UNA residents gathered for a conversation on land use planning in Wesbrook Community Centre, March 8th, 2023. The meeting was hosted by the UNA’s own land use advisory committee and Electoral Area A Director, Jen McCutcheon. Jen facilitated the meeting of about 50 souls (40 in person, a dozen or so virtually).
Speakers included Eagle Glassheim, Melissa McHale, Chris Rea, and Matthew Mitchell. Eagle gave an overview on UBC’s draft land use plan. The three other panelists provided comments on the land use plan.
Speaker Bios
Eagle Glassheim is a Professor in the department of History and Chair of the UNA’s Land Use Advisory Committee. Eagle’s work is on the history of East/Central Europe, Habsburg Central Europe, Modern Germany, and Environmental History. Eagle lives in the Wesbrook neighbourhood.
Melissa McHale is an Associate Professor of Urban Ecology and Sustainability, in the Faculty of Forestry. Mellisa’s work brings together science and urban theory to guide practical decision-making in cities. Melissa lives in the Wesbrook neighbourhood.
Chris Rea is a professor in the department of Asian Studies. Chris was a past member of the UBC Board of Governors Housing Action Plan Task Force, and served on the Stadium Road Neighbourhood Planning Advisory Committee. Chris lives in the Hawthorn neighbourhood.
Matthew Mitchell is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems. Matthew’s research focuses on how to manage human-dominated landscapes, including agricultural and urban landscapes, for both people and nature. Matthew lives in the Hawthorn neighbourhood.
The Presentations
Eagle Glassheim opened the conversation by providing an overview of the draft Campus Vision 2050 plan. Eagle highlighted the proposed increases in residential density. Despite increase in residential density, UBC is not planning on increasing useable public realm proportionately.
What follows is my summary of the three panellists’ presentations. It is not a verbatim report of what was said, though I do uses direct quotes from the presentations. The summaries reflect the core elements of each presentation, but not everything each speaker said. I have selected those points that seem most relevant to the wider community discussion on land use planning and community futures. I have not fact checked claims made in the presentations.
Melissa McHale spoke about urban ecology and UBC’s plan. This summary presents Melissa’s opening remarks weighted toward her discussion of interpreting maps and the representation of usable open space.
“I first want to say that critique is easy, and I might be putting out some critiques, but I think being a part of developing solutions takes a lot of time, and I also want to do that as well. I also want to say that there's a lot of beautiful things and wonderful things about this campus and this place and this community.”
“I have four points to make that are relevant to my research. I'm going to try to keep the discussion of these to a minimum because I really think it's important that we hear from you today. But my four points are (1) maps do not represent reality and are often very deceiving [laughter breaks out]. I'm glad you agree. (2) Land use maps are a poor measure of the benefits provided by nature, and we call those ecosystem services. (3) Humans are capable of creating multifunctional landscapes that can provide a multitude of ecosystem services, and (4) we need to create areas of refuge for extreme heat events.”
Melissa started with a map included in the land use plan. This map was frustrating as “it was subtly conveying that there are large open spaces that are accessible to residents throughout campus, when in reality, there is very little usable open space.”
Working with her students Melissa pulled apart the data layers of the map.
“Primarily, the land use map makes us believe that there's a huge amount of open space that already exists on this campus. The colouring, the lack of buildings, the greenish blue areas make one think that those are places that we can all be. I know from living here that a lot of it is not places we can be.”
“So we separated these open spaces out and put up what is actually considered as a layer called usable green space.”
Mellissa pointed to the farm which is marked as greenspace, “You can't go to them all the time. I love the farm, but there's usually a sign in front of it that says you can't come in.”
Spaces like the farm, Melisa said, don’t count.
“What's left is a really tiny bit of this map. And I think if you are on campus all the time, like I am with kids and dogs and other living beings and creatures, you're starting to also feel like those usable spaces are getting overused.”
“There's a lot of scientific evidence out there that we can create these multifunctional lands,” Melissa said.
Chris Rea spoke about affordable housing options in the plan. Chris first described what he called the current fiscal model and then offered an alternative model. Chris calls the current model “the investor trickle down or resource extraction model.
“This is essentially where UBC uses land use revenue to fund the capital cost of constructions for dorms, for faculty, staff, rental housing.”
“There's some obvious advantages to that approach. It is fast. You can raise easy money very quickly, so it's kind of instant gratification. ... You can get very fast results.”
Chris compared it to digging an oil well:
“We have plenty of land. You can dig another oil well and every one of them will be a gusher.”
Chris said this “increases the proportion of campus housing that is unaffordable. This is partly because private development are selling to the highest bidders. This also increases overall density on campus and it reduces the proportion of UBC affiliates who on campus … by literally putting non UBC affiliates first. People can buy the luxury units, only a small proportion of which are UBC people. So everybody else has to squeeze. That is the only reason you see these proposals for extremely high towers is because we just need more and more market units in order to get the funds to do the UBC stuff.”
Chris’ alternative model involved two parts: student rental housing and co-development/shared equity housing for faculty and staff.
“Part one is student rental housing. I do think we need a lot more student rental housing, and I think it should be funded by two sources. One is endowment income. [The second is with] loans ideally from the provincial government at preferential rates. As a condition of that loan, UBC [would] make sure that that housing is affordable in perpetuity.”
“There are two required changes for this. One is that the BC government would have to change the law to allow UBC to borrow money. … The second thing is that the government would have to actually budget funds for this purpose.”
Part two: “UBC could take care of the whole faculty portion and a lot of the staff portion and in my ideal world also local teachers etc. [They could do] co-development. … The person who buys in to the leasehold uses their down payment savings to build the building. … What could be combined with this, which UBC is modelling (they have not released anything yet) is something called shared equity. Essentially UBC contributes the full value of the land. The faculty member, staff member or the participant pays for the full value of the construction of the unit.”
“Now the catches are you have to sell back within the family, you can't just sell it on the market and the appreciation is capped [to] some metric that keeps it affordable in perpetuity.”
“Reason this is so important is because this would obviate the need for UBC to build a tower in order to fund any faculty or staff units. All of the capital would come from the people who actually live there. … Over 100 year time frame, you are not using one piece of land to help one faculty or staff member, you are helping several generations.”
Matthew Mitchell focused on three research-based points and one personal one: being serious about biodiversity, the complexity of landscape connectivity, reality of trade-offs, and acknowledging the hidden curriculum.
First point: “if UBC and we as a community are serious in building restorative and resilient landscapes … and we want to consider biodiversity, then we actually have to have some explicit measures and targets within this plan. … If we don't actually put those measures in place within this plan, then we don't know [if it’s working]. It's hard for us to evaluate the plan, it's hard for us to know if we're making progress.”
Second point: “landscape connectivity -and this plan talks a lot about ecological corridors and movement of species across the landscape- is really complex. … It requires specific planning supported by science. This plan has lots of … green corridors going through campus. … It will provide connectivity for people for sure. … But if you actually want to improve the movement for species like coyotes, bumblebee, birds, then you actually have to plan that. What's the vegetation going to look like? What does that look like for those different species? Because they all have different requirements for how they move across the landscape and that connectivity is important.”
“The other thing is we can improve connectivity and we can bring species into places where we don't want them as well. If we increase connectivity, we can increase coyotes on roads, birds in places where there's building, those sorts of things that increase human urban wildlife conflict.”
Third point: “there's always trade offs, … but they need to be made explicit. I do a lot of work about how do we manage landscapes for a variety of different benefits, how do we manage an agricultural landscape for food and pollination and clean water and places to recreate and conserve biodiversity. When you do that sort of research, what usually comes up is there are trade offs, there's no free lunch.”
“You can't get everything at super high levels. You have to make some decisions and often hard decisions about what you want that basket to look like and in the end that comes down to your values. I don’t see those trade offs being made explicit within this plan, and I think it makes it hard for us to evaluate what we’re going to lose by doing one thing or what we gain. There's always that cost benefit analysis. I would really love this plan to be more explicit with those things. From an ecology side of things, some of the things that I think about are those explicit kind of scenarios of what does this increase density mean versus how much green space we have, not just open space, but actually green space on campus.”
Fourth point: “There's lots of talk about transforming how we do things, and I don't see that within this plan. I see a lot of business as usual. There's a piece of our mission at UBC is to show the way, to develop the land in a way that's responsible and to demonstrate to students and people learning at our university.”
Matthew spoke of the ‘hidden curriculum’ and how students learn outside the classroom, not just inside our classes, by observing what we, what UBC does. Matt ended his presentation expressing the desire for the plan to include an acknowledgement of the transformative potential of UBC leading the way through showing real leadership in planning.
That’s a Wrap
Following the presentations a lively comment and response session followed. Most audience members supported the sentiments expressed by the presenters. Comments amplified the concerns that density was propelled by simplistic cash desires. The adverse impacts of further densifying an already high density neighbourhood was brought up several times. Concerns were raised that the plan includes inadequate public realm for the increased density. Many expressed frustrations with procedural injustices they feel exists in campus decision-making.
I would observe that Melissa’s data driven analysis of the Campus Vision 2050 green space map was particularly salient as it demonstrates that the land UBC claims is open space is essentially unusable and off limits to most residents and campus users.
Matt’s observations about the complexity of landscape connectivity and the plan’s lack of explicit measures and consideration of trade offs also undermines the cheery optimism of the Campus Vision 2050 plan in which it appears UBC development can have its cake and eat it too.
The Campus Vision 2050 plan is being widely circulated, with a version being presented to university governance bodies (like UBC-V Senate, item 12(b) March 15, 2023). The current intention is to have the plan formally approved by UBC’s Board of Governors in June, 2023.