“You vote yes for towers, we vote no to you,” read one sign held up by residents of Tsawwassen before a highrise proposal was rejected by council. Last week, the mayor, seeking reelection this fall, said, ‘We believe in gentle, community-led growth.’
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After Mark Schoeffel drove into downtown Vancouver last week for an appointment, he said, “You couldn’t get me home quick enough.”
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Vancouver’s tightly squeezed highrises overwhelmed him. He became eager to return to his suburban home in Tsawwassen, “Where you don’t see any towers.”
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For the time being, that’s the way Schoeffel and a dogged band of citizens are keeping their quiet beachside community of Tsawwassen, 25 kilometres south of Vancouver. It’s home to about 20,000 people.
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In a feat almost unheard of in recent years in Metro Vancouver, Schoeffel, Bev Yaworski and other citizens of South Delta, which has a tradition of neighbourhood activism, teamed up last year to defeat a developer’s effort to bring four condo towers to Tsawwassen Town Centre mall.
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Century Group, a long-time landowner, had been pressing council to give the green light to four highrises, between 17 and 21 storeys, at the mall complex in Tsawwassen, a low-rise suburban community that is on a peninsula adjacent to the U.S. border.
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But last spring, Schoeffel and his many collaborators — using a range of tactics — got Century Group’s four-tower project stopped. When Century came back in the fall with a different proposal for three towers, they halted that too.
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The Century Group’s website says Delta council’s rejection “sets a terrible precedent for the province.” Yet Schoeffel wonders why the developer has not shown any interest in some citizens’ idea of an alternative: Six-storey condo buildings.
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The tower defeat is a rare story in Metro Vancouver and B.C.
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The NDP provincial government has been for three years pushing various legislative strategies to force mayors and councillors to set high housing supply targets and drastically densify their towns and cities. That includes forcing them to produce new, upzoned official community plans.
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Last week, Delta Mayor George Harvie seemed to get voters’ message. When he announced on April 15 that he is going to run for a third term, Harvie admitted council would have to rethink the NDP-mandated official community plan. Delta’s 2024 plan focuses on accelerating housing developments and simplifying land-use regulations, including by permitting multiplexes on virtually any single lot and promoting towers in Tsawwassen and North Delta.
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“We believe in gentle, community-led growth. People need to know what to expect in their neighbourhoods, and we need to do a better job of creating an official community plan that better reflects this, because the feedback we have received about the first one is that it isn’t meeting the mark,” Harvie said.
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That is not something often heard from politicians in Metro Vancouver. Most municipalities forge ahead with drastic upzoning. The City of Vancouver, for instance, has been busily approving hundreds of new rental and condo towers, and last month pushed through a new official development plan that severely reduces public consultation.
