A Modest Proposal – Letter to the Editor
Our City Council and Staff have professed a strong preference for Master Plans which outline the development of the empty fields on our periphery. These plans are touted to ensure the appropriate development of these areas by providing attractive maps drawn up by their developers and conditions vouched for by our Planning Department. With the developers, city staff have worked long and hard to ensure the appropriateness of the Community Plans required to accommodate the developers of Sandstone and Cable Bay/Oceanview. If records of the staff time spent on such projects have been kept, we could know how much staff effort went into them and how much might now be refocused on preparing a Master Plan for our own Downtown.
We all know that we have expended tens of millions of dollars in trying to revitalize downtown. We have even hired a consultant so provide guidelines, but where is the Master Plan which envisions and guides our downtown development? Where is our map of development? Why don’t we use some of our resources looking out for ourselves rather than lavishing all our attention on outside developers? Why are we active on behalf of developers and passive on behalf of ourselves? Isn’t our downtown deserving of the expertise of our Planning Department?
– Ron Bolin
Posts and Comments on Nanaimo Governance 
Ron, of course you are right . . . let’s start with downtown before we titivate the “green fields”.
But even before that may I suggest you put your money were your mouth is: come live downtown. Discard your car, too, since you are so committed to AGW! Why, if all the FPN talk, talk talkers were to follow suit we’d be deep-freezing in no time . . .
One of the great problems our city faces is that our protest groups are all wind and piss and have not the courage to put their money were their mouths are!
Yes we have downtown guidelines at a cost of C$100g’s . . . a sum that could have been saved by just inserting “build-lines” appropriately! Nothing really changed! And maybe that was the point: yunno keep the natives happy!
As for your FPN downtown plan, I hate to be critical, but we are here to learn . . . it was mocked by one councilor as a worn-out “old country mining town”: and if I remember my early life experiences rightly so!
Indeed it was also an inappropriate repetition of many “New Urbanism” clichés, boringly replete with repetitive row upon row of cottages and poplar trees blatantly nicked from The Krier Bros plan for, their hometown, Luxemburg. What that has to do with Nanaimo downtown beats me!
Sort of put us, real, experienced, qualified, urban designers, back fifty years.
And you let your guru bugger off home to do his thing: wrong move!
Had FPN listened to my wise counsel, to at least pay some attention to those who favoured some sort of scaled down VICC we may not now be lumbered with C$800’gs draining onto 101 Gordon annually and a council having to lie about it!
You want a master plan! We have master plan . . . For you edification may I suggest you peruse a real plan created by a master urban designer . . .
http://www.theyorkshirelad.ca/New.Nanaimo.Center/culture.park.html
Incidentally I recently attended another charrette and, clearly our planners have learned nothing and forgotten nothing!
To your point! Yes eliminating the UCB was a fatal blow to DT: but what would you expect from a mayor Korpan who would do the bidding of any huckster who fed him large quantities of steak and custard, and a director of planning congenitally incapable of planning or indeed anything that rings of integrity other than mewling for his masters.
Decrepit old fools have reigned in this town for as long as I remember: certainly since before I started on NRGH: 1958.
So please . . . less empty chatter . . . just . . . walk the walk!
Hi Roger. Good to hear from you, even if through the fire and brimstone in your sermon. We have had parts of this conversation previously, but each time you write I am forced to consider my position anew –and that is a good thing. As I have commented previously, when I look at moving downtown -and I do understand that this may be good for the planet- I am forced to re-examine both the facts of doing so and their underlying logic.
As regards the facts, when I look at a home or a condo downtown I find that if I sell my house and buy downtown; for the same or more money, I will have half or less the living space, no land to speak of, most likely the same or worse view than the one I already have, and I will miss our garden and the critters that scamper through it. Given this equation, what choice would you have me make? And why? Am I a saint? Are you?
As for the underlying logic of these comparative costs, I am baffled. Why should it be that to live more efficiently is also much more costly? One assumes that as far as building costs go, the comparable unit cost of isolated residences should be higher than for aggregates. It is similarly true that to serve isolated units with the necessary infrastructure, i.e. roads, water, sewer, hydro, gas, etc is also more costly as it must cover more ground. It is also true that a single family home uses considerably more land per residence and this element should therefore also be more costly. So how can it be that my observations regarding the facts of the housing equation are so seriously out of step with the logic?
I can come to only one explanation. My living in the outskirts is heavily subsidized. And who is subsidizing me and the other tens of thousands of homes out here? As far as I can tell, practically everybody: especially those, like you, who live more compactly downtown but pay much more per unit in property taxes, as well as all taxpayers in infrastructure subsidies of various types, all of us who subsidize roads for the cars that enable my pretended fiefdom, etc.
And who benefits from this scheme: Those who buy agricultural or scrub land cheaply on the outskirts and get our planners and City Hall to convert it, at no cost to them, to residential land. Why should a unit of land on the outskirts be cheaper that a unit of land in the downtown? You’ve got me stumped. The old saw about the efficiency of the inner city raising the price of land certainly rings no bells in this era, nor has for a long time. Until the costs of our residential land use are recognized as more of less equal wherever the land is located, either through a charge for conversion, an elimination of subsidies, and/or recognition through the assessment system, I and many like me, will stay in the burbs enjoying our subsidies and many developers will continue to be more interested in the fruits of upzoning than in development. Or maybe we will all, as you appear to believe of yourself, be enveloped in sainthood and become prepared either to pay twice as much or to accept half as much.