ln landscaping the homes and the community, native trees have been preserved wherever possible… [and] all parts of Champlain Heights are interlinked by the beautiful walkways,” reads the gushing write-up in a late ‘70s brochure for “Vancouver’s new showcase community.”  

Today, the city says they’ll be keeping those trails in place for now, but also aren’t moving to establish any formal protections that would assuage residents’ worries. 

“The city does not have any immediate plans to change the current use or designation of these trails,” the city said in response to questions from Vancity Lookout, but wouldn’t confirm if development applications under the SHI would not be allowed if they reduced the existing forest and trail system. 

“Direction will be included [in zoning policies] to consider how to place new buildings, open space and access in a way that considers the existing trail system, including a buffer and interface with any new buildings,” the city said.

Thom Armstrong, who has been engaging with the city about the SHI in his role as the CEO of Co-operative Housing Federation of BC (CHFBC), told Vancity Lookout that people with the city have told him they “would be crazy to threaten that [trail] network, because it’s such a rich resource.” 

Armstrong said the trails, which cut between and connect several different co-ops and parts of the neighbourhood, are “a culturally and environmentally sensitive community asset,” and the city didn’t realize “how solidly the community was behind” them. 

Community organizing to steward the trail network, by Free the Fern in particular, is being recognized at the city level. 

“Free the Fern’s work has helped demonstrate and share the ecological value of the forested area and trail network, along with the opportunities this space offers for community building and collective stewardship. Their efforts are helping navigate the complex task faced by the city in balancing multiple objectives, including affordability, housing, ecological preservation, and community engagement,” the city said in response to questions for Vancity Lookout. 

A broader look at the Social Housing Initiative 

While we’ve been zoomed way in on one aspect of the plan in one community, this will be a city-wide program that will influence the development of non-profit housing in every neighbourhood.

SHI would change zoning regulations to allow certain types of non-market housing to be built in many neighbourhoods without going through a rezoning process. By removing the rezoning process the city estimates they can speed up the process of creating new housing by 1-2 years.

It’s a direct response to direction from the previous city council and a part of the Housing Vancouver Strategy [HVS], which, by 2033, aims to create 83,000 units of housing overall, with 10,000 of those being non-market units.

While there were specific neighbourhood concerns in Champlain Heights, city-wide public feedback on the proposal last fall was quite positive, with 60% of comments coming in support, while another 22% expressed some concerns but were not opposed. 

“In general, we really, really, really support the pre-zoning approach, because when we've tried to develop or redevelop non-market sites, to have to go through a year or 18 months of [rezoning] it literally can add a million bucks to the cost of our project, just by the delays,” Armstrong, with Co-operative Housing Federation of BC, explained. 

“If you're a social purpose real estate developer, every nickel of [those savings] goes to day one rents, because we don't have a profit margin,” he added.

The city’s definition of social housing includes three kinds of non-market housing, which generally rely on government subsidies, including grants, low-cost loans, and operational funding. These are the only housing types that qualify for the proposed zoning changes.  

• Social housing with rents set at 30% of income. (HVS target = 5,000 units)

• Supportive housing for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, with on-site supports for people in need of specialized services. (HVS target = 2,500 units overall, 1,500 with on-site supports)

• Co-op housing where residents are collectively responsible for managing the property, including finances, setting rents based on income, and upkeep of their homes. (HVS target = 2,500 units)

One of the general pieces of public feedback, both city-wide and in Champlain Heights, was a strong preference for six-storey buildings rather than towers. But for Armstrong, the maximum storeys allowed for in the plan aren’t a reflection of what’s actually going to be built by a non-profit developer. 

“The sweet spot for [co-op housing] is six-storey wood frame. So a lot of the talk about pre-zoning to 18 or 20 storeys, it's kind of academic for us. By the time you get to 18 [storeys], you're in the concrete. And we can't build in concrete, it's just too expensive,” Armstrong said.

“As soon as you talk about a 20-storey ceiling, people hear you talking about a 20-storey floor, that everything's going to be [that big] no matter what. [The city] understands that's just not realistic. It depends on the character of the community,” Armstrong said, predicting that co-ops won’t be building towers, even in those areas that would be pre-zoned for 15-20 storeys. 

The zoning changes wouldn’t apply in certain neighbourhoods that already have other area or development plans with their own social housing policies. Those include all of downtown, Strathcona, Mount Pleasant, False Creek, Fairview, part of Kits, Rupert and Renfrew around Broadway, and smaller planned communities in the River District and Jericho Lands. 

After the first round of consultation, the city also removed most of Shaughnessy from the pre-zoning proposal, along with any site of two acres or larger city-wide. Social housing projects would still be considered in Shaughnessy and on these larger sites through SHI, but they would still need to go through a rezoning process – eliminating some of the financial gains of a shorter permitting process while giving the city flexibility to address the specific conditions on each site. 

Speaking specifically about the removal of Shaughnessy from pre-zoning, the city said it was because of the area’s unique and complex characteristics. 

Shaughnessy has “winding streets, many irregularly shaped lots, and nearly half of the properties don’t have back lanes. These features make it difficult to apply a one-size-fits-all zoning approach. Pre-zoning works best in areas with more uniform lot patterns and infrastructure,” the city said, adding there are also considerations to be made around mature trees and heritage protections. 

There’s long been a call for the city to open up Shaughnessy for different types of development, given the large lot sizes and lack of density compared to the rest of the city. But it’s a move that’s largely been resisted by previous and current local governments until last year, when the council voted unanimously to allow 6-8 units of housing per lot, including rental, in the neighbourhood. 

That council decision in June 2024 was in direct response to provincial legislation that required multi-unit housing be allowed everywhere in the province – however the city did allow for more density than the legislation required.    

If the Social Housing Initiative is approved, non-market projects that fit within its guidelines would be included in the types of housing projects where, starting next year, public hearings would not be allowed, also due to provincial legislation. That’s why it’s so important and effective for residents and community members to get involved in consultations early on in these bigger types of planning processes, Vancouver’s head planner Josh White recently shared with Vancity Lookout.

The project is city-wide, and the city is holding other information sessions for the public this week. There’s a virtual session this evening at 6 pm (register here), and another in-person one, from 5-7 pm on Thursday at Trout Lake Community Centre.

THE VANCOUVER NUMBER

$624 million

The newly released cost estimate for Vancouver to host the 2026 World Cup. The figure is the high end of the BC government’s most recent estimate, up $43 million from last year’s projection. Up to $478 million is expected to be offset by a federal grant, taxes, and revenues. [CBC]

THE AGENDA

👮 Mayor Ken Sim is attempting to distance himself from Task Force Barrage, saying the $5 million initiative to increase policing on the DTES didn’t come from his office and that it’s led by the VPD. However, in April, the VPD called it a joint initiative between the police and council. It’s a tangled web, with Sim’s claim coming in response to Coun. Pete Fry filing an FOI to get more information about how funding was approved, after Frank Chong, the police board chair, said he didn’t know about the task force until it was announced to the media. [CBC, Vancity Lookout]

😞 Overdose deaths in BC rose slightly in April, with 165 people dying from unregulated toxic drugs, including 31 people in Vancouver. There had been less than 160 deaths each month over the previous six months. [BC Coroners] 

🙅 After deferring some fees and payments for developers, ABC councillors determined that it would be a bridge too far to consider reducing or deferring taxes on rental housing developments. Coun. Rebecca Bligh brought a motion with the same intent as the fee deferral motion passed the day before – stimulating housing construction and increasing project viability. However, Bligh’s motion failed 7-4, with all ABC councillors voting against it, saying a tax break would result in reduced services, or residents and small businesses picking up the tab. [Storeys]

🚌 TransLink increased payment enforcement last year, doubling fare checks in the second half of 2024. The bump in people buying regular fares, rather than discounted ones offered to seniors and youth, amounts to about $6 million in extra revenue per year. However, one advocate points out some people cannot afford to pay full price, and TransLink doesn’t offer any discounts for people with lower incomes. While TransLink said they can’t afford that sort of program, they are asking governments to fund one. [CBC]

🏆 It’s not the Stanley Cup, but congratulations to the Abbotsford Canucks for bringing home the Calder Cup as American Hockey League champions! It’s the first-ever chip for Vancouver’s minor league affiliate and a very good sign for the development of Canucks prospects. Goalie Arturs Silovs, who hockey fans will remember from his successful netminding with the big club in the 2024 playoffs, won the playoff MVP award after a stellar run of play for Abbotsford this postseason. [Canucks Army]   

🏒 Another hockey-related congratulations and welcome to Michelle Karvinen, a veteran Finnish forward who became the first draft pick in PWHL Vancouver history on Tuesday. [Sportsnet]

HOME OF THE WEEK

Since we’re focused on Champlain Heights in today’s story, we thought we’d feature a home from there.

And what a place it is! Four bedrooms and three bathrooms, this 1,618 square foot townhouse is spacious. It comes with a two-car garage, a potential live-in suite and is right next to the River District.

Now, to be clear, the price is lower because it’s a city-owned building with a lease that expires in 2094. But my goodness, it’s nice…

VANCOUVER ARTS GUIDE

Performance

Bard on the Beach’s interpretation of Much Ado About Nothing, on until Sept. 20, is getting rave reviews. There are still lots of tickets left. 

Granville Island Jazz continues with free, pay what you can, and ticketed events through July 1 as part of the 40th Vancouver International Jazz Festival. [Sponsored]

While not a performance per se, the LiterAsian Festival 2025 is your chance to hear from Asian writers, as well as learn a thing or two about writing.

Check out the outdoor summer series The Dance Deck, on July 19, 20, 26 and 27, an intimate series of performances from dancers, musicians and more looking to perform in a smaller space. Ticket cost by donation. ​​

Art

Remember those stacked cars near Science World? Well, the art installation, called “Tram Am Rapture” will be moved to the south side of the Granville Street Bridge, with the completion expected in late July. [Vancouver is Awesome]

While the popular Vancouver Mural Festival is no more, a new one is hoping to take its place. Called the Astro Arts Festival, it’s founded by one of the co-founders of VMF, and will take place from Aug. 8-10 in Mount Pleasant’s Astro Alley. [Stir]

Movies

It’s a great lineup of movies this week at Rio, with Tim Robinson’s much-lauded comedy Friendship, a back-to-back showing of Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2, and the classic western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

VIFF has a series on African cinema showcasing movies from the continent. They’re also re-showing some of the movies from their festival last year.

COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS

• Science World, Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Vancouver, and many others have discounted hours on certain days this summer. [Vancouver Sun]

• Jungle Room in the West End have updated their menu. We reviewed the place last year, so we’re excited to see what they’ve changed up. 

• We’re sure most of you missed this (because really, how many of us are doing a triathlon), but a group of athletes got to swim near orcas after they entered the swim course. [Vancouver is Awesome]

• Canucks journeyman Phil Di Giuseppe was caught on TV flipping some celebratory hand gestures at opposing fans after Abbotsford’s win in North Carolina [X]

• A reminder that if you qualify, you need to submit your property tax deferment by July 2. 

• Congrats to local legend Nardwuar who nailed the first pitch at a Chicago Cubs game. [Straight]

PHOTO OF THE DAY

In what is truly has to be one of the best shots of the year, someone managed to capture this picture of a coyote in Stanley Park. Well done!