URBAN DEVELOPMENT I Beasley and McAfee formed a dynamic duo whose work has helped make Vancouver the talk of many towns
Frances Bula
Sun
It’s hard to remember 20 years back in a city that remakes itself on a daily basis, tumbling from transformation to transformation like Alice in Wonderland, where it’s not uncommon to see people standing in front of new buildings, trying to remember what stood there last week.
But think back to the Vancouver of 1986, as the tide of Expo went out.
Coal Harbour still had boat-repair sheds along the waterfront. The north shore of False Creek was a desolate stretch of land that seemed very empty without the gaudy temporary refugee village of the world’s fair. And the rest of the city was embroiled in battles whose over-arching theme was “Keeping Newcomers Out of Our Neighbourhoods.” There was the raging debate over west-side monster houses, the 100 Weeks War between city planners and Kitsilano residents over redeveloping the Molson Brewery lands on Arbutus, and the citywide squabbles over basement suites.
That year, two relatively young planners at city hall were trying to grapple with the changes that everyone could see sweeping over Vancouver, as the city’s population started to climb after declining during the 1970s.
Ann McAfee, a 45-year-old housing planner with a PhD who had combined economics with planning, was looking at ways for the city to absorb new people without setting off nuclear-style warfare with residents from the city’s established single-family neighbourhoods. And Larry Beasley, a 38-year-old who had been with the city for 10 years after moving from Las Vegas in the 1960s to study in Vancouver, was just about to take on the job of overseeing the city’s central area — an area scheduled for radical change in the near future thanks to plans for development for two major tracts of industrial land on the waterfront.
Last week, the two, who have run Vancouver’s planning division in an unusual partnership since 1994, announced they will be retiring in June.
They leave behind a radically transformed city, one that has attracted attention from planners, politicians and environmentalists around the world for the way it has developed a new model of urbanism, a new way of talking to communities about development, and a vibrant, lived-in downtown where developers have been persuaded to contribute hefty sums for luxurious public amenities — a downtown envied by cities from Philadelphia to San Francisco.
Along the way, it has absorbed 130,000 newcomers since 1986.
“Vancouver has achieved an urban renaissance more comprehensive than any other city in North America,” writes David Punter, the British scholar who has written a book on the city’s successful 20 years of urban development. His book, The Vancouver Achievement, is just one of the recent glowing assessments.
McAfee and Beasley are the first to say that much of the credit for Vancouver’s transformation in the last two decades is due to the solid foundation laid down by previous planning director Ray Spaxman, an unusual level of political support through the years, and the city’s flood of investment money from Asia.
But the two also get lots of credit for using their skills to ensure Vancouver took full advantage of those opportunities: Beasley’s skill in negotiating with developers, building by building, lot by lot, to get public benefits and good design; McAfee’s commitment to a dialogue with communities that gave them an unprecedented say in how their neighbourhoods were to develop.
It’s been Beasley who has always attracted the lion’s share of attention, in part because the transformation of the downtown has been more dramatic and visible, in part because of his skill at seducing listeners with his glowing visions of Vancouver.
He’s seen as one of the most powerful people in the local development world. Former mayor Larry Campbell once joked to a roomful of developers that he’d seen people kissing Beasley’s ring, as though he were the Pope of Vancouver. No one thought that was an exaggeration.
In the last decade, it appeared that he barely had to negotiate for what he wanted for the city. Any developer who didn’t want to be sent to limbo had one simple rule: Give Larry what he wants. An art gallery, a film centre, money for housing, a top-flight architect, some design thing that he thinks is essential. Just do it.
A few people grumbled that he had gotten a little too full of himself, but you couldn’t pay any of them enough money to say that in public.
“There will be some people here who are happy to see him go — architects and planners who didn’t see eye-to-eye and never won against him,” says Michael Geller, a fan of Beasley’s who oversaw the Bayshore developments in the city and worked with Beasley when he was representing the provincial government on convention-centre expansion plans.
“But generally he had an ability to strategize to make things happen in a positive way,” said Geller.
Beasley’s job was always to negotiate the best deal for the city, to get developers to contribute the maximum for seawalls, parks, daycare centres, gallery space.
But he also brought into the negotiations his own ideas of what makes an interesting city.
He wanted townhouses along the streets of the downtown developments, a way to create a “streetwall” and eyes on the street that the great urban theorist Jane Jacobs said were essential elements for livable cities, and he insisted on them.
Developers resisted at first, but when they saw they could sell them, they became standard. Now, they’re everywhere.
His taste also shows through in the occasional public place.
“The new George Wainborn park near Granville Bridge — that is an expression of his design taste,” says Geller. “Very formal with a lot of historic references.”
Beasley himself lives in a townhouse on Hornby Street near False Creek.
Former city councillor Gordon Price, now head of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, said Beasley’s choice to live in the heart of the city gave him a passion and insight about city living.
He also says Price and others had the ability to find a middle-ground-enough position that would allow opposing groups on council to avert deadlock and come to agreement.
Because if Beasley said something was the solution, both sides had faith that it was.
“Larry has engendered a trust from the politicians. No one else was able to do that,” says Spaxman, who left the city in 1989 after increasingly public criticism from councillors like George Puil and Jonathan Baker, who thought he exerted too much influence.
In spite of his power and ability to be a tough negotiator, Beasley’s speaking style is gentle, beautifully crafted, almost spiritual — a style that Geller says rivals that of star New Urbanist planner Andres Duany of Florida.
But, unlike Duany, Beasley’s American flair for salesmanship is blended with a hyper-Canadian persona of self-effacement, gracious tributes to others, and reflective thoughtfulness.
If Beasley is leaving because he’s unhappy with a change or any kind of internal struggle at city hall, he is, unsurprisingly, not talking about it.
Instead, he says it’s time for a new generation to take on the city’s new challenges. He also hints that he’d like to take on more of a public advocacy role.
“I’m still young enough that I can still have another interesting chapter in my professional life,” says Beasley. “And there’s a place for someone who can act as a spokesman for certain ideas about the city. I’m constrained right now. Some issues matter to me a lot. I might want to express my views.”
Behind the very public Beasley, though, and the much-written-about success of the downtown, there was always Ann McAfee and the rest of the city.
The two, who have both worked at the city for 30 years, say that they have had an ideal, complementary partnership that Beasley describes as “a unique state of grace” for a bureaucracy.
While Beasley negotiated the details of individual buildings and lots, McAfee used her department to look at long-term trends and do the more challenging grind of talking to Vancouver’s existing neighbourhoods about what they would accept that would allow more people into the city.
It was McAfee’s department, she says, that first sounded the alert about the increasing loss of potential commercial lots in the downtown core to residential developers.
As a result, Beasley announced a moratorium two years ago on that kind of development until the city could get a handle on what was happening.
But most of McAfee’s work has gone into helping neighbourhoods work out what level of growth they’re prepared to absorb, how to do it, and what reward they’ll get for it in terms of extra city services.
She developed Vancouver’s unique “financing growth” strategy, which means that developers have to help pay for new services for expanded communities.
She was also the architect of schemes to create housing without disrupting existing neighbourhoods by putting housing along arterials or in converted industrial land.
And she carried on with the work started with the Gordon Campbell-initiated CityPlan — intense work with each one of the city’s 22 neighbourhoods to develop individual plans on how to create local shopping centres and absorb new housing types.
That has resulted in unusual new developments in two intersections along Kingsway, at Knight and Nanaimo, that will see intensely dense projects of towers and row houses form a node at the centre of otherwise single-family communities.
Some urban-planning experts say the biggest challenge Vancouver still has to face is in McAfee’s soon-to-be former territory.
“Now the tough projects are in front of us,” says urban planner Lance Berelowitz. “Despite her sustained efforts, Ann’s part of the city has seen much more spotty, more modest successes.”
Former councillor and community activist Anne Roberts agrees, saying that McAfee pushed the boundaries for getting residents involved in planning, but that many neighbourhood plans are still vague wish lists with no clear indication of how they’re going to be implemented.
Beasley and McAfee are the first to admit that the Vancouver achievement is far from finished.
The Downtown Eastside, planning a city with changing work patterns, developing new kinds of housing forms — they’re all ahead for the unknown next director of planning.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006