Sam Sullivan's Blog
Olympic celebration: Canada wins hockey gold!
March 1, 2010
A few photos from my Vancouver neighbourhood while people pour onto the streets to celebrate hockey gold!
Meeting with Jean Chretien & Tom Pollak
February 20, 2010
Former PM Jean Chretien, Sam Sullivan & Tom Pollak of Explore.org
Carrying the Olympic Torch
February 13, 2010
What an honour it was to be able to carry the Olympic Torch through my old neighbourhood of East Vancouver. Thanks, Tom, for the great photos!
My Advice to Future Mayors
December 16, 2009
Since completing my term as Mayor one year ago I have often been asked what advice I could give to future mayors. Here are some suggestions I could offer.
1. Develop a good relationship with civic union leaders immediately.
Early in my term I announced to senior staff that I was planning a courtesy meeting with civic union leaders. The advice I received back was emphatic. As the city was starting negotiations such a meeting could be disruptive. As I tried to do throughout my term I deferred to the experts on collective bargaining but asked them to inform me when the time was appropriate. This is I regret. I am not naïve enough to believe that I could have prevented a strike. The longest and most bitter strike in the city's history occurred under Mike Harcourt and a Council with close union connections. But I could have learned just how poisonous the relations had become between the union and some of the senior management.
2. Make sure false statements get corrected on the public record.
The unfortunate reality of democracy is there is a whole industry devoted to making the Mayor look bad. An example is the accusation that I tried to personally trademark Eco Density. You can find this allegation in many places including the editorials of this newspaper. I have actually found this claim amusing. No one has been able to tell me how someone could make money by having such a trademark. The only possible benefit would be to protect the city's right to use it.
In Manhattan with David Owen
December 8, 2009
Thanks to an invitation from the Christopher Reeve Foundation and the support of the Rick Hansen Institute Lynn and I headed out to Manhattan with a copy of David Owen's new book Green Metropolis in hand. The Reeve Gala was spectacular thanks to Henry Stifel, Vice President of both the Christopher Reeve Foundation and Morgan Stanley Bank. It is not often we get to chat with Meryl Streep and get our picture in the New York Times.
After I had finished my duties we explored the streets of Manhattan and the ideas of David Owen. Owen is a staff writer with the New Yorker Magazine who scandalized many environmentalists by stating that the most environmentally sustainable place in North America is New York City. This is counter-intuitive to most people and it is only when you actually measure the real impact of people on the planet that you realize he is right. By every measure of environmental Impact per capita New Yorkers do less damage to the planet than anyone else on the continent -- and by a long shot. It is not because they are more environmentally concerned that the rest of us. They are famous for being concerned with commerce, free-market and making money. I rather doubt New Yorkers spend much time at all worrying about the planet. There is only one reason they far exceed the rest of us in environmental stewardship and that is high density.
Densification is the path to affordable housing
November 6, 2009
The explosion of single-family homes -- a.k.a. Suburban Domination -- is bad for the environment
Special to the Vancouver Sun
In the early 1970s an urban reform movement swept North America. Inspired by authors such as Jane Jacobs who railed against the "highway, highrise city," Vancouver avoided a highway through its downtown and a new era of participatory planning was ushered in.
From this point on neighbourhoods would determine their own destiny. The free market which had created the West End towers on previous single-family homes and was now resulting in towers across the water in Kitsilano was successfully reined in. The urban reform movement not only stopped the highway, it stopped the highrise.
From 1972 to 1986 virtually no residential highrise towers were built in the city of Vancouver. Since 1986 the only residential highrise buildings have been built at the expense of commercial, industrial and low-rise apartment land.
It is not a coincidence that the early 1970s are recognized by textbooks as the beginning of a period called Suburban Domination. Before then the city grew at the same rate as the suburbs. After that the suburbs exploded with low-density sprawl. It is also not a coincidence that cutting off the supply of housing in the city of Vancouver marked the point at which the cost of housing began its steep rise.
With the decision to say no to the market's demand for higher density housing, pressure mounted to convert commercial and industrial land. So began an exodus as employment activity was forced out into business parks in the suburbs. These parks are recognized by regional planners as one of our most serious environmental and economic problems. Despite the establishment of the Agricultural Land Reserve, wildlife habitat and green areas were paved over with sprawl. People who grew up in Vancouver had to face the fact that they were being priced out of their own city.
The resistance to higher density housing on residential land had another impact. Air-quality started to deteriorate and scientists raised the alarm about global warming. Across North America almost all of the growth of cities was in a thin, life-choking layer of carbon producing sprawl.
Researchers have recently turned their attention to the environmental cost of different forms of housing. Their conclusions are sobering. The single detached house will emit four times as much greenhouse gas as a unit in a highrise tower. When you add to this the emissions associated with transportation the problem is even more serious. Where the average person living in a downtown tower creates less than two tonnes of greenhouse gas per year, the person living in a distant suburb can create more than six times that amount.
In addition, if we continue on our path of development our region will lose the equivalent of 25 Stanley Parks to sprawl in the next 20 years. Even a mid-rise building can cause more than double the wildlife habitat and green space loss of a highrise tower. In fact, every tower built in the city can save the equivalent of up to five city blocks of wildlife habitat.
The year 1995 was a time of great hope for me. The remarkable city plan process asked citizens to decide the future they wanted for their city. The results were staggering. More than 80 per cent of the citizens of Vancouver wanted nodes of high density throughout their single-family neighbourhoods and they overwhelmingly rejected converting industrial and commercial land into condos.
My hopes were soon dashed. One of the first neighbourhood vision processes resulted in a net loss of housing in the city. While small victories were achieved in some neighbourhoods the real result was a further entrenchment of the status quo.
Suburban Domination was safe from threat.
I am convinced that the way we plan our regions has utterly failed us and if this is not corrected we will continue to set a terrible example for the developing world. We need to change the rules of the game. We can no longer use government as a tool to push people who need housing ever further out into the suburbs. We need to remove the constraints that prevent people from building the kinds of housing that people want at the prices they can afford. We cannot continue to have private interests using government to thwart the housing that the market wants to provide and that the public good demands.
We must celebrate the remarkable achievements of the urban reform movement but also recognize the well-intentioned errors.
I predict that the period of Suburban Domination will end when someday, somewhere in North America, for the first time in 40 years, a single detached home will be rezoned to a tower.
This will signal at last the end of the violence we are doing to our planet and usher in a new, responsible era of city building.
Sam Sullivan, the former mayor of Vancouver, heads the Global Civic Policy Society.
Sam Sullivan: Are taxpayers at risk? No. Are Vancouver citizens? Yes.
January 30, 2009
In my fifteen years at Vancouver City Hall I have witnessed the Property Endowment Fund (PEF) make about $1.5 billion in real estate profits for Vancouverites. The PEF is the envy of cities from around the world, and it has created financial security for our city that you, me and the rest of the citizens of Vancouver will continue to benefit from.
What have you heard about this fund over the past 15 years? Probably nothing. No headlines. No press releases. An investment that has been extremely well-managed by our civil service, quietly accumulating hundreds of millions of dollars of value on behalf of the citizens of Vancouver is just not an item that will make the front page. But it's a great success story.
