Thursday, March 15, 1973 was the date that ensured homes in Metro Vancouver would become unaffordable. That evening a group of Vancouver City Councillors met informally and came to a consensus. They would slow growth, stop any more West Ends, preserve all single house neighbourhoods and direct the 700,000 people expected in the next 3 decades to the suburbs.
A new political party called TEAM had just been elected. They immediately fired first Chief Planner Gerald Sutton Brown and downzoned the West End which he had created. The West End you see today is almost exactly as he had left it in 1973. The revolution they brought to city planning was so profound that we can say we are still in the TEAM Era. Under Sutton Brown who came from Jamaica, Vancouver developed under the organic British or London model. In the TEAM Era Vancouver has become just another West Coast US city.
The most profound symbol of the change in planning philosophy is Buffer Housing. In the West End, there is no housing on major streets, just retail. All dense housing is on quieter streets. Today it is just the opposite. The quieter streets are reserved for single houses. All the density today is put on the most unliveable busy streets where residents provide a buffer to absorb the noise and pollution.
Sutton Brown supported housing everywhere. Almost all of the residential towers and most midrise apartment buildings sprinkled around the city were built in his 20 years. The Vancouver Special is another legacy. More than half of all rental apartments today were created under Sutton Brown. Only 15% of rental apartments today were built in the last five decades since he was fired.
In the TEAM Era, the majority of Vancouver’s single house neighbourhoods have fewer people today than in 1973. Despite the growing housing crisis, thousands of bungalows were demolished and replaced with large houses with fewer people.
I regret to say that this scandalous misallocation of resources happened during a period when I served as both Vancouver City Councillor and Mayor. It is only after much research which I summarized in a playlist of four videos, that I understood what actually happened. Everything I ever heard at City Hall was praise of TEAM and denigration of Gerald Sutton Brown. It was only after years of study that I reluctantly came to the opposite conclusion.
I am now dedicating myself to ending the era of economics-free planning and to unleashing market forces to provide affordable housing for all.
