Gene Miller

October 2018 We know what we have to do. The only thing holding us back is… THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A PROBLEM WITHOUT A SOLUTION. It’s the nature, the “job,” even, of problems to have solutions, a structural requirement; just like there’s no such thing as a one-sided door, or a here without a there. So it is with the homeless “problem.” It has a solution; possibly several. One would be for all of us to be homeless (goodbye problem, hello trend or new normal); but, of course, that’s foolish to imagine, given current social and political stability, coupled to rosy global prospects. The homeless problem…oh, you want me to start by defining the homeless problem? Well, the homeless are a problem for themselves: they don’t have homes. And we are the homeless’s problem because we won’t house them, or do so by miserly and unsuccessful increments. And, of course, what do our crossing-the-street avoidance and averted gaze mean, if not that the homeless are a problem, a problem for us, like some design flaw in the otherwise promising human project. Everybody knows it, nobody says it. Instead, we speak in a kind of code. With wan conviction, we say we want “housing to be provided in appropriate locations,” etc. Translated into English, that means we want them to disappear. And ask yourself how well all of that’s working. Ron Rice, executive director of the Victoria Native Friendship Centre, claimed in early October: “There are over 2,000 homeless people in the city. Although the Goldstream tenters have become sort of the spotlight on the crisis we’re experiencing as a city, there’s a lot of homeless people in the city.” Over two thousand homeless? Jesus! That’s roughly one in two hundred over the entire regional population. Maybe it won’t be too long before the number is 3,000. You never know about the tricky and changeable future. I mean, if you do a casual inventory of your near-future expectations for society and hopes for security, isn’t economic risk and its consequences at or near the top? Well. I’d love to be wrong, but I sense that the pendulum is swinging toward risk, which may well yank the broomstick props from under a significant number of the just-hanging-on. (There are currently a surprising number of folks living in their cars in Victoria. Does that qualify as homeless? I don’t know.) So, now we all share a clear picture of the homeless problem? Good. Here is my coarse-grained solution to the homeless problem: we create places that can house 500 or more in clusters or “communities” of individual suites and present like a residential version of Uptown Shopping Centre (walk its internal “boulevard” to get what I mean). House and feed them, look after their physical and mental health needs. Provide calming wallpaper and nutrition breaks, counselling and life skills training and education. Lots of efficiently delivered services (society is spending a fortune now, anyway). Show movies every night. Deliver support cheques. Provide needed transportation. Consolidate all the usual homeless services, provide social and recreational spaces, make sure to include coffee joints. Give such places cozy monikers…is The Uplands taken? Resist the temptation to place these facilities out on the flatlands of the Saanich Peninsula, or out past Stewieville on the way to Sooke. There’s plenty of available land in both directions, but the isolation sends a horrible message. Victoria already knows what it needs to do: more structures like Rock Bay Landing (l) and Our Place More logically, identify available sites closer to the city centre. I just drove past a vacant square block—a whole block!—east side of Douglas, immediately north of Mayfair Mall, right at the Victoria/Saanich border. Or make deals with one or several of the car dealerships on Douglas, between Mayfair and Uptown. Their surface parking areas are enormous and, in some cases, contiguous. Purchase the air rights, leave the car dealership surface parking as-is, and build up and over. Toss in property tax breaks in perpetuity. My guess is that the owners would jump at the opportunity, considering that, courtesy of increasingly non-negotiable demands of the climate change agenda, the private automobile has 10 to 15 years left. After that, it’s all going to be non-private-car-owning Moto, share-car, car-on-demand and cleverly engineered new bicycles built for two or more. But, you exclaim, the costs of all that housing and services! The costs! Society is paying now—not just financially, but also through social wounds that are real if hard to price. And I say: a small price to pay for a job well done. The reason the homeless represent such a potent threat is that we know deep down those protective walls around the human project are not solid, but just images, membrane-thin, projected on shifting, filmy surfaces, like cloud. We understand exactly who and what we are, one layer below the surface, and what lurks in us, individually and together: darkness, danger, deconstruction, and all the violence that brings. Please, don’t scoff; this is just Nature 101. It’s a jungle in there! You would no sooner want “the homeless” living next to you than you would anything else that carries risk of infection—or the power to depress the resale value of your home. Border Crossings, the Winnipeg-based quarterly, in an interview piece about filmmaker David Lynch, quotes Lynch: the mind “is a big beautiful place, but it is also pitch-dark.” Pitch-dark. These are especially hard times. The drumbeat has been quickening, the skies greying, for a while, and at present you can feel social climax in the air; not in, or just in, Victoria, but everywhere. Civilization has an itch, and is beginning to scratch; not for the first time on the long voyage. If your sensitivities are appropriately tuned and your knowledge of history sufficiently well-informed, you must wake up gasping these days. It’s scary. Uncertainty, the sense of risk, is spreading over the entire landscape, challenging normalcy, the very structure of the everyday, on every front. You can put it all on Trump and the burgeoning extreme right if you want, but that still leaves the unanswered question: why did our, uh, cousins elect a demonstrably crazy narcissist psychopath criminal sonofabitch? In your heart, you know there were years of prelude in which social irritation was building...everywhere, not just America. Germany, for example, is gearing up for the return of heady “Sieg Heil!” days. The reason? Turkish and other immigrants polluting the ra—oh, sorry, taking German jobs. Operating under laws and corner-points of existence too mysterious for me to figure out, it seems that just when we’re lost in orgies of self-congratulation for our social, political, and economic accomplishments, that’s when the next valley, the next sorrow, forms and grows. You recall, in Voltaire’s Candide, the protagonists echo each other in bursts of lunatic Leibnizian optimism: “This is the best of all possible worlds!” Friends, history really does happen—not elsewhere, or elsewhen, but in front of us, right now. Did you imagine that “end of the liberal order” was just editorial page punditry? History is ever-poised to turn into…foreground. History loves headlines. Spend a candid moment with your own state of mind, not your the-city-should-undertake-longer-range-infrastructure-cost-planning upstanding citizen mind, but the in-the-bathroom-staring-at-your-spreading-middle/between jobs/trying-to-make-sense-of-life’s-changes one. Now, let your imagination drift. Be homeless. Work it. Follow your thoughts, minute by minute. Dinner? The discarded pizza crusts in somebody’s garbage can. Beer and soda can empties for income, wherever you can find them, maybe the same garbage can; or panhandling on the Causeway. Where are you going to sleep? After you lost the house, you slept in the car; then, you couldn’t pay car insurance; now, you crash in a doorway. How many days before you can pick up your next government cheque? Pills to straighten that roller coaster in your head. Somebody boosted your pack the other day? Aw! Need a new prescription? Tough shit. And now that you’re in the mood, reflect on those homeless activists screaming for housing, lifting the corner-flap so high you can see revolution and social anger and anarchy on a red boil. Meanwhile, back at the garden, “This place, Victoria, is so charming.” “Quite a tech hub you’re developing here.” “Omigod, you pay such a lifestyle premium shopping at Thrifty’s!” Folks are moving here by the planeload. Companies and businesses are locating or relocating here. “Welcome to Victoria. Net Worth Statement, Please.” So, why, given our social talents, expertise and worldliness, don’t we successfully house the homeless? Why do we remain poised—paralyzed, actually—between terror, resentment, anger, sympathy (at a proper remove) and understanding? Given the levels of human talent in this place, can’t we design a new solution to this old problem? By my roughest of estimates, we could eliminate regional homelessness for about $120 million in capital costs—roughly the cost of the new bridge. And much of the dough is already in place in the $90-million housing fund of the CRD, Province and Feds. I know, I know, you’re tired and you just want the world to work. Still, work’s never done, and we disregard those discordant notes beneath the community’s happy song at our peril. Finally, you ask: “And if we do this, actually succeed in providing reasonable housing and support services, do you promise that nothing else bad will happen and things will settle down? I promise, unconditionally. Founder of Open Space and co-founder of Monday Magazine, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an affordable housing concept.

May 2017 As waves of newcomers arrive, opportunity and peril loom over our urban identity. FROM New York Times movie critic Stephen Holden’s review of director Alexandr Sokurov’s 2002 film, Russian Ark: “This ultimate display of wealth and privilege in the movie is so heady it would be easy to infer that Mr. Sokurov…harbors a lingering nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary era of czars and serfs. But this extraordinary sequence—courtly social life set within the Hermitage Palace in St. Petersburg—even more powerfully evokes the historical blindness of an entitled elite blissfully oblivious to the fact that it is standing in quicksand that is about to give.” It was 1971 and I was a newly-minted Victorian, having arrived here the year before from New York City via Prince Rupert (the story of that long rail journey some other time). I had just founded Open Space, the warehouse cultural centre on lower Fort Street that still bears my name (I swear, a letter showed up one day addressed: Open Space, 510 Fort Street, Victoria, BC and began: Dear Mr. Space…). I could barely conjure the next month’s rent, let alone funds for programming and physical plant improvements to sustain the cavernous, cruddy warehouse. “Go see Pam Ellis. She’s a patron of the arts,” said knowing friends over beers at the Churchill. They filled my head with tales of fabulous wealth earned, via her husband, Geoffrey, from the One-Hour Martinizing chain and, if I remember correctly, an English beer fortune thrown in. I made an appointment through Mrs. Ellis’ factotum, and on the day arrived a bit early at her 30-room bungalow on Runnymede Avenue. (Years before, God had thoughtfully created South Oak Bay around her home to provide a windbreak from the rude ocean breezes.) Mrs. Ellis was closeted improbably with Princess Chirinsky-Chikhmatoff (formerly Jennie Ross of Ross/Butchart Gardens fame, and wife, for a while, of dashing but impoverished Russian aristocrat Prince André Chirinsky-Chikhmatoff—a name evoking fairy-tale royalty, onion-domed castles, Glinka mazurkas, satin window swags, and flattering candlelight). So I waited in an anteroom, sipping flavourless tea, almost within earshot of their animated repartee. Eventually, the princess departed, and I was shown in. Awkward, bumptious, full of myself and my life-changing cultural vision, I launched, after introductions, into some unscripted and feverish explanation of Open Space and its cultural mission, hoping to convey the idea that, eclipsed only by the domestication of wild herds, the invention of the steam engine, and one or two other equally significant human milestones, Open Space was inarguably the most important cultural advance on the planet. All of this was larded with the worst eyewash and mangled promises of an ovation in this life and sainthood in the next for any benefactor whose dough might be leveraged to make this precious dream come true. I had to stop mid-peroration to catch my breath, which gave Mrs. Ellis an opportunity to interject an incongruous, loopy soliloquy about dieting. On and on she melodiously maundered about her efforts to reduce, gesticulating and patting her plump arms and generous middle. I adopted the glazed look of the fascinated listener: a treacly, sickeningly interested grin that in a more just cosmos would have been removed by a lightning bolt. To look at my face, you would think she was rattling off long swatches of flawless Tennyson verbatim. During this weird monologue about her weight-loss efforts, Mrs. Ellis spoke energetically to the middle distance above my head, as if to some balcony audience. Then, winding down, she turned straight toward me, her eyes penetrating deep within my shabby soul. The notes of caprice and gossipy self-absorption never left her voice as she said, “You know, Mr. Miller, its so hard being fat in a skinny world.” THOSE WERE THE DAYS. The wealthy could express metaphor and refinement (however synthetic); the aspiring rest of us had the sufferings to which we were fairly accustomed (apologies to Auden). And if there were reason to grumble about the rich, at least it was a microscopic consolation that they followed socially-approved protocols for cultural largesse via carefully-managed endowments. (God, listen to me! Where’s Tevye, from Fiddler, singing “If I Were a Rich Man,” when you need him?) Also, there was a faint sense that such plutocrats, less outright crooks than clever and aggressive opportunists, had at least made their fortunes by tapping legitimate and tangible market veins like beer and dry cleaning, and not asset-backed securities, derivatives, credit default swaps, leveraging, money bundling, or other dark and suspect financial arts. You may also accurately conclude that Victoria, while not immune to the winds of change, was “a little bit of Olde Inertia” those forty-five years ago, and still under the frosty and disorder-averse social influence of proper and vaguely British (roll your r, please) Oak Bay social aristocracy. Then, as now, provincial government was present, but a world apart from the city’s daily life. The Hudson’s Bay stood stolidly, massively, at the north end of Douglas, forbiddingly vending yesteryear’s styles, while a slightly less un-welcoming and “with it” Eaton’s at View and Douglas jumped Broad Street with an elevated pedestrian bridge. I have a possibly imagination-inflamed memory of busty, heavyset sales matrons in both stores, disapproving lifers whose body English and angry punching of the cash register keys proclaimed that spending money on frivolities like clothing was near to biblical sin. Murchie’s on Government Street, back then, likely sold more Earl Grey than coffee. You understand, these reminiscences send us back to the pre-Starbucks Pleistocene! Honestly, can you even imagine a time before lattes? There was a Downtown residential population of sorts, but more of a single- room-occupancy crowd, as longstanding citizen and City councillor Pam Madoff notes. You “commuted” home to the James Bay, Fairfield, and Fernwood suburbs from a day at the office or shop, and journeyed to the double-wide-strewn hillbilly hinterland of Langford and Colwood only for banjo lessons or to blast at small, furry animals. But all of these memories—truth and legend alike—are about to be swamped by something new. As I’ve noted in previous writing, Downtown is in the middle of a transformation: Residential growth which, if unabridged by any near-term economic hiccups, will, in under a decade, swell the population to between ten and fifteen thousand, contained within a tiny, forty-block area—roughly Broughton to Herald, Cook to Wharf, with some further help from expanding residential colonies in Songhees and Vic West. Disorienting change: Former McCall Brothers Funeral Home has a new life as a sales office for the new condo across the street. Those numbers may seem fantastic, but you have no idea what’s coming. Look past the visible hoardings, excavations and construction cranes to many other candidate properties or property assemblies—yes, including one whole city block—either acquired or in play for new development. Why here, why now, what’s driving it? Who knows? Does the current boom have legs, or will some market plunge leave many Downtown sites as holes in the ground and half-completed works for a generation? We’ll see (I assume the inevitable). Importantly, who are these newcomers steadily swelling the Downtown residential population? Can these newcomers be Victorianized, harmonized with the city’s culture, or will they redefine that culture? Will the physical structures housing this human flood result in some dismal, isolating West End of tombstone high-rises and irreparable damage to Downtown character, or in an economic, social, cultural and energetic renaissance? Pointedly, are you ready for six-hour breakfast lineups outside Jam on Herald? But what most interests me is cultural transmission: the challenge to all of us, to the city, to successfully convey story. Not history, exactly, but the singularity and character of this place, so newcomers are welcomed by a context and continuity. Discussing W.G. Sebald’s last novel, Austerlitz, Colin Dickey remarks that buildings and the entire urban fabric are human acts, projecting not just a functional message, but also a cultural one: ideas, values, preferences, importances. “No historical [condition or monument] arrives ex nihilo. Patterns are laid out decades in advance, in plain sight. They draw attention to themselves, even if we have no desire [and little skill] to recognize them.” (You need look no farther than the hundreds of now-a-generation-old cracker-box apartment buildings visually littering the Victoria landscape to appreciate Dickey’s potent thought.) Of course, so as not to get too lost in rhapsody, it’s helpful to add social critic James Kunstler’s theory of history: “Things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time.” In other words, opportunity and peril loom over urban identity. Newcomers will change, but also need to be changed by, the city’s identity, and by its public realm, cultural aspirations and accomplishments…in aid of which, we might even prevail upon Open Space to put up two plaques on its lower Fort Street exterior: one a bas-relief likeness of Pam Ellis with her thoughts about being fat in a skinny world, the other of Mr. Space. Co-founder of Monday Magazine, Gene Miller has, with partner Rob Abbott, launched the website FutureTense: Robotics, AI and the Future of Work.

January 2017 Douglas Street, once fully invested with life and social purpose, now seems diminished. QUICK, THINK OF A WORD that rhymes with “colostomy.” Infrastructure. Good for you! That profane stew of surveying and shoveling, blueprints, backhoes, migraine-coloured diversion tape, and hellfire-tinted traffic cones. Surfaces shattered, guts and filth exposed, society’s shitty undies pulled down, all niceties abandoned. Invasive urban surgery: mud, crud and blood. Eeeuuwww! Watched a two-month-long project near my home recently: realignment of an innocent, unoffending T-intersection minding its own business and doing pretty much the job you want a T-intersection to do. Suddenly, barricades, signage, lights, flaggers, equipment, trucks, detours, trenches, Everests of excavated wet earth and gravel, new drainage pipes, new curbs, light poles and paving; tax dollars and resources enlisted to improve the good enough. Now, finally, post-surgical results: a new skin of raked, seeded topsoil and curing cement. The patient survived. So did I, thank you. If infrastructure suggests all of this, the linguistic doorway to the apocalypse is crumbling infrastructure: a Doomer movie of decay, social collapse and the return of an ever-nesting, never-resting Dark Age (consider the Trump-era recrudescence of the American neo-Nazi White Right)—against which extraordinary public resources are directed to sustain the hope (some would say illusion) that the civic enterprise is still on the rails…that the human project continues. By the way, Crumbling Infrastructure, if not quite as good as Dying Fetus or Deicide (both already taken), would be a terrific name for a death-metal band. Writing about urban evolution reminds me that in many cases human settlements emerged as cities (the oldest a recent 5000 years ago) on a thought: “Oh, this hill has a good view.” “This slope is sunny.” “We can tie up our boat here.” “Lots of game and fresh water.” “We can defend this place.” The entire kit of contemporary urban parts is just decorative icing over elemental states like appetite, convenience, visions of triumph, plans for rest and safety, dreams of opportunity, or the point at which exhausted pack animals or slave porters gave up the ghost. Admittedly, cities are also hopes for order. Listening, a moment ago, to violinist Itzhak Perlman and pianist Samuel Sanders perform Edward Elgar’s “La Capricieuse,” I was taken by how the structure of musical thought springs from an innate architecture in our heads, a sense of system and form, which we apply to music, storytelling, and city-building, too. Local writer Janis Ringuette cites historian Richard Mackie and other sources to uncover the intentions upon which Victoria was founded: “James Douglas was instructed [by the English] to organize the new Colony of Vancouver Island: ‘The object...should be...to transfer to the new country whatever is most valuable and most approved in the institutions of the old, so that Society may, as far as possible, consist of the same classes, united together by the same ties…Conditions for the...disposal of lands...will have the effect...of preventing the ingress of squatters, paupers and land Speculators.’” That land Speculator ingress prevention thing worked out well, don’t you think? Like entire cities, neighbourhoods, too, are ideas. Look at city property maps and note the proliferation of orderly double-rows of rectangles serviced by die-straight streets on all sides, as if the straight line and right angle themselves might be tools of successful governance. The impulse for social management started long before and endured long past the days of Douglas’ colonial governance, simply re-expressing itself in ever-smaller property increments. The dreaming, imperial finger of the explorer withered; the founder class subdivided its holdings; planning bureaucrats and bylaw-enforcers—the property cops—took over. Almost every city, big or small, has a square reserved for ceremony and patriotic re-enactments, designed to mark the city’s connection to its founding or some other historical event. Such places, hyperbolically constructed to convey significance, elicit awed respect and reinforce the importance of memory. All feature statuary, plinths, obelisks, fountains, noble words and antediluvian dates in stone, cannons, and too much lawn; and they endure—serious and un-visited, grass ritually cut and edged—long after ceremony has hollowed out as a form of social expression and the energy of their founding story has waned. It’s hard to proclaim “We, The People!” when everybody’s off shopping the sales or glued to the next episode of “Game of Thrones.” Hierarchy, nature’s system for arranging the meek and the mighty, is also built into urban ordering. Almost every city has a main street (often imaginatively called “Main Street”) traditionally dedicated to shopping, mercantile pursuits, and financial or professional services, and established in the pre-suburban heyday of business centrality, but now, in an era of social and economic dispersal and online shopping and services, threatened by disinvestment and in need of “re-purposing.” Such streets resemble museum dioramas portraying a life when social functions were more delineated, the public realm was more polite and convivial, banks were filled with actual cash, and majestic retailers, cornerstones of national identity, slugged it out across the street from each other. Nostalgia really is ghostly. Study the archival image of Douglas Street in the late 1940s below. Note the relaxed co-existence of pre-war cars, trolleys, well-dressed pedestrians. You can feel the street’s energy and social health, the coherence and common purpose. (And catch the red car making a right turn around the money temple up a two-way Yates Street.) Like, what happened? Well, bookshelves of explanation abound, but in short and simple terms modernity took hold, a kind of atomization in which ‘we’ gave way to ‘me.’ I’ve heard it explained as diffusion and de-authorization—that is, an institutional, cultural, social and geographic deconstruction or reordering (take your pick)—allowing a more subjective, voluntary and perhaps authentic allegiance to social rules and norms. (Remember, it has also been a human rights revolution.) In no more than a two-generational eye blink, the idea that father knows best became preposterous, and the Heavenly Father, like the divine right of kings, was permanently re-assigned to the make-believe section. Vrooom! Douglas Street, Chatham to Belleville, our ten-block stretch of yesterday, is unloved, energy-deficient, crappy-looking, edgy and slightly threatening. It is preparing now for the next stage in its economic and social devolution: from Main Street to Mean Street. A recent KPMG technology report claims that street-front banks will be gone in 20 years. Which means five. Douglas, home to the big, central branches of most of our financial institutions, has drawn another short straw in the game of urban change. As the image makes clear, Douglas was once fully invested with life and social purpose. Now, civility seems diminished. Folks’ offshore limits feel wider, more defensive, and the public air has a more guarded tang. Douglas, a street of gradually evanescing purpose, is turning down-market. Ironically, Douglas Street was the most expensive property in the 1982 version of Canadian Monopoly. Let’s briefly journey from Douglas Street to the cosmos: According to the big bang theory—our best explanation for why space is expanding—everything exploded from nothing about 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmologists have been able to wind things back to within a tiny fraction of a second of this moment, but now they’re stuck. Acknowledging that science cannot explain the fact of everything from nothing, leave alone conjure a pre-nothing, Carlos Contaldi at Imperial College London suggests: “The rules we have simply don’t work in that regime.” Mystery permeates every corner, and is the heart, of existence. I’m not being glib and I mean this quite seriously. To the cliché, “lost in space,” I would add “lost in time,” “lost in story,” “lost in purpose,” and, I suppose, “lost in Victoria.” Rule-making and rule-following reflect our understandable hunger for continuity, structure and order. But order is challenged at its essence because mystery—the chaotic and tumbling-dice unpredictability of flow—is baked into existence. Nothing comes with a guarantee, or a warranty. Where’d the Douglas Street of recent memory go? Really, where did it go? What happened? Accepting the inevitability, inescapability and speed of flow, how do you re-purpose a main street? What plan or intention—and I don’t mean the synthetic promise of an architect’s gauzy, four-colour depiction—will pay off? Who leads? Commercial interests and the property-owning market? Shoppers and the public? The city government? A team of futurologists? How and when does the city go about determining if some new civic narrative on Douglas Street is plausible to a significant majority of its citizens, and worth a major civic and private investment? What signs are required? Collapsing commercial rental rates, proliferating tents in darkened doorways, or when Burger King pulls up stakes ‘cause it can’t make a buck? In the taut TV drama “Berlin Station” the CIA station chief, referencing some imminent ISIS-type terrorist threat, says to the head of German security: “Do you want to get ahead of it, or find out after it happens?” In Douglas Street terms, do we take initiative in response to a clearly darkening tracery of worry lines (growing signs of “locational obsolescence,” in planner-ese), or wait for full implosion? Don’t give me an immediate answer. Take your time. Founder of Open Space and co-founder of Monday Magazine, Gene Miller is currently promoting ASH, an affordable housing concept and, with partner Rob Abbott, has launched the website FUTURETENSE: Robotics, AI, and the Future of Work.

September 2015 A city's urban character and authenticity are never to be taken for granted. IF YOU NEED FURTHER EVIDENCE purposeful forces govern the universe, there was Victoria City Councillor Pam Madoff at a June meeting hosted by the Fairfield-Gonzales Community Association in its space just uphill from Sir James Douglas School, near the corner of Fairfield Road and Moss Street. Fix that intersection in your mind: the school on one corner, Fairfield United Church on another, and a bit of retail/commercial fungus on the other two. The flyer attracting Fairfield people to the meeting was portentously captioned: What is happening to our Village? The village in question, however, was not the crossroads described above, but nearby Cook Street Village, whose welcome banner reads: “Cappuccino and a ricotta-quince brioche while we finish blessing your yoga mat?” The association had invited two of the city’s senior planners—one with responsibility for the Official Community Plan (OCP), the other a planner for Fairfield. It was the usual interspecies encounter: vernacular but heartfelt questions and concerns from citizens, volumes of professional, well-intentioned explication from the planners. More or less at the heart of the discussion was that evocative and elusive term village, defined by Wikipedia as “a group of houses and associated buildings, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town, situated in a rural area.” Omigod, village alert! Strike up the crumhorns! Violas da gamba, over here, please! Dancing milkmaids and blacksmiths, enter left! Village, to the planners, unsurprisingly, appears to be part of an extensive urban nomenclature, somewhere mid-point on the scale between pasture and megalopolis. In the alphabetical glossary of terms in Victoria’s Official Community Plan, though, things jump village-lessly from “Urban Form” to “Visitor Accommodation.” Still, on page 47, the Official Community Plan captions the street view and perspective illustrated as a “Large Urban Village.” Some folks, looking at the visuals, might argue they were looking not at a village but at a highly compressive Downtown setting—Douglas Street at Fort, say—and ask: “If that’s a Large Urban Village, what’s Cook Street?” People! I don’t by my tone mean to charge the planners at the meeting with ill will or disinterest. Quite the opposite. They were attentive listeners and their answers were generous. But, it struck me that the visions or sensibilities of the planners and those of the community attendees sailed past each other with barely a wave. It’s really important to talk about why. To understand the discussion in that small Fairfield meeting space, it was less important to listen to the voices of the planners or the residents than to look at the large shadows moving on the wall. Two great and opposing forces were battling that evening: put glibly, the Past against the Future; more evocatively, the “nostalgic” appeal of community with its heady promise of relationship, human scale and social sanity against the rational system of professional urban planning practice—the one, by its nature, approximate, subjective and, unfortunately, generally on the defensive; the other imposed, formalistic, simulated. I can’t overstate the importance, the meaningfulness, of this urban design tussle and its outcome. On the surface, it appears to ask minute questions about land use; beneath, it asks what kind of world do we want. Let’s step back for a moment and note a strange fictional quality to our post-modern and hyper-pluralistic life right now. It spices the air and none of us is missing it. Normally guided by our cultural memory and customs—our stories—we find current times delivering anything but the familiar. Instead, it’s a non-stop rush of chartless change and rapidly shifting cultural narratives. Disconcertingly, everything feels familiar, yet far away. It gives life a dreamlike edge. We just can’t get our feet under us, and can’t believe with certainty that our values and choices are anchored to social bedrock any longer. We’re being run all around a surreal economic and social landscape like a pack of panting hounds. Yes, the times have also been emancipating, but it’s hard to know exactly what has been set free. Technology and automation are killing work, we’re killing the planet, the rich are grabbing all the marbles, and geopolitically it feels increasingly like Cold War II with a garnish of Middle East Dark Age. Are these the valid new stories, the new road maps? Oh-oh! Social critic James Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, who spoke in Victoria in 2006 at the first Gaining Ground Conference, calls our neighbour to the south “a nation of places not worth caring about...a tragic landscape of highway fast-food strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities.” In other writing, he extends this vision of cultural bankruptcy with fabulous if ominous hyperbole: “Most sickeningly you see it in a population of formerly earnest, hard-working, basically-educated people with hopes and dreams transformed into a hopeless moiling underclass of tattooed savages dressed in baby clothes devoting their leisure hours (i.e. all their time) to drug-seeking and the erasure of sexual boundaries.” Victoria has, so far, kept that ripe doom at bay (or Bay, more relevantly), but threats to structure are always looming. People here would never invoke Kunstler’s imagery (this is Canada, this is Victoria), but social trends are airborne and some abstracted strain of what he writes about is, I think, the concern that residents at the Fairfield/Gonzalez meeting were trying to articulate to the planners. Let’s make practically everybody angry with this observation: Believe it or not, Victoria isn’t only that thin, protective rind of wonderfulness—let’s call it what it is, a coastal crescent of trendy cultural liberalism and pricey real estate—running, notionally, from Esquimalt’s Saxe Point in the west, through Songhees and Vic West to downtown and the funky neighbourhoods that surround it, then following the coast through James Bay/Fairfield/Gonzales, taking in Oak Bay, and out to Ten-Mile Point and Queenswood. Urbanized regional Victoria north of, let’s be generous, Paul’s Restaurant on Douglas, just a long spit past downtown, is mostly a vast, undifferentiated suburbs, a car-dominated Shitsville that could be Prince George, or Red Deer, or Timmins, or a thousand other places. If all you want to do is dream-spin about community gardens, cool, fair-trade coffee shops, artisanal bakeries, heartbreakingly lovely, treed residential streets, buildings that foster social engagement, neighbourhoods with a strong sense of place, and village-scale good vibrations, that kind of “special” stops well south of Bay Street; and if you want to study reality for, at a guess, 75 percent of the regional population and a vast percentage of the developed regional land mass, plant yourself for a couple of sobering hours at Tillicum Mall, or Millstream Road at the Costco turnoff, or the Hillside/Shelbourne nexus. This column began with a reference to Councillor Madoff, because if any local community leader’s spirit hovers over this entire battlefield, it is Pam Madoff’s. She has had an extraordinary public career spent in informed defense of Victoria’s urban character. She draws mutters of frustration from the development industry for her interventions and, for a fact, she hasn’t batted a thousand, but she’s a careful thinker, an enemy of the bad, not the new, and a champion of good urban form and character. She personifies the axiom that you lose a city’s character and identity one bad building, one bad land use decision, at a time. Offhandedly, we all say we’re here in Victoria for the lifestyle, the quality of life. Buried far beneath that banality are the complexities of sustaining and steering a civic society and retaining and replenishing civic identity. The blessings of a good location, good urban bones, strong civic culture—such assets always hang in the balance. Cities are social experiments: human arrangements, really, expressed as built environments. Their nature is fragile, and urban character and authenticity are never to be taken for granted. Actually, I’m waiting for Victoria’s new mayor, Lisa Helps, to season enough to tackle the city’s Official Community Plan, which, in my opinion, needs a completely fresh strategy for “gentle density” in the neighbourhoods and appealing, area-wide residential intensification throughout Downtown to salvage (and transform) the commercial core—somewhat at risk, if shop vacancies and proliferating “for lease” signs are any indication (you might want to add industry buzzword “overstored” to your vocabulary). Helps is a master of intelligent listening, a getter of both (or all) sides, and a profound thinker on her own terms. She may be the one mayor who can braid these challenges into a promising new vision; and given such complex demands, the voters should commend themselves for executing a brilliant hire in the last election. Considering the concerns of this column, I’m drawn, in a complete non sequitur, to the content of Pope Francis’ recent encyclical and its memorable quote: “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” Columnist David Brooks, in a NY Times piece entitled “Fracking and the Franciscans”, faults Pope Francis for not being a “moral realist,” and adds remarkably: “Francis doesn’t seem to have practical strategies for a fallen world.” And lost on the landscape, the rest of us ask: “Who does?” Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

January 2015 If we're going to invest in a pricey new McKenzie Avenue intersection, let's charge commuters for stop-reduced driving. TO PUT YOU IN THE MOOD, I’d like to unload some overwrought consumer trivia about the price of English muffins. On Saturday, last November 29, a bag of six Dempster’s English muffins at Thrifty’s was $4.19, or 70 cents each. At Oxford Foods on Cook Street, a bag of six (a competitive brand of equal quality) was $1.88, or 31 cents apiece. A jumbo-pak of 24 at Costco was $6.49, or 27 cents the muffin. A 12-pack at the Wholesale Club on Viewfield Road in Esquimalt (a find in every way, if you haven’t visited before) was $1.97, or 16.4 cents per. To flip this around, had you bought 24 muffins at each store, you would have paid, respectively, $16.76, $7.52, $6.49 and $3.94. And it’s not like the Thrifty’s muffins were produced to the sound of Pan-pipes with south-slope-grown, artisan-milled, first-pressing, cruelty-free wheat. Same damned English muffins. And from teaching days, a lifetime ago, I remember an intellectually gifted student, Jeffrey, who, at 14, was endomorphically chubby, had an egg-shaped head, and wore thick glasses with one unhinged earpiece tenuously Scotch-taped to the lens frame. His nose ran constantly, and a bubbly archipelago of spittle sat perpetually at the corner of his mouth. He would laugh in noisy, otherworldly gulps at his own esoteric jokes. Classic bully bait, but the other kids loved him. What set him apart was not just these physical qualities, but also his tendency toward startlingly original expression. In his presence, you felt yourself a witness to the actual physical assembly, the coalescing architecture, of his thought. With no preamble, or any clue as to how long it had been in the making, or the why of it, out might come: “What if the bird in your hand is a sparrow, but the two in the bush are peacocks?” Such thoughts emerged from some tunnelling maze-work; were expressed with a precocious complexity; and, for a 14-year-old, bordered on the profound. It seemed an open question whether he would, in his adult life, go on to create the Z-Bomb or cure cancer. Keeping Jeffrey and English muffin value-shopping in but at the edge of the frame, let’s ponder the notorious congestion at the Trans-Canada/McKenzie Avenue intersection and its alleviation. The Times-Colonist’s Jack Knox acidly opened a November column: “It took 35 minutes to drive a 10-kilometre stretch of the Colwood Crawl on Wednesday morning.” Which, incongruously, reminds me of the definition of a “kilomater”—five-eighths of a mom. To call it the Colwood Crawl may evocatively title but mis-describe it—akin to calling a different collection of human behaviours “teen pregnancy” or “domestic violence.” That is, let’s not give the event a label without highlighting the choices—residential, lifestyle, mobility—of the people who are driving the many thousands of vehicles that actually cause the Colwood Crawl during each morning and evening commute. Presently, the Trans-Canada/McKenzie intersection is the whipping boy, but if we spend something on the order of $80-100 million (provincial Transportation Minister Todd Stone’s numbers) for a fix, only to move the bottleneck a half-mile south to the next traffic light at busy Douglas and Saanich Road beside Uptown, what then? Let’s look at some creative responses other than big-dollar infrastructure spending. For example, people could quit their government jobs and take up organic farming in their Langford front yards. Or stay home and telecommute. Or government commuters (a significant percentage of the on-road total) could work 2 pm to midnight and drive counter-flow. Or we could take the view that it’s only a problem if you call it a problem. We don’t call gravity a problem, just a fact of life. What’s wrong with people having to devote 20-30 minutes of their day inching along in bumper-to-bumper traffic, not as some form of moral shaming (nothing wrong with that, of course), but as a simple expression of how choices have consequences? I mean, if you move to the middle of the desert and then petition the government to deliver water, expensively, to your door, no one shows any sympathy. Everyone thinks you’re crazy and selfish. Remember the old-style car-wash through which your vehicle advanced on a creeping chain of casters? Maybe those could be installed in a one-mile stretch of the highway roadbed, north and south of the McKenzie intersection, thus providing a distraction from the crawl and freeing drivers’ minds and hands for texting, cell phone games, the crossword puzzle, masturbation, knitting, computer work, or reading Focus cover-to-cover. Alternatively, if we’re going to invest in pricey infrastructure, let’s charge commuters for the pleasure of a stop-reduced driving experience. Every car has unique DNA—a license plate—and I assume some road-embedded plate-reader or other programmable whiz-bang technology exists. Buck a trip, one way. Half the cost of a Tim Horton’s coffee. $10/week times 50 weeks times 50,000 vehicles (80-90,000 is the current count, including non-commuters) comes to $25,000,000/year. Your gas isn’t free, daily parking isn’t free, even the air in your tires isn’t free anymore; why should your trip be free? We don’t think of other car-related expenses as punishment or sin taxes, but simply the costs of driving. So, why distinguish? Revenue could be used first to repay the interchange construction cost and after payout be re-directed toward eliminating regional homelessness, which it would do in jig time. I’m getting excited about this idea! Here we are, possibly the luckiest people on Earth, in count-your-blessings Victoria. Via this revenue plan, we could produce a funding structure for thousands of the most needy and least employable people in the region, allowing them to survive less off unpredictable community good will, state largesse, and the limited and uncertain income flow from refundable beverage containers, and more off the income generated through such a program of—dare I call it—wealth redistribution? The provincial Liberals would be all over this ideologically. It’s their kind of thing. But if we go for pricey highway infrastructure upgrades, we have to discuss unintended consequences. A decade ago, you could quip about Victoria’s “rush minute” as cars streamed in and out of town during the commute. No longer true. Jim Hindson, a now-local semi-retired transportation and infrastructure professional who spent almost 30 years as traffic engineer and systems department head for the Hamilton region, has explained to me that while Ground Zero may appear to be the Trans-Canada/McKenzie nexus, under the same pressure is a much larger and highly stressed road “eco-system” featuring Saanich/Boleskine Road, Tillicum Road, Admirals Road/McKenzie Avenue, West Burnside/Interurban, Carey Road, Craigflower Road, and more. This whole system of roads is choked because in the morning people are coming from one road and, seeking shortcuts, going to many. And in the afternoon coming from many and going to one: the Trans-Canada Highway itself. I learned the phrase “lane envy” from Hindson. He explains that if a road includes an underused transit/car pool lane, folks in the adjacent clogged lanes can barely control their frustration. They experience “lane envy” and they lane-hop, replacing morality with exigency—rules be damned and no mind the signage or the white painted diamonds. The empty transit lane takes on the persona of tone-deaf Marie Antoinette who, informed that the peasants have no bread, says, “Let them eat cake!” Now, can we in essence package lane envy—that hatred of gridlock and love of the open road—and exploit and charge for it if we create expensive new infrastructure at the Trans-Canada/ McKenzie intersection? As you consider appropriate infrastructure responses, bear in mind that the daily problem at the intersection is really two 90-minute one-way problems, morning and evening. At all other times, the existing road capacity and traffic signalling is adequate to meet traffic needs. So, is there a three hour/five weekday solution? Would an Admirals/McKenzie overpass with ramps down to and up from the Trans-Canada in appropriate places make enough of a difference? Might there be an elevated reverse-direction two-laner running above the median of the Trans-Canada with ramps as needed that could, with signalling, allow inbound morning and outbound evening thru-traffic to utilize the same two lanes to cruise over the McKenzie intersection? How about we add extra lanes on grade? As Easterners can tell us, that works extremely well on Toronto’s 401 and many other highways where traffic volume quickly expands to exceed the added road capacity. Oh, and as the spaghetti interchange “postcard” included with this column suggests, you could get really jiggy with an infrastructure response and bankrupt the region. I close by acknowledging I’m not a transportation professional, so I can’t competently answer these questions. But Minister Stone, as you study and weigh various scenarios, I implore you to keep the masturbation option on the table. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

May 2014 Our newest tourist attraction may be one of the Seven Blunders of the World. More of the same are in the works. LONG YEARS AGO, I experienced a recurring kid’s fantasy of being in an elevator whose cable snapped, sending the cab on a clattering rendezvous with destiny 20 storeys below. Just as the plummeting cab was about to hit bottom, I flexed and jumped in the air at the exact same speed as the dropping cage; and when, a split-second later, the cab finally stopped in a roar of torn metal, I landed cloudlike on the ruined deck, my feet crossed gracefully at the ankles (think Fred Astaire or Bruce Lee), and walked out completely unharmed. Such reveries are the training wheels for adult magical thinking, like the sober belief that you’re gorgeous, a near-genius, unique, talented, sexually important, powerful, and headed for great things; and on a cultural level, how, when you flush the toilet or discard plastic in the garbage, a fairy carries the waste to faraway Planet Cesspoolia, or how your car alone emits not carbon-laced exhaust but orange-cranberry-scented oxygen with vitamin D to help grow strong bones. Topping any list of magical ideas should be the one euphemistically named “Ironitis.” Having nothing to do with irony, it’s a social pathology common to engineers, project managers, consultants, ambitious bureaucrats and their corporate or political enablers, and characterized by the delusion that so long as the dough can be light-fingered out of abstracted taxpayers’ wallets, there can never be too many new bridges, highway overpasses, or other big infrastructure projects. For the so afflicted, hardware addresses all needs, solves all problems and sustains the entire project of modernity whose gleaming endpoint, where the horizon meets the dawn, is some sci-fi future filled with inter-galactic on-ramps. Ironitis is social pathology because it shares with the sociopath a grandiosity; a conviction of rightness; the ability to experience counter-argument or doubt simply as Luddite noise; a belief in one’s own powers and abilities; the incapacity to experience remorse or guilt; great skill at transferring blame and responsibility, or rendering them ambiguous; and my two favourites: criminal or entrepreneurial versatility and a barely hidden desire to rule the world—in all, a form of hubris that co-indicts many of us because it’s made possible by our willing cooperation. To mangle a folk aphorism: If you’re an engineer, everything looks like a bridge. And what do we do? We encourage the bastards! I know: Why complain? Look, I get this is the good life, even with its cracks and flaws, and I don’t have problems with state authority—well, okay, some, but I’m not holed up in an East Sooke double-wide crammed with patriot-rage brochures, 200 cans of tuna fish, and an arsenal that would make the cops chitter with envy. I just look at some of this infrastructure, think about the limits of nature to absorb the human project, and wonder: What problems are we trying to solve? Yes, like the airport turnoff. Traffic coming north from Victoria to the airport was occasionally stacking up along the left-turn lane of the Pat Bay Highway, creating a potential hazard for adjacent through-lane traffic. Fine. Problem stated. So, why not extend the duration of the left-turn green signal so another 30 cars could get through, or add a pressure-activated sensor under the left-turn lane to automatically change the lights if waiting cars back up past a certain point, and/or lengthen the left-turn lane, or convert that turn lane into a simple overpass crossing above the southbound lanes of the Pat Bay and dropping airport traffic onto the perfectly serviceable existing McTavish Road? Cost of any of these responses? A buck and two box-tops, not $24 million—an amount large enough to bring about world peace. But no, it was crucial to fulfill the Airport Authority manager’s masturbation fantasy while—bonus!—creating the world’s stupidest overpass and roundabout system. Stunning only is that no one has exploited the tourist attraction potential with big signs: “One Of The Seven Blunders Of The World!” These engineering grandiosities need now to be seen as artifacts of a rapidly closing era of cheap oil and energy. Soon, society will not be able to dedicate shrinking economic resources to highway extravagances when energy supplies dwindle, price shocks hit, and some fundamental choices are forced upon us. I hope the post-apocalyptic mob remembers to hang a few politicians and some Urban Systems execs from the railing when gas hits $7/litre and the only things using the overpass are bicyclists and deer—both probably chased by zombies. You might want to believe that no one staring the future in the eye, cold sober, could come to the rational conclusion that $24 million for a glorified overpass was a good use of resources. But big-ticket expenditures like this take place in a state of culturally induced sleepwalking, and are simply pieces in a dreamscape of ever-expanding abundance and ever-continuing well-being. As a recent Huffington Post/YouGov poll learned, Americans feel that climate change will have extreme consequences, but just not in their lifetime. Really, where could you possibly place prudence on that game board? The same $24 million invested in developing an improved system for local growing, production and marketing of food, say, would generate a liberating miracle for the Capital Region. Aw, doesn’t have the sex appeal of a highway overpass? Sorry. It’s no mystery how such incredibly stupid, bad, ill-considered project ideas take on legitimacy and heft, and go the distance. These things are managed by a political ecology as self-regenerating and adaptive as anything you will find in nature. Inquiries and introductions are made. Exploratory ideas are floated. The airport dude talks with business dudes who talk with the MP dude and/or the MLA dude. Word snakes along invisible political conduits that “frosting” would be useful in the riding. Some money gets tossed in the pot. The consultants rev up. Reports are commissioned, confirming need and feasibility. At some point there’s a federal and/or provincial infrastructure funding incentive program and then the ready-made miracle is pulled out of a hat, and there’s an official announcement and maybe a speech or two, the whole thing reported by the media with a fanfare better reserved for the Second Coming. Utterly lost by then is the humble fact that three times a week, half a dozen cars hung out at the back of a left-turn lane on the Pat Bay Highway at McTavish. In an interview, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky comments about his unmade film of the Frank Herbert book, Dune, and describes his design vision for the castle of the ruling bad guy, Baron Harkonnen: “The castle itself, a symbol of intemperance, exploitation, aggression and brutality, with a magical aura which has a negative effect on all the inhabitants.” The castle is a metaphysical expression of the control of crazed and foolish leaders: the head, with its magical (synthetic) authority over the body politic, pushing that citizen-body into negativity and a life of submissive consumption (anger and depression, transmuted locally into pickups and Costco). Which takes us to Langford, where so many of these themes converge. Back in the good old days, you could tell you were on the Langford side of the View Royal border from the mountains of rusting car bodies, their windows blown out by shotgun blasts; the dysgenic, one-eyed shufflers looking like living embodiments from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Persecutors of Christ,” spit-roasting squirrel or tearing at the haunch of a hapless Irish Setter whisked the night before from dewy Uplands lawns; hollow-eyed citizens with names like Tim-Bob and Duane, Raeneese and Suelene, all munching on doughnuts and packing lots of heat; recreationally fire-bombed bus shelters; t-shirts with the arrow aiming straight north, and the words in 300-point balloon type: “I’m With Stupid.” But then two or three developers, over morning coffee at some local Grill ‘n’ Skillet, a dozen years ago, had a business idea and called it Langford. Now look at the place: ruined and character-less—from the hinterlands authenticity of “Dueling Banjos” to an invented landscape of “Picket Fences” in a decade. I was there last week, stopped a local and asked “Hey, where can I buy a pound of weed and place a bet for a cash-purse cage fight?” “I beg your pardon?” said the Langford stalwart, removing two tasteful Schonbek lamps from the deck of his 4x4 and sounding about as twee as anyone you might accost buying pain rustique at the Pure Vanilla Bakery in Oak Bay. It’s a tale of cheap dirt, easy approvals and production housing, not the calculation of hidden energy consumption costs, or social costs, or regional dislocations, or impacts on other municipalities. It’s political ecology on a very grand scale. But hey, what’s another overpass between friends? Elevator going down? All together now: flex your knees and shout: “Fred Astaire, Fred Astaire, Fred Astaire.” Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

March 2014 Good design helps make good citizens. DID YOU KNOW that in the City of Victoria, six of every ten dwellings are rental units and a rumoured seven of every ten people—especially in and around the city core—are renters? Look over there, 10 o’clock. For God’s sake, don’t look right at them! Yes, yes, right there: renters! Humanity’s wiring diagram may have its mysteries, but there is no missing that property ownership (“a piece of the rock,” we say) is a desired status and an elevated form of tenure. It confers gravitas, true citizenship that reduces renters to a ghost-class—folks “just passing through.” Actually, my interest in this has nothing to do with class issues; and jokes aside, I want to be careful not to convey the false idea that renting means a diminished engagement in community life. No, my interest is on the urban design side and begins with the premise that every bad building in Victoria diminishes both the city and its people; that is, reduces citizen expression. People are citizens—active, engaged members of the public life—only to the extent that a place is worth caring about; and this requires an emotional stakehold—in a building, a neighbourhood, a civic community. If buildings isolate or alienate people, file and forget them, we shouldn’t be surprised if the atmosphere in the public realm starts to feel strange. Allow me a calculated digression: the level of amenity at Victoria bus stops. The architecture of bus stop shelters—where shelters are even present—is a case of unambiguous Dickensian social messaging: “Public transit users, you are human refuse meant to suffer. However cold and wet it is here half the year, you don’t deserve protection, warmth or dignity. You don’t deserve the niceties of design. You are lumpen and powerless and deserve only a bench, not seating that would individuate you. Yours is a future of frustrated hopes and groundless expectation. Welcome to your shitty little life on the ‘loser cruiser.’” When I was a kid, my parents and I and their friends Joe and Anne Braunstein were out one evening for dinner at Katz’s Delicatessen in Lower Manhattan. We were next up in the cafeteria-style sandwich line, and a slightly abstracted Anne was having trouble making up her mind. Joe, his eye on the impatient counterman, elaborately waved for the people standing behind us to go ahead. Anne apparently took this as criticism and disloyalty, and she fumed throughout a ruined dinner, complaining loudly to Joe, “That was an act of deliberate intent!” Joe kept denying it, claiming with theatrical innocence that he was just being polite to the couple behind, since Anne obviously needed more time to decide. The conflict was electric, and threw open the doors of adult disharmony—scandalous and thrilling to this nine-year-old: “acts of deliberate intent!” Now, 60 years later, like Anne Braunstein, I see “acts of deliberate intent” in the design deficiencies of public transit amenities and in the barracks-like, soul-crushing presence of hundreds of both rental and owner-occupied apartment buildings in and around Victoria’s central area, regardless how their developers, architects, and the City’s urban land use policy folks may try to justify them. There is no School of Developology. In a world where you can hardly make dinner without a professional credential, developers are un-obliged to demonstrate they understand what it takes to create buildings that people will enjoy being in and around. No formal part of a developer’s education bears on knowledge of a building’s impact on the human psyche, or its contribution to the city’s appearance and character. This is a special irony in Victoria—a soul-stirring city whose entire reputation is built on the charm of its preserved architectural heritage—yesteryear’s sensibilities, really—and the accident of a fabulous physical setting. No one says to visitors: “Ah, I have to show you Bay and Blanshard, run you past the apartment blocks on Cook Street, and finish the tour at View Towers!” Victoria’s reputation hangs almost entirely on good urban character, too much of it inherited from earlier generations, too little of it created now. I’m tempted to describe developers as the innocents (two words that normally repel each other like same-pole magnets). They create what policy tells them they may, or must. The City of Victoria’s rules and design guidelines are mute on the subjective and borderless topic of creating dramatic, handsome, surprising, warm and welcoming buildings, but endlessly chatty about view corridors, build-to lines, ground-floor commercial, shadowing, and other “measurables.” Here’s an energy theory: Exhaustion is built into policy and regulation. Policy requires policing, and with every erg of planning department energy dedicated to applying the rules, there is almost none left over to insist on and negotiate for fabulous buildings (deserved applause here to Victoria Councillor Pam Madoff who has made this concern her mission). No preamble in the City’s land use manual warns developers they don’t have the right to produce bad or nondescript buildings. Nothing in the approval process solemnly reminds them that buildings are public statements, and that bad ones diminish both occupants’ lives and Victoria’s soul and good looks. Still, not every building is a “fail,” and there is room for praise. After all, developers are not vandals, and urban planners are not Sovietized. Leaving many unsung, I single out just-retired Heritage Planner Steve Barber (congratulations, Steve!) and Chris Gower, senior urban design planner, as two who, freed from workplace prohibitions, would likely deliver blistering reproach when presented with spiritless, utility-grade building designs. On the market side, a well-earned shout-out to developer and tortured artist Don Charity and co-developer Fraser McColl, responsible for the Mosaic on Fort Street, the adjacent Jigsaw, the Reef in James Bay (across from David Butterfield’s iconic Shoal Point) and their imminent project, Jukebox, near Vancouver and View. Charity shares with all developers a love of opportunity and profit, but his imagination is fired by grand design visions, starting right at the front door. Don’t you want developers to have design ego, fighting to outdo each other in producing distinctive, beautiful, livable buildings? The Jawls have done this with every project they have undertaken. Ian Gillespie (The Falls, Shutters, etc) clearly loves making flamboyant statements. Fred Rohanni and Bijan Neyestani have given us the graceful Aria and now the clever and referential Mondrian. Gordon and Chris Denford did wonders with the new Cherry Bank on Rupert Terrace and McClure Street. Chris LeFevre continues to expand his remarkable Railyards in Victoria West. David Price has produced the beautifully scaled Swallows Landing buildings on the Esquimalt waterfront, framing and facing the Inner Harbour. Ric Illich has painstakingly resurrected the empty Hudson’s Bay building, now The Hudson, and is building new residential at the rear. Pioneering Dave Chard at several downtown locations and Ken Mariash on the ridge above Songhees both have added quality to the Victoria skyline. Given some good developers and successful projects, then, what brings fresh urgency to this matter? You mean, you haven’t heard of the “silver tsunami?” That’s downtown pub owner Matt MacNeil’s phrase for it. MacNeil believes there is an enormous wave of new retirees from Toronto and other eastern urban centres who are “tired of the cold, tired of shovelling” who will be moving here very soon. He contends that they’re urban, well-heeled, and don’t want the burbs or Oak Bay monoculture; they want stylish condo and apartment living close to Downtown with its shopping, services, amenities, good dining, cool coffee joints and energy. He tosses out the number 10,000 and envisions a “beltline” of buildings loosely ringing Downtown. It doesn’t take much imagination to appreciate the economic and social transformation such numbers would bring to the core. The math is this: 10,000 people would represent another 75 to 100 fairly hefty buildings shouldering the downtown core. That’s a lot of buildings! Few downtown streetscapes would remain unchanged; and promising though it might be economically and culturally, can you imagine the consequences and impacts to Victoria’s visual and social identity of getting the architecture and urbanism wrong? Can you sense the potential for our laggard city (with the best of intentions, of course) to be locked into “my mouth says yes, but my eyes say no” mode, insanely policing the bonus density rules and regulations, when it needs instead to be setting the design terms and conditions for all these buildings, and planning and executing extensive public realm improvements? Good as it would be to have so many new people calling Downtown their home, we must ensure that these newcomers are given not only Downtown living opportunities, but also legitimate grounds and an authentic social framework that will connect them to both the pleasures and responsibilities of city life here. These concerns may seem hand-wringy and abstract, but it took a televised conversation last month between celebrated journalist and commentator Bill Moyers and David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, to help me to work out the human calculus. Said Simon, acidly reflecting on the state of the commons in these winner-take-all times, “There is no society; there’s just you.” At its best, Victoria is a place where society and common cause still prevail. People often read Victoria’s social cues simply as charming architectural heritage coupled to a dozy lifestyle; but society, as Simon means the word, is actually our “secret sauce.” Making the case for great buildings, I finish by invoking poetics: We can lose the charm of our city a building at a time, and insidiously lose its character in an even smaller increment: a citizen at a time. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

December 2013 Can Victoria move forward into the past and leave the past behind, all at the same time? Maybe. YESTERDAY MORNING, some street guy beat up my car. I was leaving the Pandora Street McDonald’s with a large, three creams/two sugars. He was crossing south on Mason Street, heading obliquely toward McDonald’s. We kind of made eye contact. I steered a slow, wide, respectful, you-too-sit-on-a-branch-in-the-tree-of-life turn around him toward Vancouver Street, and then he spun, lurched back into the intersection and beat on the hood and windshield with his fists, yelling something incomprehensible. WTF? Surprising and disturbing, but not consequential—for me, my car or, I suspect, the street guy...unless he was using his fists to drum a message about the sheer human outrage of unequally distributed opportunity in this crapshoot life, his disappointment with US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s announcement that Quantitative Easing would continue because of the still-weak American economy, and the immediate imperative that I practice personal import replacement by making local economic investments (shoe leather, I guess) instead of supporting the German automotive economy. Mind, he was headed straight for McDonald’s. What a hypocrite! Okay, just the evening before (October 1) I had attended a presentation by Michael Shuman, the enormously smart and entertaining economist/lawyer who is a champion of the local economy/import substitution movement. In fact, he is, along with Bainbridge Island-based David Korten (When Corporations Rule the World, The Great Turning) a founding director of the important and influential US-based grassroots organization BALLE—the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. The room at the Victoria Event Centre on Broad Street was packed with market lefties like me—good folks, “progressives,” people I love to talk, party and do good works with, though not the gang likely to join me for java at the Great Satan McDonald’s. As I drove home with my coffee, the question I should have asked Shuman flashed into my adrenaline-quickened mind: “Michael (he’s one of those people with whom you are immediately on a first-name basis), it’s fine for you to give this pitch to the already converted and the ideologically susceptible, but what impact does your message have on the red meat crowd in business suits? Do they take you seriously? Do they find your arguments convincing?” Clearly, Cameron A. Plommer, a reader who, on Amazon, gives Shuman’s Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age only two stars out of five, doesn’t. Plommer writes: “Economies of scale, comparative advantage, specialization? Shuman ignores all these things. There are gains from specialization and trade that most people can’t conceptualize, so they resort to fuzzy feeling concepts like sustainable commu- nities. Going Local is going backwards.” Wow! This is what you invite when you start your presentations or books by noting that the dominant economic system is in decline. Shuman, in advocating local economic development based on the concept of import substitution—local stores and services, not chains or mega-stores; local investment through the choice of local banks and credit unions; promotion of the principle of greater community (or city) self-sufficiency in food, energy, job- and wealth-generation; and so on—is definitely pushing against the conventions we have all been fed as economic gospel, and have grown up taking for granted. Cherry tomatoes in January? Yum! Who cares where they come from, or the shipping costs? Oroweat Oatnut bread 3 for $9.50 at Costco? Gimme dat! In describing the “false economy” promulgated and dominated by big-box and category-killer stores like Walmart, Costco, Chapters and the rest, Shuman explains that money directed to local spending means more local income, wealth and jobs, and that roughly three times more dough—wages, owner income, business profits, business spending on services—stays and re-circulates in the local economy. He reminds his audience that local businesses—he dubs them a “relationship-driven economy”—significantly outperform nationals and multinationals in local job-creation and retention. Every analysis and statistical study undertaken has confirmed these facts. He tells an interesting story: “A hundred years ago, when you spent a dollar on food at the market, something like 40¢ went to the farmer. But now, when you spend a dollar, 7¢ cents goes to the farmer and 71¢ goes to marketing (refrigeration, advertising, middle people, packaging, warehousing, shipping and distribution). Even if you allow for really inefficient local farming so that the farmer’s share rises, say, to 14¢, if you get rid of much of those costs associated with a global food system, you can deliver cheaper food.” Shuman, author, as well, of The Small-Mart Revolution, adds that we bring the sensibilities of big-box consumers not just to our daily purchases but also in our municipal and regional behaviour. He argues that the blind, roving quest and the laydown policy accommodations and de facto bribes (oh, sorry, I mean incentives) by economic development offices hoping to lure major corporations to come to town and set up shop is another example of utter misdirection. He invokes the poor record of corporate performance in producing lasting local economic generation, and reminds us of the fickle loyalties of multinationals when Korea, China or other Asian entrepots come whistling. Remarkably, two evenings later, life was whistling harmony with Shuman—a timely downstroke to his ideas—when ThisIsVIC took over the lobby of the Atrium on Yates and Blanshard. A glorified business mixer and nosh-fest with lots of young person accou- trements (music, pulsing lights and a high ambient noise level), ThisIsVIC aimed to expunge Victoria’s “expired vision” as a somnolent, newly wed/nearly dead town. While many believe that the “little bit of Olde Inertia” thing is fading, others sense that a dead hand still holds things at half-throttle; and Victoria continues to carry a reputation as “a place bright ideas come to die,” and as a hard place to “get to yes.” (One of my scallywag friends thinks a “Welcome to Victoria. The answer is NO” sign would be an informative addition to the Centennial Square landscape.) At a guess, 200 attended ThisIsVIC, and conning the room you might well have asked yourself: “This is VIC?” It was a young, casual crowd, sprinkled with a business suit here and there. No Canadian flag in the corner, no framed photograph of the Queen on the wall. No sit-down. No wallflowers. No mayoral wand-waving. No long speeches. And a dance party starting at 10 featuring DJ Murge. WTF? Walter Wheeler, interviewed many years ago in his home north of Burlington, Vermont on the occasion of his 100th birthday, was asked whether he thought there was more sex now than when he was a young man. Walter responded: “No-o-o-o, I think it’s about the same, but there’s definitely a different crowd doing it.” There was a different crowd doing it (and doing it differently) at ThisIsVIC, driving another nail into the coffin of proper Victoria. Business cards, email addresses, Facebook and Twitter handles were being swapped in a frenzy of happy noise. Roaming, I heard restaurant ideas, tech ideas, small-business startup ideas, food truck ideas, online game ideas, local food production and farming ideas, funding and capital formation ideas, green business ideas. Who knows how much of this will see daylight, but that’s not the point of a fizzy, collaborative brainstorm like ThisIsVIC which, in an information card, describes itself not as an event but a “movement,” and notes, perkily “We are super lucky to have some amazing people in the room with us tonight—including yourself!” I’m a super-amazing old bastard who came to Victoria in 1970, aged 27 and believing, as I took the measure of the place, that me against everybody else was a fair fight. With that perspective, I took heart from Michael Shuman’s hopeful news that economic localism is undergoing a groundswell resurgence, and from a visceral demonstration of that truth as I looked across a sea of 27-year-old faces at ThisIsVIC. Leaves me with a hopeful feeling that now in Victoria the answer is MAYBE. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

November 2013 Despite some foot-dragging, trends are pointing to a revitalized Downtown. WHEN I DROVE BY on a mid-September Saturday morning, the crane truck was lifting the word “PUBLIC” into place above a steel-frame marquee at The Hudson, Townline Development’s residentially and commercially re-purposed Hudson’s Bay store. The next day, it had been flanked by the words “VICTORIA” and “MARKET.” That Monday, the market opened formally to congratulatory speeches before a large, enthusiastic crowd of merchants and well-wishers. The opening followed years of speculation about the flickering possibility that a supermarket might occupy the cavernous ground-floor space (names like Thrifty’s, or a Market On Yates clone, and even Whole Foods had swirled through the Downtown rumour mill); and what made any of this gossip interesting was not only who the candidate would be, finally, but open questions about how and whether any full-scale supermarket could make the numbers work in such a location on the northern fringe of our small and far-from-populous Downtown. Supermarkets vote with their cash registers and require, if my information is current, about six thousand shoppers in their “capture zone.” Six thousand. I guess the north end of Downtown isn’t near that number yet, but in a possible foretaste of the future for this area, including the 18-square-block Rock Bay bowl immediately to the north, the individually-owned shops that have opened up at the Public Market are light on dishwasher detergent and toilet paper, heavy on gluten-free baking, a global selection of olive oils, spices, cheese, charcuterie, seafood, pies, cakes, fresh produce, Indian food, Mexican food, tea and gelato, with more to come. You know what that foretells: young urban professionals. Circle the wagons! Millennials and Cultural Creatives on the ridge! The “wagons,” I suppose, are the industrially-disposed stakeholders—businesses and property owners—in Rock Bay whose activity is supported by current industrial zoning and by popular sentiment. Consider: Who’s not for “real” industrial land use as opposed to opportunistic developers building condos for yuppies? The City has its own reasons for foot-dragging—not just the political whiplash, but that it may have to put scarce taxpayer dollars (giant sucking sound coming from the Blue Bridge, Bay Street Bridge, firehall, Crystal Pool, etc) into new amenities, upgraded streets and subsurface infrastructure to replace ancient pipes and sewers if the Rock Bay area is redeveloped. Also, it’s a mixed bag for landowners who know that Rock Bay has a long history of dirty industry which has in some key places left a toxic legacy—that is, their properties may be laced with costly-to-remove contaminants from the industrial bad old days, and this will require expensive mitigation and will impact property values and/or development costs if new land uses are contemplated. Industry gossip says that the landowner is spending something approaching $90 million to clean up the glow-in-the-dark mess behind that curtained ex-BC Hydro super-block on Government at Chatham. I’ve written before about a possible future for Rock Bay in which lots of residential and new streetfront retail/commercial gradually fills up Rock Bay’s vacant lots and replaces some of the light industrial and service uses that operate, in many cases, out of one-storey structures surrounded by wide aprons of surface parking. But before you go to your corner on the (in some circles) touchy subject of land use in Rock Bay, it would pay you to actually walk the Rock Bay area—Chatham to the south side of Bay Street, Store Street to the west side of Blanshard—to take in the current realities of land use. A lot of folks assume the area is exclusively industrial, presumably because that’s an easy handle for this generally un-groomed frontier that most of us drive through, not to, with its still-operating asphalt plant at Store and Pembroke and a hodge-podge of service, commercial and light industrial uses, with a strong emphasis on automotive services and freight handling. Remember though, that such uses share the neighbourhood, even now, with a dog-minding/walking service, Paul’s Restaurant and Motel, the White Spot, Capital Iron, Discovery Coffee, Club Phoenix fitness centre, H&R Block, a children’s gymnastics studio, Jordan’s Furniture, an Apple service store, and Cascadia Bakery and Sager’s Furniture a half-block south on Government Street. Up the side streets on Princess and Pembroke between Douglas and Blanshard there is even a small cluster of humble, occupied houses, some with modest heritage chops. The one chimney in the area, part of the ancient and long-disused BC Hydro power plant near Store Street and Pembroke, hasn’t smoked for a lifetime and is now worthy artifact, not working flue. The neighbourhood, you might say, is half service/commercial Rock Bay, half proto-Herald Street. Worry does emanate from the heavy industrial operators along Bay Street who are involved in sand, gravel and cement production. Understandably, they have a variant of the “there goes the neighbourhood” fear that encroaching residential and retail uses will pressure them and crowd them out. But construction material activities are crucial to the city and will stay there as long as they are viable. That co-existence is possible is clearly demonstrated by Granville Island, home of a major cement production facility a thousand feet from “festival retail,” galleries, theatres and a toney boutique hotel. When I first arrived in Victoria in 1970, Yates and Douglas was our city’s Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Classy stores (Miss Frith’s, Ingledew’s and Standard Furniture anyone?) and stolid banks framed the intersection and the 700-block of Yates. The old Carnegie Library at Yates and Blanshard (at whose footworn steps I was deposited the first day I came to town) was a busy place. People shopped Downtown, circuiting between the original Bay and the original Eaton’s, unless they were intent on stranded rural purposes like buying a dressed side of moose. Once things slid Downtown, though, they stayed slidden; and to this day, through the cycle of a whole generation, the immediate locale of the Yates/Douglas intersection feels lost and cheesy, less epicentric than epidemic, a fallen angel of commerce looking for a fresh mission. A short block south (avert thine eyes from McDonald’s), things pick up nicely at the Bay Centre, and the blocks south of Fort have been progressively redeemed by new residential towers. Out-of-town developers—Townline’s Rick Illich, Bayview’s Ken and Patty Mariash, Westbank’s Ian Gillespie, Dave Chard of Chard Developments, Reliance Properties’ Jon Stovell, David Podmore of Concert Properties jump to mind—and a large number of locals, too, have sniffed the wind and caught the scent of Downtown/central area rebirth. To the north, after hopscotching Douglas Street’s still-poisoned blocks from Yates to Fisgard (even that will start to change when the Jawls put up a sister building to the Atrium), The Hudson, and now a second Townline tower going up behind it, plus a surprising number of newly minted and emerging residential buildings (the Janion, the Union on Fisgard, 601 Herald, and many more), or venerable older buildings revitalized for residential and commercial uses are improving not just the feel (and real estate values) of Downtown’s north end but also Rock Bay’s prospects, and may, in not too many years, leave Whole Foods regretting a missed opportunity. Mind, this isn’t unique to Victoria. Cities almost everywhere in North America are, to varying degrees, experiencing the same trends and rosy impacts. Jeff Speck, formerly a planner with DPZ (Duany Plater-Zyberk, the legendary Miami-based architectural firm) and co-author of Suburban Nation, notes in his 2012 book Walkable Cities that so-called millennials, cultural creatives, tech nerds and others in the younger generations are trading cars for shoe leather, and the ‘burbs for the urbs. He observes: “It turns out that since the late ’90s, the share of automobile miles driven by Americans in their twenties has dropped from 20.8 percent to just 13.7 percent. The number of 19-year-olds who have opted out of earning driver’s licenses has almost tripled since the late ’70s, from 8 percent to 23 percent. This trend is seen as cultural, not economic, and fully 77 percent of college-educated millennials plan to live in America’s urban cores.” Speck also notes that front-wave boomers, their commuter, child raising and backyard barbecue years behind them, are abandoning big, expensive-to-run, socially-isolating suburban homes for livable central areas that are more walkable, social and, frankly, more fun. Victoria, then, is part of a larger trend: a North America-wide shift back to urban places. It’s something of an ironic confirmation of this shift that even suburban places are trying (unconvincingly, in my opinion) to become or appear more urban, to give identity, character and a borrowed authenticity to essentially placeless places. Go study the wannabe design of the Uptown shopping centre or Langford’s town centre on Goldstream Avenue. Both feel synthetic: vehicular destinations trying so hard to be what they’re not. Cast your mind forward and imagine a vibrant and vigourous Downtown Victoria with a living population of 10-15,000—four times its current population, say. Imagine the street tone with pedestrians everywhere. Consider the financial health of Downtown businesses. Envision the size of the cultural audience. Picture the employment levels. Speculate with me about how many fig-and-herb-infused pork roasts the charcuterie at the Victoria Public Market would go through in a day. Hey, leave some for me! Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

September 2013 Victoria just needs to turn itself inside-out to be ready for a great future. I TURN—likely turned, by the time you read this—70 on August 2nd. Let me assure you, in this era of wishful and delusional thinking about graceful aging, that 70 is the new 70. Everything hurts or misfires a bit. Whatever noble or sexualized fantasies of remaining good looks I concoct as I strike poses at the bathroom mirror evaporate on the street when everyone under 40 walks by me like I’m wallpaper. I survive off my pension, refunds from deposit containers, petty crime in the bulk food aisle at Thrifty’s, surreptitious and profitable fast-change capers when the Sunday church donation plate comes by. Whatever its outrages, aging offers one consolation: the conquest of shame. Look for me next at Denny’s publicly taking out my dentures so I can gum a full stack. An already porous memory is becoming more so. There are frequent moments in the day when “You know, the guy who also wrote that other book about, uh…” stands in for crystalline recall. I have an increasingly fictional relationship to my own past. Halfway through anecdotes, I think: Did this really happen, or am I making it up? I find I repeat myself more often. I find I repeat myself more often. “Senior” meant some abstracted, white-haired, little old gent haltingly driving a 1950s Buick Roadmaster up Fort Street at 12 kph, braking at green lights. Not any more. And what’s the hurry? When I got to Victoria in 1970 from New York via Prince Rupert (a manly summer at the Nelson Bros. salmon cannery), my head was buzzing with the rumour that Victoria was still “a little bit of Olde England.” I was not disappointed; this place was, in fact, thunderous with propriety. Queen Elizabeth would visit monthly, a gourd-like, liveried carriage sweeping her from the Royal Yacht in the harbour to Government House on Rockland Avenue. We would cheer and throw rose petals in her path, thrilled that our city was a jewel, if not the very centre-stone, in the Imperial crown. Back then, the help behaved themselves and didn’t court dreams of “doing their own thing.” We wore white gloves to dinner at the Empress Hotel. Salad was served after the Palm Court Orchestra played, and we sang, a rousing “Rule, Britannia!” When Britain first, at Heaven’s command Arose from out the azure main; This was the charter of the land, And Guardian angels sang this strain: “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!” Gone, all gone. The Imperium is ruined, lying on history’s scrapheap, and this place now sits, chinless and stupid, listening to its own fading echoes. Glory’s over, the lights are flickering. All that’s left is residue: a fortressed, waspish propriety led by the house-proud, thumbing local reno-porn and fussing with their 1912-ers. Now, Victoria is post-historical, post-contextual, contemporary…like everywhere else, but with coastline and aging street trees. The story it tells itself (I mean here an agreed-to narrative, a commonly held sense of identity and purpose) and its brand are—I could be nice and say tarnished, but I mean—broken. City of Gardens? Appropriately, Victoria’s current image references a vegetative condition. Someone tours me past a restyled house in Fairfield sporting a clever and tasteful second-storey side-deck that projects from the sloping roofline. I’m informed that “Fairfield now has a rule against such decks” because they enable intrusive overlook into neighbours’ rear yards. Amazing that second-storey windows aren’t verboten. Decorum our most important product, intrusion our greatest sin. Front page news in the daily? “Dog recovering from chilly night in car trunk,” or somesuch. The place has gone hyper-local, thuddingly dull, ditzy, Swiss—one of the last stages in a (once-important) city’s life cycle. Victoria behaves like cartoonist Saul Steinberg’s two duelists on the tongue of a crocodile. The crocodile, by the way, is The Future, pulling in at Platform 3, any minute now. Leaving macroeconomic, macropolitical, macrosocial trends and their local implications to the side for just a moment, it is so obvious that in the next few years, job-killing technology, work-at-home software, job-theft by the Westshore or capture by centrifugal Vancouver, outright provincial job-slashing in aid of a balanced budget—linked to a thinly veneered all-party hatred of this place (Victoria’s favourite wine? “We weren’t consulted!”)—will significantly chip away at the presence and sheer numbers of the civil service in Victoria’s central area, emptying out whole office buildings that will be a challenge to repurpose. Vertical mushroom farms, maybe. Or crash pads with elevator service for the shopping cart set. A June conversation with Sage Baker, the city’s brand new economic development director, quickly (and understandably) turns from an enumeration of opportunity areas and initiatives (she had been on the job only about two weeks when we talked) to her views about the need to change the internal culture and to discover ways to make Victoria City Hall more responsive and helpful (read: less obdurate, obstructive and hostile) to enterprise interests, and less micromanagerial. You’re a quick study, Sage! I wish Baker the best of luck (she is absolutely programmed for success, and if anyone can succeed, she will) but I’m not sure she appreciates, at the start of her two-year mandate, how long Victoria has been perfecting the Zen of dynamic inaction—something like a real-life version of the Vogons in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (described as “not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous”). I’m reminded, when I talk with Baker, of the droll cartoon of a ballet master addressing a large stone: “Jeté!” In an effort to help Baker, let’s be open-eyed and analytical about the City of Victoria’s strong suit. Also, let’s be modern—futuristic, even—in our thinking about where economies are headed. Things are roiling, ecologically and economically, in case you hadn’t noticed. Maybe instead of moaning about the economic drift to Westshore, we should realize that soon-to-explode energy costs will paralyze Arcadian stalags like Westhills and Bear Mountain, and should be asking ourselves: What does the world need that plays to Victoria’s assets and capabilities? When I answer my own question, I think: If we must be Swiss, let’s at least be the green Geneva. Greeneva! We could be the world-leading green innovation capital—if only somebody with vision, entrepreneurial ambition and resources would see the remarkable business potential (David Black, say, with his compass reset from Kitimat oil refineries to something morally useful). Imagine Victoria’s future as an entrepot filled not with vapid visitor experiences but a green (in its broadest meanings) hub with consultants, world-class environmental expertise, research, workshops, discovery, invention, congresses, conferences, demonstration projects, global teaching and crucial green data services and information products. The key, I think, is not to ask the stone to jump but to exploit creative, money-making expressions of what we so brilliantly are right now: our fuddle, our genius for inertia, our indecision and motion-tabling skills, our local-ness, our passion for and protective love of nature and environment, our hand-wringy-ness, our predilection for healing therapies, our yoga-ness, our alternative-ness, our squishiness and sensitivity, our insatiable intellectual appetite, our committee-ness, our love of talk, talk, talk over action, our idealism. Perversely, it’s all so ecological! I have this revelation: it’s not that we have chosen removal from the wider streams of commerce but that we have failed to play to our own strengths. Maybe we just need to turn ourselves inside out. Old Town property dabbler Michael Williams, in what I assume was a misdirected quest for immortality (promised him, I don’t doubt, by the insidious Martin Segger, UVic secret agent posing, years back, as a Victoria City Councillor and heritage building buff), bequeathed his large clutch of downtown heritage buildings to the university upon his death. For starters, in a wider strategy of repatriation of regional assets, I say raze the entire existing university campus tomorrow. Bulldozers, forward! Reduce it to rubble. Relocate the entire university downtown to occupy not just its own ill-gotten properties, but every other vacant square foot of downtown space. Convert its current campus into a site for regional wastewater treatment, garbage sorting and recycling. Or move the airport there. What’s the urgency, you think? Trust me, this is not a time for folks to steeple their fingers and maunder about the long game. Go see World War Z (do it for Brad if you won’t do it for me). I’m sorry to remind you so often that zombie movies are an ominous, ecological metaphor whose message is we’re headed toward major self-harm and catastrophe. You can feel it. Media is seething with it. Global civilization simply cannot take this high level of environmental, economic and social stress. Victoria, you have an important destiny in these latter times. Seize it. “Jeté!” This is a feeble, old man’s request, and I’ll continue to voice it as long as my brains still work. As long as my brains still work. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

June 2013 Why do we penalize those who are trying to densify the city core? I’M TEMPTED TO DEVOTE THIS ENTIRE COLUMN to the news that while the McDonald’s on Pandora Avenue and Vancouver Street charges four cents less for a large coffee, the McDonald’s on Esquimalt Road near Esquimalt’s Archie Browning Recreation Centre is a masterpiece of tasteful, intimate restaurant decor, especially the leather armchairs and the booth seating. Yes, leather armchairs, booth seating. The Pandora McDonald’s is straight out of the prison cafeteria riot school of interior design (the “lockdown” look), and evokes Agent Smith’s disgust in The Matrix when he describes humans as a disease, a virus. The beautifully furnished and finished Esquimalt restaurant, however, communicates trust, love of people, belief in the goodness of the human community, faith that someday we will overcome our differences and all be as— Okay, sorry about that. But if you saw the place in Esquimalt you would rhapsodize, too. I’m trying to get my arms around something elusive and chimerical this month: air and space—though these words may be just markers for the real subject: value. I referenced a few months back the City of Victoria’s roughly two-year-old policy that allows developers in selected downtown areas to buy additional project density from the City. Density, you’ll remember, is the ratio of building square footage to site square footage. Under this latest formulation, the developer gets added density above 3:1 to a cap of 6:1 and the City gets money. As near as I can determine, the City’s case for this bonus density charge is that the City, in permitting densities of up to 6:1, is bestowing an unpaid-for benefit upon the developer (“bonus” says worlds about the City’s mindset); and in doing so, the City has the right to collect money because it functions like a secondary property owner—not of the “dirt,” but of a volume of space, up in the air. This renders the City the notional “owner” of a purely conceptual spatial volume and, in selling this development entitlement, the practitioner of an alchemy that the rest of us can only dream of: commodifying thin air. If the value of land is determined by what you can build on it, then this makes the City’s ownership of a spatial volume, as expressed in its land use policies, a fascinating subject—legally, business-wise, and philosophically. If you don’t mind some smudges on your clothing, come on down the rabbit hole with me. Cities evolved from simple crossroads origins to become towns and city-states ruled by an aristocracy and, in time, rough-cut administrative units run at first by powerful bosses and mayors. Eventually, a more democratically constrained elected leadership emerged. (The phrase “You can’t fight city hall” is believed to have originated in the US in the mid-1800s.) Cities exist to frame and manage the very complex living arrangements of a human community occupying a tightly-bounded geography; to foster opportunity; be the promoters of urban well-being; and behave as stewards of the future. In such pursuits, cities make budgetary and policy decisions based either on common sense; or support for the community’s mood and values; or the ghost-lit pursuit of some civic intention or aspiration. Here are some examples of each: Management of a water supply or charging for downtown parking or installing traffic controls at intersections are common sense. Detaining public troublemakers and preserving public parkland reflect community values. Licensing cats or charging for downtown density over 3:1 are batshit nutty. Oh, sorry, I’m breaking the writer’s omerta by not saving the crazy for later. So, here’s the thought: Why doesn’t the City zone everything 1:1 and charge for all additional density? Why not zone residential neighbourhoods one-storey and charge for the second storey on two-level homes? And you say: “Those are the silliest and most preposterous things I ever heard!” Oh, and charging for density above 3:1 is what? Solomonic? 3:1 says to developers “You can build three times your site area.” 6:1 says to developers “You can build six times your site area.” 6:1 with a density bonus charge says “Please, don’t build in Victoria.” Presumably, logic and desire led the City to say okay in the first place to greater densities. In other words, somebody thought it was a good idea for some reason, just as other somebodies thought 3:1 was a good idea at previous times. Though right here might be a good place to remind ourselves that there are a number of pension-age downtown buildings—the Central Building, 612 View, Belmont Building, Dogwood Building, Sayward Building and the Yarrow Building, for example—with densities approaching and in some cases exceeding 6:1, all of which were put up umpteen years ago without bonus density charges, and all of which were seen in their day to be making a positive contribution to the downtown. In spite of these historic precedents, wise heads in today’s Victoria believe that a density of 6:1 is a developer’s windfall, and that the City is entitled to capture most of it. What it says as social subtext is that developers are sociopathic and criminally insane and must be punished for their ambitions. Let’s turn to an obvious but as-yet-unasked question: Why did the City raise the density cap to 6:1 in the first place? Surely, the City concluded that higher density buildings might result in more people working and living in and around downtown—a good thing. If this was the City’s principal motivation, why aren’t those presumed beneficial economic and social outcomes (and downstream property tax revenue) quid pro quo enough? And why wouldn’t the City turn a blind eye to a developer windfall (more theoretical than real, anyway) to get developer juices flowing? The City was for several years getting a strong message from the development industry that given downtown Victoria’s high land costs, densities greater than 3:1 would enhance project viability. The City was also aware that many developers of downtown projects were using the cumbersome rezoning process to achieve densities in the range of 5:1; and that downtown area property owners were pricing their property on the assumption that 5:1 was a slam-dunk via rezoning. Old expectations of value die hard, of course, and even with the City’s new bonus density policy, property owners have hardly backed off their earlier asking prices. So, when the City stacks bonus density charges on top of a property owner’s price expectations, the essential rationale for greater density falls apart and turns into an invitation principally to take on the greater risks of attempting to sell or lease bigger buildings. And last, there is an argument floating around out there that the City needs to charge this bonus simply as a “gimme” because it needs new Downtown amenities; and our underground infrastructure is old and at capacity; and greater density puts more pressure on infrastructure, so developers should make a contribution to improving/increasing that capacity. Leaving aside the mind-bending circularity of that thinking, why then wouldn’t the City make any and every new development pay a bonus, regardless of density, since every development adds pressure; and further, isn’t infrastructure-upgrading precisely what the City is supposed to be doing within its franchise, with its normal tax revenues through the annual budgeting process? In consideration of all of these circumstances, what exactly explains the City mordida from new projects seeking densities greater than 3:1? Well, first, the present bonus density payment program is meant to rationalize a previous horse-trading system in which developers exchanged affordable housing units, public art or contributions to the City’s affordable housing fund for greater density. Folks thought that system lacked transparency and was open to developer abuse. (Can you believe that?) Second, other cities do it—justifying such charges against high civic processing costs, when in fact it’s just the City saying to developers: “Hey, if you’re trying to max your building density, we must be doing something right, so share.” Third, the City needs the dough, and it’s cheaper for the industry to pay than take the City to court. Of course, this is Victoria, so there are also “dark side” explanations for the bonus density policy: first, that it picks up on strong anti-density/anti-height sentiment in Victoria and by “punishing” developers with a surcharge tosses a bone to the folks who believe those higher densities threaten Victoria’s character and really should not be permitted under any circumstances; second, that by imposing bonus density costs, the City plays to the values of the single-family house-owning “urban aristocracies” of James Bay, Fairfield and elsewhere. Such values—call it the “Victoria lifestyle premium”—percolate into City land use policy and drive up property and housing costs in the core. Funny how Victoria’s land use policies are trapped in this murk of living contradiction, a dreamscape, a social mystery in which the amenities and nostalgic charm of an intransigent past and the needs and imperatives of an urgent present battle for validation. Maybe we should modify the old axiom to give it local relevance: “You can’t comprehend city hall.” Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

May 2013 White and curvaceous, Shutters flaunts Victoria's unwritten cultural code. SHUTTERS, THE IMPROBABLY-WHITE and unexpectedly-sinuous condominium building in Songhees, is not so much a building as a sculpture people live in. Proper buildings, after all, are squared up and have right angles. Everyone knows that. And they’re brick-y red, not wedding-cake white. So, let’s study this one-off that flaunts all of Victoria’s unwritten cultural code regarding colour and shape of buildings, and that seems not so much to have been built as to have landed. I was led to consider Shutters after I sat in one of the city’s coffee shops frequented by the double latte crowd, and overheard an artist/philosopher-in-residence explaining to the tattooed bunny at his table that white was not a colour but a concept, an idea. White an artifice? My view is, if you can buy a can of it in a paint store, it’s a colour. I typed “Is white a colour?” into Google, hoping for Wikipedia solidarity, like: “Hey, stupid, do fish swim?” No such luck. I was immediately swept up into light theory, pigmentation theory, molecular theory. In a tactical retreat I plodded to the basement and dragged out the voluminous Benjamin Moore Designer’s Kit—the “Good Book” of colour. A whole fan of colour chips was labelled “Whites.” I rest my case. But not in Victoria, architecturally. We may be mostly a white-people city, but not a white-building city. We’re much more in the shrubby palette: pomes, mustards, duns, beiges, greys, yam skin maroons…proper, serious, rooted colours. White buildings here stand out like college pranks involving lots of toilet paper. White’s about an endless faith in blue skies, and such faith is in short supply here on the raincoast. White’s sybaritic, Mediterranean—not Scottish, disapproving and hellfire. Hold on: white is also an aspirational colour, and it inspires the same meanings in many cultures. Think of how germs flee before a white starched nurse’s uniform, or how a tunnel of bright white light guides us to the afterlife, or how the good witch wears white. If you take white to this level of metaphor, Shutters is the one Victoria residential building that forces us to think about what white means expressively. Shutters was undertaken by Ian Gillespie’s Westbank Developments in Songhees, and designed by Vancouver architect James Cheng. It is the most architecturally flamboyant building in Victoria, all nerve, curve, brazen performance and exhibitionism. Shutters is entirely sun-loving, carefree and sea-cruise, and has taken its cues from Miami Beach, cribbing some of its design pedigree from architect Morris Lapidus’ Fountainbleu Hotel. I take slight liberties in describing it as a mismatched pair of single-loaded (units extend fully across the building) punctuation marks—a nine-storey comma and a six-storey parenthesis—on a roughly two-acre site in Songhees—to date, the only building “over there” to suggest that it might actually be fun to live at the edge of the ocean. The buildings share in common a resort-size pool that sits almost invisibly on an elevated patio space. Overall, the project scandalizes its grumpy, beige-painted or red shingle-hatted neighbours, and colour and shape-wise in Songhees comes off like a unicorn picking its way through a chivvying herd of hippos. It’s an impossibly jazzy and sexy development, as dazzling, distracting and disconcerting as Marilyn Monroe captured by Cecil Beaton’s camera in gauzy white petticoats, or Marilyn standing on a windy grate, her white dress billowing sculpturally in the updraft—and enjoying it! Shutters’ two building curves have been set on axes roughly at right angles to each other, and as you walk around the site, more of one building is revealed as the curve of the other recedes—a photographer’s dream and an urban aesthete’s delight. It’s interesting that in a city whose developers and builders will swear that every angle, jut-out, and deviation from the geometry of four straight walls spells financial ruin for the project, Shutters is nothing but circumference. The building is called Shutters because of a repeated design motif of quartets of white-painted louvered shutters that have been staggered from one floor to the next on the exterior walkways of each storey. Funny, actually, to have named so glassy and transparent a building after an object intended for opacity and privacy. Shutters wears all of its circulation systems on the outside: Glass columns enclose its numerous elevators and stairs; and its wide exterior entrance corridor makes occupants visible when they leave their front doors. The slightly hypnotic and spacey effect as people pop out of their homes, walk the corridors and visibly descend in glass-walled elevators is a bit like watching something from Second Life or a video animation. A friend who lives in the building informs me that short bridges cross a narrow void between the elevators and the curving walkways that lead to front doors. He suggests that the act of crossing over is a profound and dramatic event, akin to stepping across the gangway between dock and cruise ship: You leave one world behind and step into a new one. With room to burn, the building sports a graceful and remarkably spacious lobby filled with designer-istically geometric, furniture showroom-like white-and-chrome seating and table arrangements, bathed in a faint aqua glow from its glass walls. I note this because so many of our recent buildings, facing both cost and security concerns, seem to have opted for a penitentiary aesthetic featuring miserly lobby spaces and the lockdown look. On its lower south-facing side, Shutters rises glassily out of a low cliff of raw Songhees rock, emphasizing its crystalline grace. The landscape designer has lopsidedly dropped in a copse of white birches to one side of the main building entrance. Nice! In its totality the building must leave occupants happily confused about whether life’s a bummer or a vacation, and humming along with Tony Bennett, “Where am I? I’m a stranger in Paradise.” In that vein, Victoria’s countless thousands of urban critics habitually bemoan how ego and idiosyncrasy invariably get boiled out of major developments because in the development field flamboyance is equated with cost and risk, if not outright mental imbalance. Westbank is a major developer, yet Ian Gillespie, the company’s president, presumably with his banker’s and investor’s approbation, has installed something eccentric and unexpected in virtually every one of Westbank’s buildings, often with great success—notably, the beautifully controlled The Falls on Douglas Street and his many projects in Vancouver including the Flatiron Building-like Woodwards tower in Gastown, the Fairmont Pacific Hotel and condominium tower near the new harbourfront convention centre, and the planned Beach and Howe Tower by BIG (the very hot Dutch architects Bjarke Ingles Group), a completely insane architectural tour-de-force that will rise between some of the Granville Street Bridge on-ramps and that looks in renderings, unnervingly, like it will fall over in a strong breeze or a tremor. While the Bay building re-purposed as The Hudson stands in creamy, off-white splendour, and smaller white buildings, homes and such, dot the Victoria landscape, Shutters and the tower portion of the eponymously named The 834 at 834 Johnson Street remain the city’s two major residential studies in white. Not enough to nudge our city toward Mediterranean bliss. We may have to wait for the full-on local effects of global warming (tropical palms, a hot sun, blondes in bathing suits) before we shake off Edinburgh and embrace Miami. Can Shutters be faulted for not respecting its context? Probably not. Ex-industrial Songhees itself has been a-historical—Victoria’s “wild west” where almost anything goes (and has gone). No reminders of our civic history excepting the nearby railroad roundhouse, car barns, assorted stores buildings and rusting railyard tracks remain to be offended. Can it be faulted for being capricious, or overly self-congratulatory about its daring curves and good looks? These are hard questions to answer without tumbling down the rabbit hole into a swamp of architectural semiotics. Last time I tried, I broke my leg and almost drowned. What I sense—without knowing the mind of its developer—is that Shutters and Gillespie’s other clever and playful projects are not at all synthetic, Las Vegas products (Egyptian pyramids, castles, faux villas, etc.) but serious attempts to express a new architectural language—a mix of technical daring and design brio intended to bring character to large and tall buildings, and not just the iconic skyscrapers, but all. Last, can Shutters be faulted for being too curvaceous, provocative and white in a city of well-behaved, soberly coloured cubes? Hey, do fish walk? Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

April 2013 The City of Victoria is robbing the future to pay for today. I WANT TO ENLIST YOUR HELP in fleshing out an idea for the City of Victoria and in designing a strategy for its implementation. I’m proposing that together we generate some innovative thinking directed at our downtown and, by extension, the city’s problematic economy. In doing this we’ll not only open new ground in citizen innovation and city/citizen collaboration, but assist the city we love—a place that has clearly found itself overwhelmed and temporarily out of ideas. We can do this on the pages of Focus (send in your thoughts as letters or emails); or around a table in a coffee shop (call or write me); maybe it wants to be a small conference or workshop. Possibly all. As framing, let me quickly invoke Paul Krugman, economist and New York Times columnist, who in the context of the current US recession debate recalls the “utter impenetrability of the elite [Bush-era] pro-Iraq-war consensus”: Now, as then, this consensus has seemed impenetrable to counterarguments, and its leaders regarded as credible even though they’ve been wrong about everything, while critics of the consensus are regarded as foolish hippies even though all their predictions — about interest rates, about inflation, about the dire effects of austerity — have come true. My local take-away from Krugman is this: the current mis-ordering of importances by our political leadership and civic management is driving this city to its knees financially. Believe me: right at the very borders of calamity, these folks are perpetuating a ruinous and fatal approach to the city’s economic strategy. Here in Victoria, Council and key staff have for months been wrestling with a budget so tight that the effort to boil a mere $1.6 million out of it (less than 1 percent) has produced major brain damage in city hall and bizarre, funny-if-they-weren’t-so-tragic proposals like switching from annuals to perennials in some of the city’s flower beds. And all of this Herculean effort is in aid of tabling a budget for the following three years not with a zero increase, but one that will continue to increase by 3.25 percent a year—an 11 percent cumulative jump, presumably with further rises likely beyond that. No portrait of Victoria’s present political and administrative leadership will be complete or accurate without making this simple fact clear: the city is robbing the future to pay for today. The blue bridge—a subject exhaustively discussed on the pages of Focus Magazine—is a lucid illustration of stealing from the future. In the city’s deal with the devil to keep the replacement bridge ‘within budget,’ the structure’s engineering standards have been relaxed, shaving not just amenities but two-and-a-half decades (25 percent) off its functional 100-year life—a clear case of the city essentially crapping in tomorrowland. It’s not just the bridge, it’s a pattern: the city is under-allocating incoming revenue to its capital account (the money needed to repair, upgrade, replace or add infrastructure), in favour of its operating account (what it spends today). As an example of city duress, the city recently required Chard Developments (and others, I imagine) to build wastewater holding tanks into its recent condo project at 834 Johnson Street to facilitate overnight, lower-volume discharge: the sewers are so old they lack the capacity to handle a growing downtown. None of this is sustainable and it’s going to get us into even more trouble down the road. Ask yourself: How do these things happen, how did it come to this? The answer is that, as with personal behaviour, institutional behaviour follows the laws of circumstance and consequences—essentially, an ecological principle. Smoke for thirty years, you get cancer or lung disease. Leach the soil of nutrients season after season, eventually the crops fail. Spew a lot of carbon into the atmosphere for a half-century, the glaciers melt and the global weather roils. In this vein, the city’s current budget dilemma didn’t come out of nowhere. It has been years in the making and is best understood as a long-brewing, slowly evolving set of political and managerial miscalculations and missteps moving us toward the inevitability of consequences. Some of those consequences are here now; others are quickly approaching. The miscalculations span successive mayoral leaderships, beginning somewhere in the political dry gulch of the post-Pollen years, and speak to the ever-expanding fuddle culture at the city. The current challenge of boiling $1.6 million or so out of the budget? Believe me, just a symptom and not the disease. Honestly, if you really imagine the solution to Victoria’s economic problems lies in switching from annuals to perennials in city flower beds, automating payment at the city’s five parkades, freezing a few pay packages here and there, and eliminating free egg salad sandwiches at committee meetings, you should stop reading this piece now. Consider leaky boat syndrome: Water’s coming in through a dozen holes! You can’t bail fast enough! The boat is getting heavier and less maneuverable! The tide’s pushing you away from the shore! Big, swamping waves are approaching! Oh-oh! As things deteriorate, all options are compromised. The city is trying desperately to reduce the budget (essentially, a 4.25 percent increase) by a mere 1 percent and clearly not having an easy time of it. But much bigger rollers are just offshore, and the city is under-equipped for an economic event-horizon likely to feature: • a regional sewage treatment levy imposed on taxpayers; • the growing drag of three-quarter-billion dollars in unfunded city infrastructure projects including underground systems, streets, parks, facilities and community amenities; • potential cost overruns (in any event) on that embarrassment of a blue bridge replacement, coupled to the prospect of a legal challenge of the city for betraying the terms of the spending referendum approved by voters; • continued softening of the real estate market with drops in assessments and the need for compensatory mill rate increases (a bigger bite into home and commercial property owner equity value); • relentless commercial predation from the ‘burbs and accelerated erosion of downtown retail and service/office assets, prompting all kinds of bad consequences; • financial challenges to the sustainability/viability of various city recreational and cultural assets; • an emptying piggy bank, hampering the city’s ability to mount new initiatives, exploit emergent opportunities, respond to rainy-day conditions, or compete aggressively in the face of regional economic challenges in the far-from-rosy near-future. These prospects point to an enfeebled city less and less able to invest in its own well-being. Our well-being. Here’s something that happened in the last two years that brings a fine point to understanding the city’s dilemma. Under its new land use policies, the city telegraphed that it was prepared to allow densities of up to 6:1 (total building square footage six times the site square footage) in certain areas in and around the core. With guidance from an out-of-town consultant who demonstrated little intuitive understanding of either the competitive regional economic condition or local business culture, the city came up with a bonus density policy that said to developers: “Okay, you can build up to 6:1, but we’re going to charge you a ‘density bonus’ for every square foot over 3:1.” In other words: “No problem, we acknowledge that you can build at densities up to 6:1, but we’re going to punish you with a significant financial disincentive if you try.” As business messaging, this is perverse and anti-market, contradictory and un-partnerlike. It builds neither trust nor confidence within industry. It doesn’t say to industry: “Let’s build this city together!” Why this push-pull insanity? It’s three-pronged. The simple answer is that the city desperately needs the dough. Driven by that need, it literally cannot afford the costs of acting more entrepreneurially. Next answer, there is an extremely murky social and political mindset in Victoria—sniffy, contemptuous and distrusting of business and enterprise, neurasthenic and carry-over colonial, second-rate in its business skills and energies. Final answer: The city doesn’t see itself as a partner in or facilitator of successful business outcomes, just as an administrator and regulator. And here, I believe, is where the invitation to crowd-source needs to come in. As a citizen and taxpayer, I don’t like seeing my city and my downtown at risk. And as an investor in real estate—essentially, my home—I don’t like chilly reminders that no law prevents Victoria real estate values from tumbling if this place loses its lustre. Addicted to the hoped- (and prayed-) for constancy of provincial civil service presence in and around downtown (a crapshoot), and the sugar-high of seasonal tourism, Victoria coupon-clips as if these conditions were ordained, or written in fire. As downtown retail vacancy and the city’s budget challenges demonstrate, they’re not. I’ve noted in a recent column (“Heart Warming,” January 2013), that if all the central area condos and rental units under construction or somewhere in the pipeline come on to the market in the coming years, it will add to the central area about 2,000 additional residential units trolling for roughly three thousand occupants. Take my word for it: Three thousand additional residents living and shopping and, with luck and effort, working in and near downtown would profoundly improve the economy and the street tone of the city. However, downtown commercial rental vacancies are gradually rising, nudging 8 percent. Suburban retail is eating downtown’s lunch; and under current circumstances and trends, a lot more downtown retail is at risk of falling below the threshold of business viability—with all due respect to comic book shops, tattoo joints and specialty tea stores, which are great but not exactly cornerstone enterprises in today’s urban economy. To the extent that it’s possible to divine city thinking on the subject, the only city strategy operating right now is to try to woo suburban shoppers downtown by dangling the ‘specialness’ of the place: fizzy bribes like parades, festivals, fireworks, unique ‘character,’ and so on. This will not work to any appreciable degree. Car culture finds its own level and trust me, the Market On Millstream makes the Market On Yates (though profitable, I’m sure) look like a lemonade stand. My guess is that the downtown public realm—streets and other public spaces—probably needs a serious $20 million fluff-up. And a mobility strategy designed to whisk people (and their shopping dollars) downtown cost-free from James Bay, Fairfield, Fernwood, Gorge-Burnside and Vic West hasn’t even been conceived, leave alone priced. Not surprisingly, a downtown jobs/living paradigm hasn’t been formulated either. Not by anyone. The vision of an emerging downtown, as expressed in planning documents and policies, as articulated and ratified by mayor and council, is un-dreaming, unsure, underwhelming, un-strategic. In fact, with the exception of the usual high-minded flapdoodle on the preamble pages of the new Downtown Plan, there isn’t any ‘how’ there at all. Meanwhile, too many of the city’s condominium projects—from the towers in Humboldt Valley to those in Songhees—are not living buildings but dark-windowed, tombstone investments by prairie folk planning to ‘sunset’ in Victoria. Years and years of inattention and neglect—the result of hubris, complacency, budgetary botch and mis-investment—have taken us to this place. It really is time for a local political revolution, which is to say it’s time for public (voter) outrage and action. It’s also time for a new crop of political hopefuls who can articulate vision, intention, substance and a detailed plan—before this city goes smelly with rot. That said, changing the multifarious habits—the culture, really—of this place is going to be exhausting and nearly thankless. It starts with the need to replace conceits about how downtown is the “centre of it all” for the region with a muscular plan to actually re-make the centre as the centre—on its own terms. The only shopping carts I see in and around downtown are filled with beer and wine empties and the scant possessions of the marginal, not food or merchandise. By contrast, Greater Victoria’s suburbs are almost totally self-sufficient—economically, culturally, recreationally, socially; so the continuing effort to invite suburbanites to live their economic lives downtown must be acknowledged as an ever-more-thready and pointless undertaking. Instead, how to ensure that an eventual 10,000-15,000 new residents are able to live, work and function south of Bay Street, west of Cook is, in my view, the city’s job #1. Our job as citizens and voters is to send the city that message, as quickly as possible. Funny, but obscured by our dewy love of the old Victoria—mostly, the buildings downhill of Government Street—is the realization that they were shoulder-to-shoulder commercial structures created largely by a bumptious merchant class—people who were confident about the city’s economic future and their opportunity to make dough. The buildings weren’t an earlier generation’s idea of a legacy heritage project. The structures—and the merchant dreams that founded them—are at their centenary. Frankly, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate old bricks than with new plans for economic regeneration. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

March 2013 Is there an app for zapping bad buildings? TWENTY YEARS OR SO AGO, I was for a while a development consultant or, as I called myself in private moments of searing candour, a “developer’s finger puppet.” I was paid on a performance basis (“employed by the outcome,” was my trippingly elegant phrase for it), and was of course highly motivated to succeed. As I made the rounds door-knocking in various neighbourhoods and attending countless public meetings, I would listen to a predictable and repetitious litany of neighbours’ concerns: too high, too big, too dense, too close, too much traffic, too much shadowing, loss of privacy, and my favourite change-up: “I support density, just not here.” I knew this repertoire was code for something else, something much more emotionally raw and elemental, like: “I don’t want that monstrosity, that death star, anywhere near me! If it goes up, I’m going to hate my life every day!” Things could be otherwise. For a clue as to why they are not, type into Google any of these: “Creating beautiful apartment buildings,” “The art of multifamily buildings,” “Designing beautiful apartment buildings,” and be prepared to learn about “The art of thermal mass modelling for multifamily,” or “Miami apartment buildings for sale,” or “Multi-family millions: how anyone can reposition for big profits.” In other words, join me in the stunning discovery that creating beautiful apartment buildings is not as compelling an online topic as, say, the colour of Anne Hathaway’s undies. I blame Cook Street. Why exactly do apartment buildings belong on arterial streets, which is where we seem to like to stick ‘em? Everyone gets the cultural message, which is: “If you live in a multifamily building, you deserve traffic noise, alienating architecture and a place-less environment when you come out of the building.” If you ask planners you’ll get a flat-footed retreat into professional-ese like “concentrating density” or “improving the car/street interface” or “clustering” or “neighbourhood hierarchy” or “choosing density-appropriate locations and preserving neighbourhood integrity.” (The last of these has at least a whiff of covert honesty.) Streets like Cook and other so-called “arterials” make it easy for planners to rationalize density, while everyone else (including developers) instinctively understands that it’s simply a green light for creating human storage lockers. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I made a risky pledge at the end of last month’s column to lay out some ideas that would assist apartment buildings to look and function not like human warehousing but homes, and not like vacuums or black holes in the streetscape but places of energetic human presence and/or visual delight. First, this note: By “apartment building” I mean “multifamily”—that is, the building form, not the tenure; so, while respecting the Scriptural principle that renters are scum, house-dwellers are the Lord’s Chosen, and condo owners could go either way, this writing considers rental and condominium buildings interchangeably. Apartment buildings are not large houses any more than buses are large cars. While they may share a neighbourhood, houses and apartment buildings have different social identities, emotional resonances, positions in the community hierarchy, and principles of social governance. It’s not unlike the grazing protocols of animals in the wild. And as with lions, elephants, water buffalo, and zebras on the African veldt, it’s also useful in housing to acknowledge uneasy relationships, territoriality, uncomfortable adjacencies and the certainty of chivvying. (For fun, check if any, or how many, of the members of your community association’s land use committee live in apartments.) Multi-family buildings don’t get any sympathy. In the complex and nuanced world of land use, they are the predator, not the predatee; the wicked witch, not the good fairy. People, including the occupants (considered culturally as either aspiring or lapsed house-owners), lend them no more feeling than we give to rental cars. Something about multi-family buildings deeply threatens the core values and elemental beliefs of single-family residents. Barring deep cultural study, I’m not sure why, but the prospect of a multifamily building next door, or down the block, or in the neighbourhood saddens, threatens, frightens and angers single-family house-owners. It’s not exactly a class issue, but you can’t miss the reek of threat—something that exposes the ideal of “home” to the roiling imperfections of the living human mass. For purposes of discovery, then, let’s think of multifamily buildings not only as physical structures, but also as social messaging. That’s the only way to get to a whole-system understanding of these buildings, and to propose some changes that might result in a more salubrious outcome. From the perspective of social messaging, appearances suggest that as long as apartment buildings meet building code standards, nobody cares beyond that. There is nothing aspirational or warm-blooded about the design results. They rarely project developer ego, for the most part read as “product,” and in a hundred subtle ways convey more about the project’s pro forma and return on investment than about designing for successful human community. To get away from this, you have first to believe, as a form of casus belli, that building design and site use strongly impact the resident’s sense of community belonging. In other words, bad buildings foster bad citizenship. It’s nearly pointless simply to want better buildings from developers. You also have to be a keen student of the building code, of the actual intentions of policy and the contents of zoning bylaws, of development costs, and even of strata laws and property management culture. You have to be able to make the economic case for more creative site use, improved design and the singularity of buildings. In its recently approved Official Community Plan, the planning professionals advanced only an anodyne response by green-lighting multifamily anywhere along the city’s arterials and in very tightly defined “village centres.” Better than nothing, but still redlining and setting the stage for more crud. Here are some additional specific proposals. Apartment buildings in earlier years were better integrated within single-family areas and built generally on corners—not, I suspect because of the zoning of the day, but because community-makers intuited that corner locations would allow multifamily buildings to push up to the two sidewalk property lines and farther away from adjacent single-family houses on either street or from contiguous rear yards. If you take some time to nose around the core neighbourhoods, including Fairfield and James Bay, I think you will agree that generally it’s not a bad fit and that the city could almost universally apply a corner lot zone, maybe with a two-lot maximum to ensure protection of the neighbourhood scale. The city would also benefit from a formal study (with design and development industry professionals) of architect Eric Barker’s two deconstructions at 948 North Park and 22-24 Songhees Road. Both offer nourishing food for thought about alternatives to the conventional apartment block plunked in the middle of its site and disconnected entirely from the larger neighbourhood context. There need to be rewards for even modestly inspired architecture. In a perfect world, these would come from a discriminating market rejecting bad buildings. Realistically, community associations and advisory design panels have to pound the message home that design and appearance matter; that people and neighbourhoods require idiosyncracy, individuation, character; and that these examples should be treated with some form of regulatory lenience or tax generosity. Multiple entrances served by multiple elevators would help to de-anonymize buildings. Consider: a single elevator, opening front and rear can, in a four-storey building, serve up to 32 apartment doors—four forward, four back. Instead of long penitentiary corridors which carry financial (building efficiency) and social costs, such elevators could open on small, somewhat individuated vestibules serving up to four apartment doors and improving the sense of place within a large building. Walk Southgate Street between Vancouver and Cook Streets, paying particular and careful attention to the house-like structures. Count mailboxes (prepare to be stunned, in some cases) and then ask yourself if there might not be potential for an innovative form of new-built, house-like apartment building designed to fit on single lots almost anywhere in the city. To their credit, Victorians are conscionable about the need for density, inclusion, and affordability. Communities continue to wrestle with the challenge and, in my view, remain open to ideas and models that will encourage the benefits of density while keeping negative impacts at a minimum. Surely, policy, design and pricing innovation is the way around the siege-and-fortress dynamic that currently describes land use events in Victoria. So, maybe it’s time for the city, industry and the community associations to co-host some form of creative workshop. This developer’s finger puppet will gladly spring for the refreshments. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

February 2013 Why don't more multi-family buildings in Victoria pass the sniff test? IN A RECENT WEEKEND FEVER DREAM, I was trapped in a maze of walled rooms filled with a vast selection of coffee beans in sacks and hundreds of different grass outfits that hung in thin air; and the only way to advance toward an exit was to grind a pound of coffee and to wear a straw clothing outfit in just the right combination. If I got the coffee/straw suit combination right, walls would reluctantly part just enough for me to squeeze through to the next room, where I faced the same task again. Plus, every room featured its own distracting adventure or sub-dream. Monday, happily, brought bracing news about English daredevil Ian Rothwell, who recently consumed at Bindi Restaurant a chili-laden curry named “The Widower,” so hot that it’s prepared by a chef wearing goggles and face mask. A media source stated “Rothwell took about an hour, but that included a 10-minute walk outside during which he began hallucinating.” No details were provided about his hallucinations, beside a hint that he saw hell firsthand. Ian, real hell is grinding coffee and wearing straw clothing. I had set myself a less risky if more ambiguous task for the week: to unlock the messaging and social mysteries of the (generally four-storey) apartment building. I’ve been pondering this for a while on walks around town, noticing how on mixed-form streets the houses say “Home” and the apartment buildings, rental or condominium, say “Product.” Why don’t more multi-family buildings pass the sniff test? With the cold charm of filing cabinets and an aesthetic borrowed from highway motels, how did they get here? Do their deficiencies reveal some subtle disapproval—a kind of social punishment—built into the very form and design? Here we are, living in a city that richly demonstrates the spirit-essence of home and the art of creating appealing streets and neighbourhoods; so, bearing on apartment buildings, why hasn’t more of that culture rubbed off on civic leadership, municipal planners, developers, builders, architects and, for that matter, buyers and tenants? Why hasn’t it been bottled—codified in policy and design practice? Or is that an impossible task because we have a cultural predilection toward houses? It’s telling that our one art form is the conversion of large, older homes into suites. And it says something about our city that what could have been the genius of the place—the design and creation of hundreds of remarkable apartment buildings—has instead found its voice mostly as a patented neurasthenia any time the status quo is threatened. There are no accidents or unimportant details in architecture. Nothing is extraneous, everything is choice, every detail has an impact. Here I take cues from a line in John Bird’s biography of composer Percy Grainger: “Arnold Schoenberg once said that nothing about a great composer is irrelevant and that it would have been a pleasure for him to have observed Mahler putting on his necktie.” Scattered here and there in Victoria are Mahler’s neckties: multi-family buildings—some vintage, some contemporary, some short, others tall—that suggest or outright demonstrate the potential of multiunit building form. There’s the Mosaic on Fort Street and the Reef in James Bay, co-executed by tortured creative/nail-banger-turned-developer Don Charity and would-be artist forced to manage his family’s trillions Fraser McColl Jr. The Reef, of course, is neighbours with Shoal Point, David Butterfield’s exceptional, monumental, sculpture-bedecked confection beside Fisherman’s Wharf. Then there are the city’s two authentic art deco masterpieces, Tweedsmuir Mansions on Park Boulevard and 895 Academy Close, both purpose-built apartment buildings (full disclosure: I live in Tweedsmuir). And nearby is stately Hampton Court at 159 Cook Street, south of the village. On the James Bay side of Beacon Hill Park, across the street from Mile Zero, is the Coté family’s eccentric but inspired three connected houses, converted corner ex-motel and townhouses. Also, there are the new-built Aria behind the Crystal Gardens and Swallows Landing high above the Esquimalt end of the Inner Harbour—the first influenced, the second designed, by Paul Merrick. Songhees may be the locale everyone loves to hate, but no one should overlook the Fountainbleu-esque Shutters in Songhees, or architect Eric Barker’s understated but architecturally important deconstruction of a standard residential cube at 27-33 Songhees Road, beside the Delta Ocean Pointe. An even more imaginative example of Barker’s sits at 940 North Park, and is worth a walk-around and serious study. Almost single-handedly among Victoria architects, Barker stands out for creatively deconstructing the four-storey apartment building, pushing its conventionally centred mass all over the place: to the front, sides or rear of the site, distributing parts of its usual block-y volume in the form of two-storey townhouses or three-storey mini-blocks close to the sidewalk, and creating semiprivate landscaped voids in the centre—that is, voids in the very space where the entire building would normally sit. And last, there is a two-storey-plus-dormer masterpiece that sits on a single lot, a humble gem of a building—white with grey window frames and black doors—at 427/429 Chester Avenue and 1133/1135 Hilda Street in Fairfield. Well, you have to check it out to understand the complexity and accomplishment of this building. This is a partial list, and I’m sorry if I haven’t mentioned your favourites. But to understand why there are so many disappointing buildings, let me take you through the essential conditions of multi-family development. First, remember that while many other professions are credentialled, developers aren’t required as a condition of practice to formally study history, architectural aesthetics, story of place, design for human comfort, authenticity, or any other discipline related to successful habitation and community-building. That said, the fickle marketplace and high stakes do force developers to be keen students at the School of Risk Management. Show me a successful developer, and I’ll show you a coward, if you take my meaning. Land ownership is highly fractured and land costs in our region are stratospheric, and this pushes developers in the direction of the greatest saleable density, and away from capriciousness about volumes and space use. There are economies in repetition: It’s easiest for the trades and it saves money. Slice and dice, baby! There is a problematic regulatory landscape. Zoning bylaws can be highly prescriptive, unfriendly toward creative response, and strong determinants of the character and morphology of apartment buildings. For example, bylaws generally ask multi-family buildings to maintain front yard setbacks as if to mimic the “propriety” of adjacent single-family houses. Ironically, the front yard is an increasingly vestigial feature of functional living for single-family homeowners; though, of course, it retains powerful cultural meanings. Price sensitivities in a competitive environment (and fears of excluding parts of the market) tend to force developers away from idiosyncrasy, amenity and costly design conceits. In addition, the pressure to achieve high building efficiency (net saleable square footage) and the technology of double-loading (units facing front, units facing back) combine to produce penitentiary-like corridors and no-man’s-land lobbies and common areas. Security issues make buildings hermetic and impregnable-looking (though rarely impregnable). On-site parking requirements mean that the entire property must be undergirded with a big concrete box, which leads to unimaginative cosmetic planting managed by landscaping companies. And ownership or tenure itself unwittingly creates obstacles. You own or rent no further than your suite’s front door, and common areas are kept free of the slightest hint of human presence. Apartment buildings (rental and condo) are professionally managed and rule-heavy. They are not places of carefree personal indulgence. You can’t leave things lying around. Of course, you can always hang a Peace sign in your window. Given so extensive a catalogue of conditions working against imbuing apartment buildings with character and idiosyncrasy, is it reasonable to say, simply, that if you want homey things, live in a house? Could be. Still, in the face of all the challenges I’ve piled up, there are apartment buildings old and new in our city that show character, appeal and singularity, which makes one wonder: What are the characteristics and qualities—the DNA—shared by successful apartment buildings—buildings that contribute to the street and to the living quality of their residents? What conditions might be created to make standout buildings the rule and not the exception? No treatise has been written to address this question, as far as I know. But let’s assume that study of this issue will unearth all the usual complexities, contradictions and counter-intuitions that plague even apparently simple questions. Going beyond a friend’s unhelpful suggestion: “Make developers live in their own buildings for a year,” I promise to devote the next column to exactly this question: What would it take to substantially improve the looks, functioning life and citizenship of apartment buildings? Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

January 2013 Close to 3000 new Downtown residences are under construction or in the development pipeline. Only 22,000 to go. WITH THE HEADLINE “Alligators Guard Pot in Stripper’s Home,” the Huffington Post recently created an informational dilemma: file under pets, home security, agriculture, careers, or real estate? But in a more locally relevant wildlife story, the cranes are returning to Victoria. No, not the stately birds, but the ones that augur construction activity. Really, it’s an extensive list of downtown and shoulder-area projects marked by excavations with cranes sprouting or soon to sprout, projects poised to begin construction, others currently in the development approval pipeline, and projects planned if not yet detailed. If you do the math—economic energy embedded in potential dwellings and commercial space (more people, more businesses, more jobs)—it’s an impressive amount of activity, and it promises to improve prospects in and around downtown. So, let’s enumerate downtown’s hopes and blessings: Union, under construction in Chinatown, spanning Fisgard Street and Pandora Avenue, will have 133 units of residential and commercial frontage. The Mondrian, an almost 100-unit, 10-storey residential building with commercial frontage, is well along in construction on Johnson Street at Cook. Era, a 15-storey, 150-unit residential and commercial project, is just starting in the 700-block of Yates Street, immediately west of the Odeon Theatre. 819 Yates is a Chard Development project targeted for the surface parking lot stretching from Yates to View, immediately behind the renamed but still architecturally monstrous Famous Players/Capital 6 theatre. By the time plans are made final, Chard’s vision may expand to encompass both the parking lot and the theatre property, emerging as a larger residential/office/commercial project of 16-17 storeys and, rumours be true, including a supermarket. The St Andrew’s School site on Pandora Avenue at Vancouver Street, across from McDonald’s, has been purchased. The site, which backs on the narrow, lovely and fragile Mason Street, is likely to feature residential units (I hear rental) and given the enormity of the property, 200 or more suites would be a reasonable guess. I gather that there is some possibility of a new supermarket as part of the development. Hudson Mews, a 12-storey, 120-unit market rental development by Townline, is emerging behind the old Bay building, itself residentially repurposed as the Hudson condos. Jukebox, a 200-unit, 8-storey small-suite project, will occupy the long-vacant lot on View Street just east of Vancouver Street. On hold for now, pending improved market conditions, it is being developed by Don Charity and Fraser McColl, the same team who brought the nearby trendsetting Mosaic on Fort Street and The Reef in James Bay to life. On the heels of their success with the Atrium, new home of BC Ferries and a ground-floor strip of very successful commercial businesses bracketed by Zambri’s and Pig restaurants, the Jawls have acquired the site on Douglas Street across from City Hall, encompassing a thin line of now-threadbare retail/commercial on Douglas and several surface parking lots behind, running from Pandora Avenue to Cormorant Street. Presumably, the site is slated for a significant office and commercial development. Promontory, Bosa Developments’ 21-storey residential highrise, is coming out of the ground in Songhees, beside Esquimalt Road. It’s the first in a multi-tower project slated to provide hundreds of residential units along with a public market (“festival retail,” to use the industry term) that will emerge at the car barn, roundhouse and stores buildings of the former CN Rail property. The Sovereign, an 11-storey, 36-unit residential condominium project with commercial frontage, is going up on Broughton Street between Government and Broad Streets. Northern Junk, the two rubble-and-brick buildings that frame the curving southern exit from the Johnson Street Bridge, are poised for heritage rehabilitation as part of an additional five-storey residential and commercial redevelopment. Janion, the long-suffering and gradually decrepitating brick pile immediately north of the downtown-side approaches to the Johnson Street Bridge, is soon to be developed as 100 micro suites. A large banner hangs from the wall of the building with the ironic and iconic message: “Finally.” 200 Douglas, six storeys—38 condominiums—across from Beacon Hill Park, is in sales mode as I write. Duet, another of the busy Dave Chard’s projects at 640 Michigan, beside the James Bay firehall, is a go. The two-building, eight- and four-storey residential project will have 90 units. Jack Julseth’s Sawyer Sewing Centre Building, a combination of renovation and new construction slated to create about 40 new small suites in the 800-block of Fort Street. 257 Belleville, currently the site of the Admiral Inn Motel, is approved for an eight-storey residential project. Westbank, one of these days, will dust off its plan for the redevelopment of the boarded-up City Centre Motel on Belleville, across the street from the bowling green. There are rumbles these days about plans to redevelop the surface parking lot at the bottom of Fisgard Street, with extensive frontage on Store and Herald Streets. As well, rumours, but no details, circulate concerning the former BCAA site at Cook and Pandora, and diagonally across Cook Street, the surface parking lot adjacent to the Medical Arts Building. This is by no means a complete list. There’s also a vacant development site on Fort Street, just up from Birk’s, across from the Bay Centre, slated for office/commercial redevelopment; the Fort-to-View Street surface parking lot just east of Lund’s Auctioneers; the someday-to-be-developed Gateway Green on Blanshard and Fisgard; the big hole in the ground immediately north of the Jack Davis provincial office building at 1810 Blanshard intersecting Herald Street, diagonally across from the arena, planned for a wood-frame rental project by Townline, developers of The Hudson; the vacant properties on the corner of Vancouver and View (next to the ex-bottle depot); the commercial strip on the southeast corner of Fort and Cook; the voluminous Price’s Locks property on Fort and Quadra; the balance of Dockside on the west side of the harbour (rumours of a play in the making on this one). Oh, and did I mention the roughly 18 square blocks of Rock Bay? If you add the numbers, even leaving the new commercial and office components aside, this could represent upwards of, if not well over, 2000 new residential units, and easily 3000 new downtown-area residents. This is staggering! If all of this development takes place, and assuming successful market absorption, it will result, within the next five years—a decade at the outset—in 3000 or so new people buying food every day, getting their shoes repaired, acquiring mirrors and lamps, requiring tattoos, guzzling lattes, purchasing Spandex and Windex…in and around downtown! While these numbers are significant, they are a small fraction of what the downtown area needs, and can handle. That number is closer to 25,000. Going back to the days of the Downtown 2020 Conferences several years ago, knowledgeable urbanists have been arguing that the City of Victoria needs to aggressively pursue a replacement strategy to offset residential and commercial flows out of the central area toward Saanich and the Westshore. The fact is that businesses follows buyers, and it’s almost a complete waste of time for the City to court suburbanites who have organized their lives around automobile culture and rhythms, and who are served by a full range of suburban shops, services and amenities close at hand, offering car-based convenience. Rather, the City needs programs and policies (including an innovative, as-yet-unimagined, around-town mobility strategy) designed to encourage the growth of jobs and the steady expansion of the urban population—folks for whom downtown commercial, recreational and cultural activity will be convenient and reflex. And you say: well, duh. Of course, if it were easy, it would be easy. Standing as testament to the challenge of mounting such urban countertrends are the hundreds of North American cities and towns whose quiescent centres are struggling dead zones doughnutted by and largely irrelevant to self-sufficient, prosperous, safe suburbs. Compared to all of these, even as things are, Victoria ain’t doing so bad. Unfortunately, nobody has developed the fine-grained measurement tool, the heart monitor, to help cities (including our own) keep their fingertips on the urban pulse; and cities often discover they’re in big trouble only long after the trend lines have grooved deep channels. The risk, in other words, very much as with global warming, is that by the time people observe that there’s trouble in River City, the disinvestment and damage are ingrained and a very long time reversing. It’s an unromantic formulation, but cities are an expression of social and economic arrangements: how we want to interact; how much energy we wish to (or believe we can) use; what styles of commerce we favour; what ideas of pleasure, well-being, status and comfort we value; what ideas of community, mutuality, memory and interaction, and opportunities for privacy and personal autonomy we think are best. These are the invisible principles that receive ceremonial re-enactment every time folks living on a single-family street fight a multifamily development proposal. Or when defenders rush to the barricades if a heritage structure is threatened. Or when people flee pricey neighbourhoods and buy in more affordable ones. For a moment, view our city-region as a place in which an evolutionary, ever-morphing board game is being played, expressed through land use rules, opportunities and economic behaviour; and as endless skirmishes mediated by regulation-bound bureaucracies and twitchy politicians; but also as an arena in which rot meets the future, and outdated uses succumb. As an urban population, we’re always straddling the restless border between the comforts of changeless streets and neighbourhoods, and the liberating energies of novelty and change. “Any place you don’t leave is a prison,” says a character in the movie Liberal Arts; but some of those prisons can be pretty appealing. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

December 2012 City Hall seems tone-deaf to the urgency of looming fiscal concerns. REMEMBER WHEN Langford and Colwood—now backbones of the recently re-branded “Westshore”—were known as Dogpatch? Seems like that page turned. Now there’s an embedded impression that you can have a house and small yard in Langford for the price of a condo in Victoria; and in spite of the occasional rumblings in the national media about a coming major correction in real estate prices, nobody who’s selling in pricey Fairfield, James Bay, or the other central area blue-chip neighbourhoods has received the memo. Years back, hearing that we could buy a three-bedroom home in Moose Jaw for $65,000, we could, while sitting in our restored Moss Street 1912-ers say between sips of ruby-toned Shiraz, “Be my guest.” The prices have changed (even the Shiraz is more expensive), and the facts are that the housing cost differential between Westshore and the rest of Victoria is less noticeable, but the market perception now favours the idea that Moose Jaw is just twenty minutes up the Island Highway. All of this speaks to the roiling tectonics in our region’s economy, changes complex and far-reaching; and because we’re all standing in the river as it carves a new course, nobody can be sure where this is headed. But studying the trend lines, would it be too blunt to ask: What are the odds of Victoria waking up dead? Worries that the region’s economic centre-point is moving away from downtown are, unfortunately, just one layer in a shit sandwich that also includes an ever-expanding list of major capital projects for which Victoria has almost no money or plan, and a weak and risk-laden world economy (Victoria is not immune). The Canadian Press recently noted: “A report from Accenture said demands for public services will outpace Canada’s economic growth over the next 13 years, leaving all levels of government unable to provide public services at present-day standards.” As a local taxpayer, businessperson, engaged citizen, ask yourself: do the words caution, discipline and reinvention have any relevance in this conversation? Infrastructure. Yes, this is a thudding, dull topic, but the point is, the stuff ages and wears out. Doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the plumbing, cabinets, floor coverings or appliances in your home or city drains, pavement, sewers, firehalls, community centres and swimming pools…or blue bridges, for that matter. So, here’s the poser: What does it mean to say that the City of Victoria—a city with an annual budget approaching $200 million—has at least three-quarters of a billion dollars in unfunded capital projects? More pointedly, so this doesn’t seem too abstract, where’s the money going to come from for that seismic upgrading of the Yates Street firehall at a cost of $15-17 million? Or renovation/retrofitting of the Crystal Pool at $22.5 million; or the Johnson Street Bridge replacement at $90-100 million (even with $37.5 million from the Feds and gas tax funds); or a new wastewater treatment system requiring the City’s share of $800 million; or a $60 million new central library? Or seismic and functional upgrades of City-owned buildings at $40-50 million? Or renovation of parkades? Or? Since the City, which funds its annual budget largely from property taxes and various fees and transfers, spends almost all of its annual income on day-to-day operating costs, how much long-term borrowing to cover the costs of the big capital items can be heaped on taxpayers? Or to ask the same question more uncomfortably, is it possible, as the regional economy shifts and if the city’s economy softens, that the scale of municipal services and the level of amenities we’re accustomed to can no longer be afforded? Or alternatively, that a lot of maintenance and renovation will have to be deferred, pushing the City increasingly into a position of lurching from crisis to trouble-spot to imperative? Blue Bridge is falling down. Oops! (A little birdie tells me you can kiss the Crystal Pool good-bye, by the way.) Is it a reasonable line of thought, then, that current service and amenity levels in Victoria may have developed during times and economic conditions that simply no longer exist? And if this is true, what does the City do? During the so-called Great Recession that began in 2007, many US cities, faced with looming financial crises, eliminated amenities and drastically curtailed services, even essential ones. They cut to the bone with a chain saw. Some cities went bankrupt. Life in such places has become kind of nasty. Clearly, diminution, contraction at the city level is not the stuff of myth. It happens in the here and now. It isn’t easy to assemble definitive information about the state of Victoria’s fiscal health. A lot depends on interpretation and nuance, and the believability of various financial snapshots and projections. Remember, the recipe for most performance projections is equal parts data, spin and prayer. I’ve reviewed data that states that Victoria will of all municipalities in the region be the highest in debt per capita when the new Johnson Street Bridge debt is added. But the real story, I’m informed, is that not only are we facing skyrocketing debt, but that the municipality is not required to know its infrastructure/deficit liability, report on it, or prepare plans to address it. One commenter calls it the “sleeping disaster;” another described it as a “set of land mines.” An asset management plan has been a Victoria Council priority since 2009, but no substantial progress has been made to-date. It appears instead that the City is handling its major capital challenges as one-off “squeaky wheel” projects, meaning that attention to needs is being delivered in a vacuum, or a series of silos—something analogous to moving the dimples around an under-inflated volleyball. Obliged to align its new Official Community Plan with a five-year plan for asset management, Victoria appears to have treated the requirement as little more than a formality. Ironically, the new OCP is intended to shepherd land use planning for 30 years, not 5. You will search the pages of this recently minted Official Community Plan in vain in an effort to find extensive, comprehensive, rigorous, long-range thinking and strategizing about the City as an economic entity, compared to a land-use entity. The document leaves you with the impression that “planning” is largely taken by the City to mean where the next park or 15-storey building will go. And you may then want to ponder a really obvious question: How could the City, in mounting and funding a nearly four-year planning process, invest so much of its (and our) resources—time, energy, money and social capacity—in land-use thinking with so little attention, effort, and expertise dedicated to the study of our financial prospects and future, even though this will powerfully influence land-use potentials, the City’s ability to deliver services, the range and condition of amenities and, of course, taxes? The costs of the gold-plated “iconic” bridge—and the associated size of the taxpayer burden—are still unknown. Pricey renovations to City Hall continue. And both the costs and cost-handling strategy of the stormwater (not wastewater) utility and much more remain both uncertain and un-strategized. By any measure, the City has done a poor job of initiating a candid and informed conversation with citizens and economic stakeholders—likely because the City itself doesn’t have a holistic or integrated picture of the challenge, or a coherent response, and because there is a substantial amount of political whistling in the dark going on. Evidence suggests that the City is nowhere near integrating all of these needs, setting priorities within affordable limits, or proposing a strategy for funding massive capital undertakings. Rumours tumble out of City Hall both that senior staff is stalling or sugar-coating the reality of capital requirements, or baffling council with bullshit, and that much of council itself has remained tone-deaf to the urgency of these looming fiscal concerns. Consequently, citizens and stakeholders have no way of understanding the City’s assumptions; and if it can be said that council is elected in part to be a steward of the future, it’s a mystery at the moment as to what future Victoria City council envisions. Is it possible that the City has been neither skillful nor strategic concerning municipal finance? Let’s ask: Will the city’s economy be robust? Will property values (and assessments) remain stable? Are downtown businesses optimistic or planning to cut, run or fold? (Chapters Books, by the way, will not be renewing its lease on Douglas Street and, if rumours are true, will be heading to Uptown Shopping Centre). Will provincial employment levels fall as “virtual government” expands? Are the city’s seniors (higher than the regional average) financially resilient, or clipping coupons? What are the implications as the city’s stock of rental housing ages (60 percent of Victorians rent)? Will senior governments be able to sustain financial partnerships, or will there be more walkaways and downloading? Will there be a continued shift of economic energy to the suburbs? If yes, then with what consequences? Can tourism be sustained, given the crappy global economy? Answers and even advised best guesses to these and other questions need to be woven into a macroeconomic Victoria narrative that people can understand, and without the jive and body English made famous by the City’s legendary “consultations.” The City’s future literally depends on it. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

September 2012 SNC-Lavalin's "zero tolerance" for unethical behaviour apparently doesn't include a billion-dollar overstatement of the benefits of a proposed LRT for Victoria. 1. Lucky Sevens The prospect of criminal prosecution is keeping the news alive that England’s Barclays Bank, with the likely cooperation of JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, UBS, Canada’s Royal Bank and others, has for years been manipulating the London interbank offer rate (Libor) so as to sweep a few additional hundred million crumbs into its lap. To memorialize such cupidity and moral squalor it might be timely to undertake a meditation on the dna of gambling—risk in hope of a win—in all its expressions (casinos, raffles, lotteries, the stock market, faith-based belief in a heavenly reward, armed robbery, ponzi schemes, price-fixing, payola, corporate self-generosity, and so on). To do so, you have to plunge into the dark and subterranean subjects of appetite and greed; the mysterious, energetic attraction of winning and getting something for nothing, or a lot for a little; the corrosive appeal of luck on the spirit; and risk, which I define as the willingness to test the frontiers of undesirable outcomes. You will note that the concept of venality keeps a hovering eye above all of this. Think about it: what, exactly, drives this body of impulses and conditions? I speculate it’s cellular, hard-wired into our consciousness, connected to the original crapshoot of natural selection—in other words, that the conditions of life itself are the essential gamble—and also to our greatest existential dilemma: the paradox of biological finality (death), when everything in our imaginations tells us that we should live forever. It helps to explain two fundamentally opposing ideas that in my view are actually faces of the same coin: the heavenly belief that suffering in this life will be redeemed for pleasure and release in the next (a perfected life after this life featuring milk, honey and virgins) and the urgent desire for pleasure now (this is the first, last and only life, so take what you can get, and get it while you can). Both share an essential belief in temporal reward, differing principally on timing. Both also agree that good luck opens the future, makes it rosier. Everyone understands that. Everyone wants it. Most of us want it now—heaven on earth, so to speak. The genesis and consequences of risk-taking, the arc of risk, is a much-explored topic in our cultural storytelling; and the higher and longer the arc, the more transfixed we are by the story. Outside the world of hip irony, you never see headlines like “10-inch wave destroys sand castle.” Our fascination with bigness and our preoccupation with the out-sized—notably, the self-indulgences of the wealthy and powerful—play into the theme of risk and reward, and are intriguing subjects of cultural study. I’m not a polymath and don’t have the intellectual wattage to join all the dots, but I sense there is a vital connection between both our drive for acquisition and love of excess and our in-built desperation to prolong life and forestall, gain advantage over, death. Even at the biological level, our cells are designed—instructed, you might say—for repair and regeneratiion. Maybe this is why we love and are drawn to largeness and quantity as if size itself held some inherent magic and potency, was itself talismanic. Donald Trump is an acquisitive, attention-craving asshole, but that doesn’t diminish our intense cultural interest in his quest for immortality or, at least, his desire to be buried with all of his toys. As a reviewer of Ray Kurzweil’s disturbing book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, puts it: “In essence, Kurzweil conflates the wholesale transformation of the species [via emerging technology] with ‘immortality,’ for which read a repeal of human limit.” Talk about tearing down the fourth wall! Maybe that’s where all of this hunger and appetite is headed. It’s interesting that the definition of greed is “the inordinate [the word means boundless] desire to possess wealth, goods, or objects of abstract value with the intention to keep it for one's self, far beyond the dictates of basic survival and comfort.” Camille Seaman, the iceberg photographer, notes: “As I was walking across the ice, I had an experience in which I understood that I was on my planet, that I was made of its material, and that in the scheme of things I meant nothing, but the fact that I could even stand there and think about it was a miracle.” This ability to wonder about ourselves, also named consciousness or self-awareness…. The itch that keeps us scratching. The Beatitudes are teachings by Jesus that are expressed as a set of blessings in the Sermon on the Mount in The Book of Matthew. Together, they provide a cluster of Christian ideas that focus on love and humility rather than force and exaction. They echo the highest ideals of the teachings of Jesus on mercy, spirituality and compassion. Here, are the best-known two: Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. 2. Win, Place, Show Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin is not the largest global engineering/ construction/project management firm. Currently that honour goes to French-based Vinci with about 180,000 employees. SNC-Lavalin, though, is Canada’s largest engineering firm, and this giant does business in a hundred countries and employs about 30,000 globally. Were they all our nationals, the company would write paycheques to almost one out of every five hundred employed Canadians. In its last reporting year, 2011, the company earned gross revenues of $7.2 billion. In 2011, the entire Province of British Columbia anticipated revenues of $41 billion, a bit less than six times SNC-Lavalin’s. Not bad yardsticks for understanding the scale and scope of SNC-Lavalin’s operations. Companies like SNC-Lavalin feed globally on infrastructure projects—airports, dams, urban transportation systems, water systems and power generation plants, manufacturing facilities, ports and harbours, entire new cities, major energy installations, tunnels. Any city or country with dreams of economic renewal, systems improvement or expansion is a place of opportunity, a market, for these companies. Replacing the weather seal on your garage door is not defined by such companies as a business opportunity. Delivering a finished, functioning airport is. This is to say, the stakes and the budgets are enormous. As you might imagine, there is a global intelligence network that allows SNC-Lavalin and its competitors to be aware of business opportunities at the earliest possible moment—often when they are just errant dreams or mere flickers of possibility. Embedded in such a process are years of relationship-building, opportunity-cultivation, strategic investment, and various and often nuanced forms of business courtship. A lot of paycheques and bonuses are riding on successful outcomes. SNC-Lavalin was described this spring in the Montreal Gazette as “the embattled engineering giant” after the company was rocked by revelations about $35 million in “misallocated payments” in its Libya operation. The business drama even swept up Canada’s now-ex-ambassador to Libya, Sandra McCardell, and her husband, Edis Zagorac. The Gazette writes: “According to the Globe and Mail report, Zagorac was involved in the Executing Agency of the Libyan Corps of Engineers, a civilian and military company with ties to Quebec-based engineering company SNC Lavalin and chaired by Saadi Gadhafi. “The reports raised concerns that McCardell's role in Libya would be affected by her husband’s ties to the ousted [Muammar Gaddafi] regime. “According to the Globe report, Zagorac was an operations manager and later a managing director at the Executing Agency. “The agency was a construction company with designs on building a massive desert city as well as a prison. The company was created by Saadi Gaddafi and Riadh Ben Aissa, a former SNC Lavalin vice-president, the report says.” Unstated but implied is not that McCardell’s husband did anything inherently wrong, just that he carelessly rode the wrong horse. Tarred by this concatenating embarrassment, long-time SNC-Lavalin CEO Pierre Duhaime resigned in March, and the company said that it will implement "recommendations… directed primarily at reinforcing standards of conduct, strengthening and improving internal controls and processes, and reviewing the compliance environment." The Gazette quotes a company spokesman who notes that SNC-Lavalin has “zero tolerance” for ethical misdeeds. I’m personally confident that SNC-Lavalin is not alone amongst global engineering firms—global firms of any kind, in fact—who have zero tolerance for ethical misdeeds. Zero. The biggest number. 3. Jiminy Cricket Has Left the Building Under the headline “The Spreading Scourge of Corporate Corruption,” Eduardo Porter in the NY Times writes: Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America. According to Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, nearly three in four Americans believe that corruption has increased over the last three years. Have corporations lost whatever ethical compass they once had? Company executives are paid to maximize profits, not to behave ethically. Evidence suggests that they behave as corruptly as they can, within whatever constraints are imposed by law and reputation. Bigger markets allow bigger frauds. Bigger companies, with more complex balance sheets, have more places to hide them. Rafil Kroll-Zaidi reports in Harper’s Magazine that nations with a more prevalent belief in Heaven have higher crime rates, and those with a more prevalent belief in Hell have lower rates. While some might take this as a reason to bring back the strap, I consider it to be a strong argument in favour of government regulation. Porter’s point and Kroll-Zaidi’s (obliquely) speak to the little-studied and dark fact that when a dollar changes hands, something explosive and seismic happens. That is, there is a hidden energetic, a plus-ing and minus-ing, a violence, almost, built into economic transaction—buying and selling, accumulating and divesting, profiting and losing. Why else would ‘squander’ be understood by everyone to represent a loss of power? 4. Square Wheels Welcome to the Smoking Gun Cafe, here in the beautiful Capital Region. Let me show you around, introduce you to a few people. Kevin Mahoney is the Chairman of the Board of BC Transit, which oversees transit projects and services throughout the province, and which ultimately reports to Provincial Cabinet via the minister responsible. A likeable and competent guy, Kev, beside other corporate chairmanships, is also Chair of InTransit Ltd., described by BC Transit as “the private sector concessionaire [35-year operating contract] for the Canada Line,” Vancouver’s airport-to-downtown rail connection. Who owns InTransit Ltd? It’s owned in thirds by Caisse de Depot, the Quebec-based institutional investor (pension and insurance fund money); BC Investment Management Corporation, investment manager for public trust funds and employee pension funds in our province; and...SNC-Lavalin. Pacific Liaicon and Associates “specializes in project and construction management and management consulting.” The highly successful company was founded by Henry Wakabayashi in 1970, initially to address BC forest industry needs and opportunities. In 2001, Wakabayashi sold Pacific Liaicon lock, stock and barrel to…SNC-Lavalin and has since then been a Senior Advisor of Business Development in the SNC-Lavalin Transportation Division. Currently, Wakabayashi also “provides senior advisory services” to BC Transit. Pacific Liaicon has a diversified portfolio of project management work, including management of the initial study stages of LRT feasibility in Victoria—work for which it has received just north of $4,000,000, so far. The bullet-headed guy? That’s Gwyn Morgan, a name that you may already know. Former CEO of EnCana, Morgan has made a name for himself as a right-wing ideologue, generous donor to the Fraser Institute, climate-denying scary monster in environmentalist circles and, in the wake of Gordon Campbell’s exit, a key advisor to BC Premier Christy Clark. He is now a local boy, with a spread out on the Saanich Peninsula. Fracturing the laws of coincidence, Morgan is currently Chairman of the Board of... SNC-Lavalin. I’m reminded at this moment of the unnamed sage who noted: “If you shake the branch, all the leaves rustle.” 5. Corpse in the Study Actions and meanings: when Obama straightens his necktie, is he telling ghetto youth to get it together, or sending the Iraqi leadership a message they’re all gonna hang, or fidgeting, or just straightening his tie? Probably no one has more carefully studied—or been so motivated to study—the reports emanating from the various entities involved in transit decision-making than Jim Hindson, Executive Director and intrepid researcher of the citizen group CRD Business and Residential Taxpayers’ Association. Hindson, a semi-retired public-sector transportation engineer and municipal information systems manager, has spent a professional lifetime planning and assessing projects, and evaluating systems efficiencies. He comes to his current role equipped with a penchant for forensic review and an ability to hold up all the jargon-loaded reports and executive summaries so bright sunlight shines through them. For the last few years, he has been playing Inspector Morse on our regional transportation file. As in a drawing room murder mystery, there are complicated relationships, fingerprints on wineglasses, blind alleys, tantalizing hints found in unlikely corners, connections to be uncovered and understood. Hindson has reviewed all materials available publicly and has filed over a dozen freedom of information (FOI) requests on behalf of the Association. He has been trying to piece together a puzzle of conflicting and erroneous information in an effort to understand why, how, and on what basis the decision was made to pursue the LRT option instead of other more viable options such as HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lane dedication. Why, he wonders, was the decision made so hastily and apparently with little professional regard for standard decision-making protocols? Sheer incompetence? Gaming the system? The HDR Corporation, an engineering consulting firm retained (and paid) by Pacific Liaicon to undertake data modeling (cost/benefit scenarios) in support of the LRT option, noted in its July, 2011 Draft Final Report: “Many inputs and assumptions used in the model and presented in the report herein have been provided to HDR by BC Transit. The data was used as given, and has not been independently audited or verified by HDR.” Such a note at the beginning of a professional report is a kind of ‘get out of jail free’ or a ‘please don’t blame us’ card for the authors. The “inputs and assumptions,” however, are in some cases so suspect, bizarre or flaky, that you have to wonder why HDR, a consulting engineering firm with nothing in the game other than a paycheque, and with its reputation presumably unsullied, would undertake the work without balking. It is hard not to read into BC Transit’s attempts a desperation to justify LRT as the mobility option-of-choice; that is, to throw shit at the wall until something stuck. Here is a small, glaring and by no means isolated example. One input used in calculating the potential benefits of Victoria LRT is accident data. The idea is that a switch to LRT use by car drivers will statistically reduce accidents, consequently reducing life and property damage; and that this reduction is a quantifiable ‘benefit’ attributable to LRT. Okay. So, you would think someone would, as a starting point, get hold of the readily available data set showing accident history on Highway One between Langford and Downtown. Nope. Well, then they would at least use other relevant and comparable MOT (Ministry of Transport) data. Nope. Well, then at least Canadian statistics. Nope. It appears that someone provided, and HDR used, much higher data from the US Department of Transportation that allowed for an orders-of-magnitude larger and entirely bogus accident savings attribution. Here’s another example. HDR forecasted a lower rate of corridor travel growth with LRT than without, but then spun the data in a way such that by 2038 (the study horizon), the reduction in auto travel and the increase in transit travel were out of balance by over 11 million trips. This is to say that an erroneous reduction in auto travel growth (the ‘error’ compounds over the 27 years of the study time-frame) was then converted to accident, travel time, and vehicle operating benefits for the LRT scenario (see items 3, 4 and 5 below). The end result, when all of these highly suspect calculations are pooled, according to Hindson, is an overstatement of LRT benefits exceeding a $1 billion. The CRD Taxpayers’ Association wrote to the CRD: “The revised total of $1.2 billion [rounded] in overstated LRT benefits includes: 1) LRT ridership forecasts inflated by including predominantly bus passengers as LRT passengers: $23,730,000 2) Nearby Property Uplift value incorrectly included as a project financial benefit: $182,130,000 3) Accident benefits overstated by $405,509,800 4) Auto (includes trucks and others) travel time benefits overstated by $402,950,000 5) Vehicle operating cost benefits overstated by $148,350,000 Total LRT overstated benefits $1,162,669,800.” It’s a convention that to justify themselves, these major capital projects have to achieve a minimum ratio between costs and benefits of 1:1. Reading the Association’s conclusion below, it’s not hard to understand why there has been so much sleight-of-hand during the study phase of this project: “The net impact of these errors is that the Present Value cost of the LRT Project is now $922 million and benefits are at a maximum of $264 million ($1,427 billion original – $1,163 billion overstated) resulting in costs exceeding benefits by 3.5 to 1.” Lest you imagine that self-respecting professionals would feel any shame about applying such flagrant body English, consider these additional observations of the Association’s about the contents and conclusions in various reports and presentations: The LRT option was loaded with a $3.25 transit fare, while the other options were held at a $2.50 transit fare; the business case analysis does not comply with the Provincial or Federal business case guidelines for Capital Plan Development Projects; the accident benefits claimed in the Study are 17 times higher than similar LRT studies in Canada; the accident costs used are based on U.S. collision cost data which are considerably higher than the (required use of) Canadian accident costs; the LRT costs do not include notations about the $90 million additional balloon payment required to replace all the LRT vehicles in 2042. In the vintage days of radio, The Shadow knew “what evil lurks in the hearts of men.” Now, we have to excavate cupidity and stupidity with FOI requests. In the absence of more conclusive evidence, it would be irresponsible for anyone to assume that this entire regional transit process has been designed, however unwittingly, to produce outcomes favourable to the long-range business interests of SNC-Lavalin. I mean, how could you possibly assume that? If you are looking for a more far-fetched but more innocent explanation, maybe it’s just ‘ironitis,’ as my parent’s generation used to call such fevered infrastructure grandiosity. From the BC Transit website: “Light Rail Transit (LRT) from downtown to Uptown and then to West Shore has been recommended by the Victoria Regional Rapid Transit Project (VRRTP) and endorsed by the BC Transit and CRD Boards and the municipal councils. The estimated cost is $950 million and the business case has been submitted for funding under the Provincial Transit Plan.” After all, this is Canada, not Libya, and we do things very differently here. In today’s parlance, let’s call it the zero effect. 6. Napkin Math I’ve been playing with a calculator, exploring a wayward idea. Lessee... Current stats indicate that heavy rush-hour traffic, two lanes wide, on the Island Highway is about 3800/hour. Let’s up it to 4,000. If you invested principal of $1 billion (the rounded-up cost of LRT between Langford and Downtown) at a mere 2.5% interest, it would throw off $25,000,000 annually. If at the start of Year Two, with that interest income in-hand, you bought some really snazzy commuter buses and fancied up some key bus stops, you might have $10,000,000 left over. You could, in some appropriately safeguarded program, give 4,000 current single-occupancy car commuters an annual incentive of $2,500 to take the bus and leave their cars at home. By my calculations, this would totally remove the equivalent volume of one hour’s worth of crawling traffic from the highway during the morning and afternoon peaks, effectively restoring highway functionality probably in perpetuity. And in Year Three and subsequent years, you could redirect the $15 million you used on capital improvements at the start of Year Two to other regional transit improvements. Or you could solve the regional homelessness problem. Or end world hunger. And remember, you would have preserved the original $1 billion in capital—returnable, at some point, to its various sources. So, what would be the taxpayer cost of such a strategy? Zero. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

July 2012 Once upon a time, Victoria offered the delicious opportunity to transgress at every turn. OUR BEARDED DAILY, The Coach and Flyswatter, contained an early May report that Oak Bay residents had just staged a rally to protest a contemporary house going up in the 1000-block of Monterey, architecturally scandalizing the staid manses up and down the block and, like a flailing mouse drowning in the punchbowl, nauseating the people living in them. You should never underestimate Oak Bay’s capacity for hysteria and self-parody. From the headline alone, though, “Oak Bay home too modern for neighbours’ tastes,” I had brief but unrequited hopes that the object of all this protest would be a house that had dared to erect something truly outre and new-fangled like a wood picket fence along the front-yard property line instead of the traditional pike-topped stone wall festooned with the bloody heads of invading Normans. All that angry buzzing on Monterey triggered a momentary meditation on our city’s passion for order and stability and its hypersensitivity to the disruptive threat of change; and this, in turn, put me in mind of the Victoria that used to be when I first arrived in September, 1970: a potty, eccentric, colonial Pleistocene saturated with still-virulent old-guard values—all of which blew away like fireworks smoke in my first, short half-decade here. Victoria literally stopped fighting the inevitable, gave in to modernity before my eyes, and became the standard-issue city it is today, captured by the dismal preoccupations of real estate and pricey kitchen renovations. So, travel back in time with me—less with strict regard for history than for impression—to tour a Victoria before cell phones and computers: the early 70s, which I now remember simply as a time of youth and unrepentant sexual squander. Which reminds me of a story. The Burlington Free Press sends a reporter up to St Albans, Vermont on the advent of Walter Wheeler’s 100th birthday. The reporter asks Walter whether he thinks there’s more sex now than when he was a youngster. He says: “No, about the same,” then pauses for thought: “but it’s definitely a different crowd doing it.” I have mentioned that I came to Victoria in September, 1970, at the close of the salmon season, after a manly summer working at the Nelson Brothers Fisheries in Prince Rupert. Someone up there told me without a hint of guile or irony that I should visit Victoria because it was “a little bit of Olde England.” And so it was. By the way, you have only to go to the eHow website to learn that even in 2012 “The ambitious spirit of Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, reflected in the architecture and the personality of The Empress Hotel, has affected the town that grew up around it and makes Victoria a little slice of Britain in North America.” And I thought it was the toffee on Government Street that gave it away. One story from back then—truth or myth hardly matters—will suffice: Mrs Tod would summon the Oak Bay police by telephone to retrieve her senescent husband who, on the occasional weekend morning, would wander in his bathrobe down to Scott’s Diner on Yates Street near Douglas for breakfast. And fetch him they did. It was urban legend, too, that a few people still lived—in the Fred Astaire/get-your-mail-there sense of the word—on a residential floor high up in the Empress Hotel. I always imagined that this level could only be reached by private elevator and that it was populated with faded aristocracy caught in an era’s hardening twilight, warming their hands on memories of races at Ascot and uncle Albert’s time in the 1st Royal Dragoons at the Charge of the Light Brigade. How different were things in Victoria back then in 1970? The sign on the Pat Bay Highway—itself a meandering, unpaved, one-track cart path—announced “If you cannot conjugate your Latin verbs, you are definitely not welcome in Victoria.” Wine stores were not two to a corner, as they are now. In fact, there was no such thing as wine. You drank beer or booze and you bought hard liquor in the Sovietized environment of “package stores,” aware, as you beetled beneath the fluorescents, that a disapproving God was making another black X in your dossier each and every time you bought a pint of lemon-flavoured gin. Bottles destined for the alcoholic’s curtained gloom left the store robed in plain brown paper bags, so as not to tarnish the proper light of day. That’s it! I caught Victoria in its last years of propriety—an invisible airborne virus of manners, code, boundaries. The city was anachronous and square, but it held the line. It held the line. Victoria, distant in every way from the liberalizing influence and cultural roil of most cities, offered the delicious opportunity to transgress at every turn. You could sin here! Like monks worrying their beads, there are fevered obsessives in this town who can recall the state and fate of every heritage building, going back to before Jesus could fly, and narrate tales of the heartbreaking loss of such treasures with a drama worthy of the sinking of the Titanic. Every nick and scrape in this city has been recorded with actuarial detail, either archived on paper somewhere or etched upon living memory. I have just a few more generalized recollections of my own (all that squander) that may help to paint an image of this place 40 years ago. There was no Lower Causeway. You looked down from far above on starfish and discarded beer empties. Eaton’s department store sat where the Bay Centre now rests. The Bay maintained a huffy distance in its wedding cake of a store four blocks north on Douglas at Fisgard. Now, in a memorable consolidation, Eaton’s is in Valhalla (no, dear, that’s not a suburb), the new Bay sits astride the corpse of Eaton’s, and the old Bay is the new Hudson condos. Eaton’s had a grocery store in its basement, a tunnel under Broad Street connecting its two buildings, and a serpentine, counter-service luncheonette. I remember meeting the love of my week, Diana McCoy, there, over tuna salad on white. Oh, back then, finger sandwiches were made with real fingers, not the fake soy-based ones you get now. A handful of eccentrics, alcoholics and floaters walked the streets downtown. They were “characters,” not “the homeless,” and were simply the smallest part of Downtown’s social ecology (this was pre-de-institutionalization). I remember a lumpen regular walking Downtown’s streets in the worst of weather, his green work shirt and pants visibly stuffed with insulating newspapers. And a grizzled, old scarecrow who would ask for odd jobs: “I work at your house for a dollar,” he would call as you walked by. And a harmless, screw-loose guy nicknamed Sashi who loped and pinballed all over town, talking non-stop to the lesser gods in his head, borrowing meal money from you one month, mutely placing accurate repayment in your hand six months later. Victoria was Downtown-centric, small, communal in ways likely never to reoccur here. You went to a movie or a show Downtown. The tiny Carnegie Library (information and inspiration came from books, then) was on the corner of Yates and Blanshard, beside the Odeon. Your doctor, dentist, lawyer, accountant and psychologist had their offices Downtown. Clothing or furniture-shopping were Downtown events. You drank urinous beer Downtown, principally at the legendary Churchill, a basement cavern on Government Street and Bastion Square. Beer mills still had separate entrances signed: “Ladies and Escorts.” Downtown in those years was the proper home of commerce, culture and raucous social drinking. Oh-oh, memories are starting to flood back in. Oak Bay was a fusty, patrician Oz, practically a rumour’s distance from Downtown. The university had a physical plant not much larger than a well-endowed private school. You could buy homes in the Uplands for a buck and two box-tops. In places, the rural intruded almost to the edges of streetcar neighbourhoods like Fernwood. Had I known then what I know now about real estate and pricey kitchen renos.... Even into the late ’80s, cricket in Beacon Hill Park featured gentlemen in regulation whites, bowling and scoring to polite claps and calls of “Well played!” Now it’s a bunch of whooping, shouting, cheering newcomers who might as well be playing fast-pitch in Prince George. Which leads me to ask: What’s the matter with all these people? What has happened to everything good and proper here? The city’s going straight to hell. Unless, of course, there’s just a different crowd doing Victoria. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

June 2012 Put all the politicians, bureaucrats and engaged citizens in a big pot and turn up the heat until everyone screams "Density!" FROM MY EASTERN WINDOWS dawn landed like the Apocalypse a couple of Fridays ago: a tortured sun fighting its way through volcanic black stormheads churning below a leaden sky that flattened the landscape from horizon to horizon, north to south. “The end of Fairfield and pricey Gonzales?” I wondered. “Maybe there really is a wrathful Higher Power. But why Cook Street Village? Why? Why? Why?” God works in mysterious ways. I consulted my well-thumbed Bible For Dummies. And there it was, a portent, a message. The text in Renovations 4:17-3 read: Sayeth the Lord: For your iniquities and inertia I will tear down your great works, heritage and otherwise, for ye have abandoned your downtown and left its economy in the gutter. And I will cause ye to wander in Langford without a cool coffee shop or rustic baguette with herbs and sea salt for forty years. Your supplications come too late, declareth the Lord. Time for tough love and Tim Horton’s, I say unto ye. Yes, this means ye. Scripture! Wow! On the very same day and at the very same hour that architect/urbanist Franc d’Ambrosio and I were giving a presentation to a hundred-strong UDI Victoria (Urban Development Institute) luncheon audience, including Victoria’s mayor, half of City council, numerous property owners, developers, architects and other professional stakeholders about the urgent need to turn Rock Bay at Downtown’s northern door into a great new mixed-use urban neighbourhood filled with residents and workers, Jim Hartshorne, currently president of the West Shore Developers Association and prime consultant on Westhills in Langford, was addressing an audience of commercial realtors at some other rubber chicken palace about the Westhills plan to build a total of 6000 homes and (I hope you’re sitting down) six million square feet of commercial space. If the details reached me accurately, it appears that the Stewarts, deep-pocketed developers of Westhills, are prepared to spec-build the first quarter-million square feet. Well, doesn’t that make you want to slit your dainty Victorian wrists? If you’re having trouble getting your head around the number, six million square feet is about 2000 Pagliacci’s. Not, of course, that there is any danger of—excuse me a second. What? No, reception’s good. Oh, Pagliacci’s is closing up on Broad Street downtown and moving to Westhills? I’m just kidding...probably. Here’s a thought: maybe, instead of issuing proclamations that the Belarus Navy is not welcome in our harbour because of that country’s sub-par diversion of recyclables from its landfills, Victoria Council should be confronting the immediate reality that Downtown is slowly but steadily losing its status as the economic epicentre of the region. Maybe this is just the way some downtowns wane—not with a bang but a whimper, through a process of slow haemorrhage, so imperceptible at any given point over time that it hardly seems worth dealing with...until, of course, Downtown crosses a tipping point and wakes up dead, an economic backwater, in spite of all conceits about being the “centre of it all.” While it’s good that the mayor, several months ago, intervened literally at the last moment to reduce the severity of the City’s bonus density policy (in which the City keeps urban densities artificially low to force developers to “buy” from the City the additional density they need to create viable projects), his actions simply softened Victoria’s development policy disincentives. The City has to stop thinking that a move from -5 to -3 is palliation worth cheering, and must figure out what a set of +5 policies would look like. I don’t know how to say this more simply: Victoria needs 10,000-20,000 new people living and working in and near Downtown. That’s the goal; everything else should be the how. Imagine an insufferably cheery, peppy extrovert who meets a healer who says: “You’re not really happy, are you?” and places magical fingers on her third and fourth chakras. Tears well up in her eyes and in a moment she’s gasping and shaking with soul-racking sobs, admitting that she hates her life. That’s our girl, Victoria. For more years than any of us can count, the City has honed its genius for inertia. It has set up a complex network of systems and policy structures, rules and regulations designed to slow and frustrate constructive ambition; a forbidding, hermetic “don’t bother me” service culture; and a “plan to plan,” consult-everybody-but-do-next-to-nothing modus operandi. The whole thing is a vast, institutional lie, an emperor’s new clothes representation of good municipal management, but it has become so ingrained and has delivered dulling pain and stress for so long, that people within the municipal organization and citizens at-large find it hard to believe that things could or even should be any different. It’s a lot like what happens in a bad marriage that endures well past its sell-by date. And as in a bad marriage, all parties are complicit—politicians, administrators, citizens: good people trapped in a bad context. Something, someone has to release the City from this culture. I’m staring at the cover of an important official document entitled Victoria Economic Development Strategy. In an introductory chapter I read this freighted note: “Population and job growth is projected to accelerate in the suburban areas, particularly in the Western Communities. As population and job growth become more concentrated in suburbia, the impact on the Downtown core could be profound.” And a bit later, “We can accept these trends as inevitable or we can commit to a bold new approach that will change our course and manage our future.” In its Action Plan summary, the Strategy states: “Enhance the vibrancy of Downtown” via these priority actions: “Increase residential density; increase cultural development and programming; reduce commercial vacancies; increase the economic potential of the harbour; increase safety, security and cleanliness.” The document was produced by the City in 1997. The broad social indifference to climate change has a lot to teach us here. It’s hard to get people to recognize and mobilize against threats that move only with (in this case, literally) glacial speed. That is, Victoria, trapped in the euphoria of lottery win-like real estate value increases (the “somebody up there loves me” syndrome), chesty with long-standing conceits about its regional importance and economic and cultural heft, convinced that the city’s appealing physical setting is a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card from God, and in a dozen other ways swallowing its own horseshit, has been mostly blind to the northward-drifting centre of regional economic gravity and its implications. The history of nations and cities (and yes, downtowns) is loaded with cautionary stories like this, of once-successful places and cultures that became self-congratulating, dulled and inattentive to shifting conditions. Usually, in these situations, the wake-up call comes late. Know where I would consider putting the new central library were I the head of long-range planning for the regional library board? At Uptown. Know where I might locate if I were an educational institution looking to strategically position a satellite campus? At Uptown. Do you imagine, somehow, that regional calibrations of this kind are not being considered by savvy institutional decision-makers, by developers, by business and shop owners? Brooke, a young, attractive sales associate, has been with Urban Barn long enough to remember the customer count and daily sales performance at the old location on Herald Street, in the heart of Downtown’s so-called “Design District.” Now the store is adjacent to Future Shop, along the faux streets of Uptown. “We’re much busier now,” she assures me. “Our store traffic count is way up.” She’s excited about what Uptown’s emerging later phases will do for her business. Is it some twitchy, leftie response to enterprise, an indisposition toward red-meat capitalist adventure, or some unique blend of values forged in the city’s long history—the British-y past, the pervasive and falsely calming economic presence of the provincial civil service, the intransigent complacency of a retired gentry—that has made this town so ditzy and extinction-prone when it comes to economic development? Recently, at a business event, the mayor stated that the City held a presumably impressive 42 percent share of regional employment. I thought: How do we grab the other 58 percent? Why is it so hard for Victoria to breed (and elect) its own version of municipally self-interested carnivores like Langford’s Stew Young and his council? Why, in the highly competitive regional brawl between municipalities, is Victoria’s reflex response a Neville Chamberlain-like appeasement and a default to “the regional context?” If I ever hear Young agonize about what Langford can do to help the City with its downtown street population and its homeless, or if the lily-whites on and off Central Saanich Council reverse themselves and extend a rousing welcome to Woodwynn Farm (Creating Homefulness Society) and ask what they can do to help to make it a big success, I’ll start to believe in the regional context. Rock Bay—the “subject area” of Franc’s and my UDI presentation—is roughly 18 city blocks between Chatham and Bay Streets, the harbour and the west side of Blanshard. It is an area about half the size of the existing Downtown core. If you walk its entirety you will discover first, that it’s a big sloping bowl with million-dollar south-westerly views over the harbour all the way to and past the Sooke Hills and the distant Olympics; and second, that it’s mere minutes by foot from the heart of Downtown. After your Rock Bay walkabout, grab a latte at Discovery Coffee just around the corner off Douglas on, uh, Discovery Street, sit down, and ask yourself why an ambitious city wouldn’t be falling all over itself to produce a fresh land-use vision rich with strategies, policies, incentives, a taxonomy of beneficial partnerships, a dynamic business plan and related marketing and so on intended to produce a living/working population in Rock Bay of, say, 10,000 over the next two decades. Chakras are the sacred energetic gateways to healing and wholeness. Know anybody with magic fingers? Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

April 2012 Even with storm clouds on the horizon, Victoria continues to avoid direct action. AT A RECENT Urban Development Institute luncheon, guest speaker Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin, invited to profile the City’s new economic development strategy, told this story: “I was giving a speech in James Bay and mentioned Victoria as a world-class city...and someone in the audience said “What if we don’t want to be a world-class city?” Now, this raises some interesting questions: What does it mean to be a world-class city? What does it mean if your city isn’t? And last, who cares what some shrubby, unemployed, dope-smoking loser in James Bay thinks? Or, why would the mayor throw that goad at a James Bay audience, any more than he would say: “Ya know, James Bay could really use a bunch of 30-storey condo towers, four active traffic lanes on Simcoe Street, and a nuclear reactor at Ogden Point?” Amongst the top gleanings on Google for “world class” are World Class Hockey Camp, World Class Luxury Vehicle Detailing, and World Class Wreckin’ Cru (an electro rap group). Clearly, “world class” has about the same definitional precision as “Awesome!” and “Like, totally!” I would say to the James Bay audience member: nothing to worry about. By Google’s standards, we’re world class whether we like it or not. As I listened to the mayor tick off Victoria’s assets and, implicitly, his own administration’s accomplishments, I developed a growing sense of the void between political image-play and reality—that is, two different systems of thought or species of narrative akin to: “The glass is half-full” versus “There is no glass.” Of course, this is not unique to Victoria. I draw your attention to the profoundly diverging political/social/values/economic narratives fighting an epic war to the death or the next presidential election, whichever comes first, south of our border. Years ago, when I was teaching at the High Mowing School, a Waldorf high school in New Hampshire, one of my students, Christopher Stoney, a goggle-eyed, physically uncoordinated dork with a fine mind but differently-wired circuitry (yes, he may have been a Venusian), would often interrupt a lecture or class discussion to blurt troubling and ponderously framed questions like: “Mr. Miller, if you say you want creative and original expression from us, why do you give us specific topics to write about?” Or, “We call it a two-by-four, but it isn’t. Why don’t we call it a one-and-a-half by three-and-a-half?” His queries—clearly, such matters had been fare-jumping his mental gates for hours—would be accompanied by eye-rolls and audible here-we-go-again groans from the other students, but also a grudging fondness for his zingers. It’s like he didn’t get it. His view of the world was too logical, too literal. He got some other “it.” Listening to the mayor, I felt a bit like Christopher Stoney. Now, if “world class” means “mostly crappy but nice in places,” then the mayor and I are on the same page. But honestly, if you Google for the “Ten Most Beautiful Harbours,” or “Ten Most Beautiful Waterfront Cities,” or “Ten Most Beautiful Heritage Cities,” or “Ten Most Beautiful Urban Parks,” or “Ten Most Architecturally Significant Cities,” or “Ten Most Culturally Rich Cities,” or “Ten Most Dynamic Downtowns,” you’ll be stunned by the global competition and shocked not to see Victoria referenced on any such lists. It’s a big, world-class world out there. Such evidence delivers an inescapable message: “Get real!” Here, then, is a clutch of annotated Christopher Stoney-like questions: At the UDI luncheon, the mayor couldn’t say too often that the city needs developers to believe in Victoria and invest in local projects, and that the City considers itself a stakeholder in successful outcomes (“We’re your partner.”). Given the flight of economic and shopper energy to the suburbs and the mounting weakness and frangibility of the network of downtown shopping and commerce, why would the City adopt a downtown bonus density policy designed (however unwittingly) to discourage developers from creating more office, commercial and residential space, and other policies and procedures that make the City notorious for obstruction and micromanagement of the development approval process? Considering how the City maunders on about setting a high standard for architectural design excellence, why is there a near-total absence of outstanding contemporary architecture (though, God knows, a few developers and their architects try, in spite of the obstacles)? Could it have anything to do with the economic realities of development? Is it conceivable that good design costs more, and is automatically elided from too-thinly-profitable development pro formas? Why does much of the downtown public realm look like a back-up set for Blade Runner? What extended and continuing psychotic episode has allowed two of the most significant harbourfront properties along Wharf Street to operate as surface parking lots? Why has the city been incapable of completing the Inner Harbour walkway? Why were ten of the 13 business and education community members of the city’s Economic Development Advisory Panel people with no particular business, organizational or institutional mandate (or regionally competitive passion) to make downtown Victoria hyper-successful? How does a couple thousand tech workers (far less than one percent of the total regional worker population) make us a Silicon Valley-like hotbed of high-tech innovation? Why is the city spending hundreds of thousands annually on “message management,” when everybody knows it’s just “good news” varnish, hyperbole, turd-buffing, or old dither in a new wrapper? From the City’s Victoria’s Economic Development Strategy comes the following strategy points concerning downtown: Focused effort is required to retain and support the region’s main urban centre. Short-term: • implement the Downtown Core area plan • create a comprehensive waterfront plan for the entire core area waterfront from Ogden Point to Rock Bay • foster a lively downtown arts and culture scene • with the development industry, improve the public realm by enhancing sidewalks, lighting, landscaping, and street furniture [sic] improve safety and security downtown Long-term: • explore the feasibility of creating a new downtown educational presence for the major post-secondary institutions. Let’s do a brief semiotic analysis of this language and syntax (the entire strategy document is studded with similar examples). “Focused effort is required” means: “Downtown’s circling the drain and somebody better do something. Not us, of course, but an abstracted somebody.” “Create a comprehensive waterfront plan” means “Do what Victoria does best: create plans. Someday. When Planning Services manages to scratch a few completed projects off its hundred-item list...unless other priorities come along.” “Foster a lively downtown arts and culture scene” means “Do absolutely nothing, but for God’s sake, call it fostering.” “With the development industry, improve the public realm” means “Omigod, we don’t have a dime in the bucket after we tackle infrastructure and capital spending items, so make the developers provide public space improvements. Oh, memo to ourselves: capture 75 percent (the City’s favoured number, thankfully modified at the last moment by the mayor) of the lift in the land value if they want more density and spend the money wherever and on whatever we please, because we’re near-broke, but then ask them to provide public space improvements.” “Explore the feasibility of creating” means “Form an all-stakeholder study group to propose a methodology for optimizing strategies for exploring the feasibility of creating a report outlining a framework of recommendations to review options for the creation of absolutely nothing.” As I write, the Downtown retail vacancy rate is creeping toward eight percent. And in that vein, apart from its tendency toward the aspirational, the report (available online at: www.victoria.ca/assets/Business/Documents/economic-development-strategy.pdf) does harbour a suspect and risk-laden idea: it refers to downtown as the regional “hub for specialty retail.” This raises two issues. First, Frontrunners, the “specialty” running shoe store on Vancouver Street, also has a store in Langford. That is, the suburbs is not some benighted landscape littered with nothing but cruddy big box stores, but an increasingly sophisticated and diverse retail landscape. Second, if your wallet becomes thin in a prolonged economic downturn like the current one, are you going to buy milk and hamburger meat at the Superstore, or violet-infused elderberry all-butter shortbread at that adorable little patisserie on Fort Street? I mean, simply, to highlight a form of institutional and cultural pathology in Victoria: a tendency to abstract, to avoid direct, beneficial action at all costs, even if the storm clouds are visible on the horizon. Other places: “I need a hammer, right now. Please give me one.” Victoria: “It would be helpful to have a hammer.” I have to believe that if an advisory committee submitted such a report to Stew Young, mayor of Langford, their skeletons would be exhumed from the Hartland Road landfill in a decade or two. Not really. It would be a century (Stew is a waste management professional). It’s not that the entire Economic Development Strategy Report has this hallucinatory quality. In places, it makes reasonable and sensible recommendations. The real tragedy is that the report underscores the disconnect between the city’s economic hopes and the kind of liberating policies and implementation that could make those ambitions come true. I know the mayor wants the best for the city, but I worry that he and his council are stuck to their hips in a toxic fudge of wrong-thinking and counterproductive policy design. Like Christopher Stoney, I’m looking at an economic development one-and-a-half by three-and-a-half, and being told it’s a two-by-four. Guess I’m getting the wrong “it.” Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

February 2012 Reflections on what makes Esquimalt the real deal. ESQUIMALT IS THE REAL DEAL. Everywhere else is exegesis. That’s a slap in the face of quite a bit of regional exegesis, and ovation for a place that receives far too little applause, so it may be useful if I tell you what is on my mind—especially timely, right now, as Esquimalt is going through a tiny spasm of funk, self-study, and media-fanned ignominy over its worry about a proliferation of payday loan shops along the main drag. (Funny, I would have targeted Tim Horton’s.) I remember as a kid living for a while in the almost exclusively Jewish Kingsbridge area of New York City, sure that if I ventured into neighbouring Tolentine (home of St Tolentine’s Church), I would be eaten alive by Irish Catholics. Older, wiser and better read (Irish Catholics don’t eat Jewish kids alive, they cook them first), I have come to understand that human geography in all places is tribal and made up of sub-territories each with its own narrative or story of place—social, economic, historical, physical, ethnic, mythical. Some of this is mutable, since places do change; some of it sticks for a long time like a hated nickname. There are two Esquimalts: imaginary Esquimalt (“So, these three drunks stagger into a cheque-cashing store...”), and real Esquimalt. Esquimalt—the name is Central Coast Salish, Es-whoy-malth meaning place of gradually shoaling water (no, I don’t know what “gradually shoaling water” means)—has in regional mythology an “other side of the tracks” reputation—largely attributable historically to the presence of two groups: the armed services, and working-class people like the enormous workforce at Victoria Shipyards and Victoria Drydock who actually make and repair things (troglodytes, of course, from the perspective of the white cuffs/organic arugula crowd on the closer-to-God side of the Blue Bridge). Victoria, by the way, was named for an English queen who presided over—well, comedian Mort Sahl had the best line: “You call it colonialism; we say we brought roads and schools.” I like Esquimalt a lot. It isn’t in any practical sense really the underdog, but I root for it. It’s as if the pixie who distributed municipal benisons gave Esquimalt too light a dusting. But with that said, online history suggests that Esquimalt had its heyday: "Esquimalt’s quiet development was shattered by the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858 when its wharf became the main point of arrival for thousands of miners heading to Victoria. Esquimalt officially became the headquarters of the Royal Navy’s Pacific Station in 1865. By the 1880s, rapid growth was occurring through the building of Royal Navy dry docks (1887), the construction of the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway (1886), and the founding of a military base at Work Point (1887). Esquimalt’s attractive setting made it a desirable residential location for many of Victoria’s business and political leaders." And then there is this exciting footnote in history, the year before my birth: "The massive passenger liner Queen Elizabeth crept into Esquimalt Harbour in 1942. The Queen Elizabeth (then the world’s largest ocean liner) was at the Esquimalt Graving Dock to be secretly refitted from a passenger liner to a troopship capable of carrying a full army division of 15,000 men. This invaluable Allied asset was one of the most attractive targets in the world and almost no one knew with certainty where she was. To have sunk her would have been a massive victory for the enemy. In order to prevent being attacked by surprise at night, naval authorities urged the people of Victoria to adhere to the strictest possible security by partially covering the headlights of their cars, closing curtains in their homes and avoiding mentioning the ship’s name in public and private." Somehow, between then and now, Esquimalt acquired a reputation for being a bit rowdy, especially in the glory days of the Tudor Pub, a legendary hops palace at the corner of Esquimalt and Admirals where bar melées involved thousands, lasted for months, and required the intervention of UN peacekeeping forces (I stretch a point to make a point). But in the interests of fairness and perspective, this was the same era (early ’70s) as the Churchill, a capacious basement beer mill on Government Street beside Bastion Square, and home to—without a word of exaggeration—some of the most malignant, unredeemed, subhuman wreckage you could find in these parts (many went on to distinguished careers in the arts, politics, the civil service, business, and magazine journalism). DND holds ownership to probably a quarter of Esquimalt’s real estate—an enormous acreage just past West Bay Marina and, of course, all the land at Naden where the Pacific Fleet is docked and the shipyard and drydock are located. The West Bay piece includes extensive married quarters—street after street of modest, well-maintained housing; and Saturday in nice weather must be washing day, because clothes fly like flags in the breeze from dozens of clotheslines, less an intentional ecological statement, more a cultural tradition. Most of the housing in Esquimalt, after you get off Esquimalt or Admirals Road and start to worm your way into its neighbourhoods, has a Saanich-y look, except for the more James Bay-like housing on the long finger streets that terminate at the water. That said, you could never mistake Esquimalt homes for those in other parts, and this might have to do with a higher ratio of smaller homes that, in my view, gives the area a distinctive modesty and frees it from pretence. Yes, there are some heritage-era mansions with to-die-for views; and numerous waterfront or water-view properties, especially on those finger-streets between Lyall and the ocean. Friends of mine, Bill and Linda Ross, own a plum-coloured art deco house at the water’s edge on Constance Avenue that must be seen to be believed. Dave and Shirley Barrett own a big old place at the water’s edge not far from Saxe Point Park. There is a cluster of gorgeous art deco homes—like nothing else in Victoria—near the village at the foot of winding Old Esquimalt Road. And while it may seem a digression, no cultural tour of Esquimalt is complete without mentioning the Superstore Warehouse Outlet on Wilson Street, where you can manoeuvre industrial-size shopping carts along aisles loaded with gallon jars of mayo, 50-pound bags of rice, job-lots of any candy with the word “Gummi” in its name, three-foot-long pepperoni sausages, and carboys of sweet green pickle relish large enough to garnish a thousand hot dogs. Leaving the esoteric charms of the Superstore behind, there is no missing...what is it, exactly...a current drabness, a lack of ego, principally in those buildings that line Esquimalt Road from the Vic West border almost to the town centre. If you bring a discerning eye as you drive, and look past the buildings rather than at them, you discover that Esquimalt Road is built along a ridge with a steep drop-off to the south, and that block after block of Esquimalt Road features million-dollar views of the ocean and the Olympics. I have no idea what the zoning allows, but there is extraordinary redevelopment potential, and this could be Esquimalt’s “Miracle Mile.” Developers drop in from time to time with proposals for 10- or 15-storey buildings in or near the town centre. Esquimalt flirts with these economically tempting proposals, but remains uncertain that highrise is the right profile for a town centre not much longer than Oak Bay’s. If I may volunteer an opinion, I would suggest offering almost unlimited density to developers, but aggressively managing height. I have no problem with height but Esquimalt isn’t likely to get exceptional highrises so much as sore thumbs. It’s in the course of writing this meditation about the place that I stumble on the reason why Esquimalt’s the real deal: the town is completely authentic, and even the recent boulevard program along Esquimalt road, begun by former mayor Ray Rice, is free of artifice. Next time you’re out for a recreational meander, take a couple of hours on Esquimalt’s main roads and side-streets, wearing your planner’s eye. Authenticity is hard to come by and easy to destroy. There is nothing wrong with Esquimalt, and I would urge its leadership to make a 10-year commitment to execute the town centre plan, continue to beautify main streets, wake up to the development potential along both sides of Esquimalt Road, and keep the Gummi Bigfeet flowing. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

November 2011 What will it take for mayor and council to realize it's war and that job number one is to save Downtown? AFTER THREE SHORT YEARS it’s again time for us troglodytes to put down the remote, get our food dye-stained fingers out of the family size bag of Hawkins Cheezies, and go to the polls. Saturday the 19th—Municipal Election Day in Victoria! As soon as the Labour Day weekend was over and summer-ized voluptuaries were magically turned back into citizens, the civic election will-be’s and wannabe’s started their chivvying and I began to hear the grumbles: some of you were threatening a killing spree if you had to go to all-candidates meetings or read campaign brochures filled with platitudes and pledges about public safety, strong and vibrant communities, heritage protection, affordable housing, prudent tax spending, more green space, protecting our seniors, and so on. I attribute the swamp of clichés to a kind of authorless cynicism—something like an airborne cultural pathogen or a corrosive, blanketing fog—affecting political incumbents and aspirants about what it takes to get elected or re-elected in Victoria. And if this synthetic politics is a form of public obscenity, the public itself is a willing accessory: passive and fuddled to the core, it encourages a municipal election process whose commandments are: say nothing provocative, sit on the side of the angels (signal left, that is) on all the obvious issues, spout platitudes, don’t express an original thought, pray for name recognition at the polling booth or hope that name-dropping some popular incumbent (“Dean sent me”) buys you some votes. Most local political contests here are little more than spats over different approaches to inertia; and God knows there’s evidence to support that view. It’s a challenge to cast local elections as serious public referendums on mayoral or councillor performance because so few credible challengers present themselves as the anti-incumbent or offer seriously competing visions or political agendas. From here we can only watch with awe (or envy) the mayoral slugfest in Vancouver where NPA contender Suzanne “It’s time for Robertson to Mayor up” Anton is attempting to paint Vision Vancouver incumbent mayor Gregor Robertson as a bumbling lightweight incapable of leadership (the Stanley Cup riot) and a capricious green clown (bike lanes on the Burrard Bridge). Her prospects may be iffy, but she gets credit for giving the voters a choice. Still, don’t lull yourself into thinking there are no local concerns in Victoria. What’s interesting about the City of Victoria is that you can feel its pain. It plays a Christlike, sacrificial role in the regional hagiography, and the surrounding municipalities—solemn invocations of regional cooperation notwithstanding—can barely contain their glee. The WestShore doesn’t even bother to hide its animus and contempt. It simply wishes Victoria would drop dead. Frank Leonard, mayor of Saanich and regional elder statesman, keeps his opinions to himself, christens new shopping centres, and diligently repaves his roads. Every politician in the region with a shred of intelligence knows exactly what’s happening: the tide of economic influence is streaming toward the suburbs and Victoria is slowly but steadily losing muscle mass in terms of regional leverage. Gormless Victoria council is either unaware or in denial. I guess they’ll just wait until Downtown wakes up dead. The City of Victoria is the only place in the region where you get this strange condition of endless, concatenating near-fiascos: a vitiated Downtown planning process (with profound implications for Downtown’s future); homelessness and street issues; the edgy relationship with the province; Blue Bridge cost overrun debacles-in-waiting, rhapsodic embrace of LRT with no idea whatsoever if it will benefit or hurt the city; housing affordability challenges; a largely un-funded half-billion-dollar capital works to-do list; a median household income $10,000 below the regional average (and half of Oak Bay’s); legitimate worries about business and shopper exodus to the suburbs; intermunicipal competition for jobs and fading numbers for Victoria; diminishing financial reserves…. Whoo-ee! Of course, not everything’s a crisis and the city has its share of victories. The new public urinal for besotted, late-night club-goers is a big success. There is an alternative political narrative to the conventional one you are likely to hear at the all-candidates meetings or read from the blizzard of campaign junk. The alternative goes something like this: One more global economic crisis or new suburban shopping centre or really crappy tourist season away from serious implosion, downtown Victoria is at constant risk of dodo-ing out as its share of the shopper pie gets thinner and thinner, and as every bumptious, new suburban business claims turf in the regional consumer’s wallet. In spite of the conceit that Downtown is where the region shops, God knows folks in the ’burbs aren’t spending one dime Downtown. Their paycheques are being cashed at the Save-Marts and the Mega-Buys, and a thousand other shops and services filling the interstices between the big boxes. (Just wait until some enterprising dreamer creates a mall in Saanich called The Design District.) Watch what happens when the Four Horsemen of the Economy come riding through Downtown. Starting in the 1970s, a generation of people who had a background in house-building or construction—‘napkin pro forma’ nailbangers and opportunists—made up the bulk of the city’s developers. For them, heritage buildings were just dated eyesores. Any available block was worth busting. They saw places not as neighbourhoods or social narratives, but opportunities. They threw up (I mean constructed) hundreds of butt-ugly three- and four-story utility-grade apartment and condominium blocks—taller buildings in some cases—anywhere and everywhere the City would allow it. They didn’t do it because they’re evil; they did it because they could, and because they weren’t building homes, they were cranking out “product.” Communities weren’t well organized; these things often landed like bombs and took the heart out of streets and neighbourhoods. Communities in reaction got up on their hind legs and started to fight back. Now, neighbourhoods have effectively fought the development industry to a draw, but all of this sulphurous history has powerfully affected land use culture and process in Victoria, making the public wary, officials and policy-makers tentative and micro-managerial, and developers defensive and hyper-strategic. Memory, in other words, doesn’t evaporate quickly. The City—its citizens, neighbourhoods and communities, politicians and, by reflex, its planning department—have become very accustomed to saying “no,” or “maybe.” Now, even though the locus of development has shifted out of the neighbourhoods and much closer to the Downtown core (a very good thing), the City doesn’t really know how to say “yes” very well. A particular set of planning skills and creative assets is required to produce vibrant, successful Downtown neighbourhoods. Victoria, even though it has some bright lights in the planning department, has not really developed these skills; or the planners are fighting against incredible political intervention and the sheer weight of the past. Vancouver has developed these skills (Yaletown, West End, Granville Island, Granville Slope); Portland has too (Pearl District, NW 23rd, PSU, the trolley system). Ironically, the new crop of Victoria developers (many are Vancouver transplants or players) is now probably far ahead of the City in its receptivity to and embrace of the best urban design ideas and sensibilities. In spite of a few tentative utterances from the mayor (timed, tellingly, in the last 60 days before the election), or the prevailing lunatic “Downtown’s for everybody!” sensibility, I remain unconvinced that he and council realize that Downtown isn’t dead when the last business turns off the lights, but when the binding cement between businesses gets too soft. What will it take for mayor and council to realize it’s war and that we’re fighting powerful social and economic trends, and that job number one for City leadership is to design and implement a policy strategy promoting intensive, new residential and mixed use/job-related development as close to Downtown as possible—everywhere? What will it take for them to realize that an economic development strategy based on the idea of attraction/retention of suburban shoppers, dollars, and jobs is practically folly, and that a vast, new population of city-living folks is needed to improve the Downtown retail economy? What will it take for them to realize that the development industry has no trouble reading the push/pull, we-may-need-you-but-we-find-you-morally-repugnant nature of City policies and approval culture, as distinct from authentic partnership? This is a City, not a business community issue. If Downtown’s stress cracks widen, the City will have to dedicate more and more resources to costly, too-late, and possibly fruitless Downtown economic repair, less and less to city-wide services and amenities. And no politician or candidate—mayoral or council—has figured out how to deliver a convincing public narrative on this subject that might bind Victorians in some kind of common cause or productive strategy. If you do brave an all-candidates meeting, you might want to echo-sound on this subject. Do wear your tinfoil helmet, though, to protect you from the saliva-rain of spluttering clichés. Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

October 2011 What to do with a contaminated, once-industrial part of Victoria in a post-industrial era? WHAT DO YOU WANT, Victoria? What do you want to be? Modern? I don’t think so. History hangs around you like a wrinkled matriarch wearing her fortune around her neck, trudging through the curtained gloom of a Rockland mansion. Socialistic? Well, yes, but just during the news cycle, please, and not in our neighbourhood. Administrative and imperial? Bold and high-powered? Pass. How about lymphatic, aggrieved, isolationist? Several months ago the Times Colonist ran an editorial entitled “Making rezoning pay for public.” The TC quotes a neighbour of a proposed development: “If they get 12 storeys, what do we [the community] get?” The editorial continues: “That’s a question every municipal council should be asking before approving rezoning applications…Rezoning approvals generally increase the value of a property. Councils often seek, or are offered, benefits in return for rezoning…[But without accurate information, councils] can’t strike the best deal for the public.” Developers—if I may borrow from Conrad—have taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land. I don’t want to pull you all the way down the rabbit hole on the subject of zoning, but I do want to establish here, as context for the theme of this month’s sermon on the area known as Rock Bay, that zoning is about as rational as religious faith and subject to the same logic as the parental “Why? Because I said so!” The 20th century opened with “smokestack” industrial practices (including everybody’s favourites: whale flensing and dumping coal tar), and closed with the total transformation of industrial business activities, loci and markets. Hey, guess what, there’s no more local industry, so small wonder that many industrial areas in urban settings are in a functional transition and ready to change with the times, but are still trapped in an outmoded definition of industry and long-ago zoning, and burdened with a civic eye blind to the special costs of contamination cleanup or the unique challenges and risks of developing properties in a transitioning ex-industrial frontier. This is understandable in part because areas don’t necessarily stop being what they were on some January first. Transitions can be slow and evolutionary, and there are often viable holdover activities with legitimate industrial agendas regarding land use, and a lot of political clout and megaphonic moral leverage. This traps planners and politicians who want never to be on the wrong side of the little baby Jesus jobs-and-industry argument (the local mantra in Victoria is working harbour, working harbour). So, what is the Rock Bay narrative? Economy? Geography? Opportunity? Policy? Complexity? How should we frame public interest for the future? This is a classic Victoria story: archetypal in its genesis, predictable in its (presumptive) outcomes. Maybe it starts with history. Rock Bay—the sizable area north of downtown bounded approximately by Chatham Street, the south side of Bay Street, the harbour on the west, and Blanshard Street on the east—was home a century ago to tanneries, a coal gasification plant, timber mills, and a variety of other businesses and cottage industries. Folks lived and worked in the area. At one time, harbour waters lapped well inland, east of what is now Government Street in the vicinity of Pembroke and Princess Streets, and a wooden pile bridge—now rotted, dismantled, gone, and replaced by a portion of Government Street itself—used to carry people and streetcars from one side of Rock Bay to the other. Now much of the bay is filled in. A frisky stream—currently encased underground in an ancient, six-foot brick culvert—once ran down to the harbour waters. An estimated 85 percent of Rock Bay’s foreshore and uplands is laced with contaminants from previous industrial practices. BC Electric used to dump coal tar and chemicals everywhere, and bury disused PCB-laced capacitors. Other industries treated the lands and waters of Rock Bay like a flush toilet or a magic disappearing cabinet, contributing to the area’s glow-in-the-dark pedigree. In fact, Rock Bay is described in federal government handouts as “one of the most contaminated sites in BC.” While the wisest thing might have been to turn the area over to the Japanese to use as a toxic monster movie set, various civic leaders—elected and otherwise—have cast an eye north periodically and seen the gleam not of chemical stew, but of opportunity. Folks think of the current Rock Bay as industrial—light, heavy, or a mix of both. An hour-long meander up and down its roughly 16 square blocks reveals a finer-grained reality. There is still the old house here and there, mostly uphill of Douglas Street toward Blanshard—some occupied residentially, others appropriated by adjacent service businesses. There’s a lot of warehousing and truck unloading, auto-related repair and servicing, motels, commercial offices, an incredible amount of paved surface, a Dairy Queen, numerous shops, a condo development. In fact, Rock Bay contains everything from redi-mix concrete plants to a love shop—soup to nuts, you might say. St Vincent de Paul has a big operation here. So does Budget Rent-a-Car vehicle sales (though rumours are swirling that owner Judy Scott has sold the property to BC Transit for some future transit infrastructure). There are large, vacant properties scattered here and there, and behind temporary screening, BC Hydro and the feds are involved in a $40-million cleanup of the large, almost seven-acre, contaminated site around the old power plant. There’s chatter that Ian Maxwell, owner of Point Hope Shipyard and Ralmax, has his sights set on a watery indentation close to Bay and Government Streets as a future site for additional construction materials barging and handling. While an industrial ecology may have occupied large portions of Rock Bay in past times, industrial activity now exists mostly west of Government Street and takes the simpler (and hardly job-intensive) form of an asphalt operation two blocks north of Capital Iron, and the concrete batch plants and ever-shifting hills of construction aggregate that claim almost all of the water’s edge along Bay Street. Smith Brothers Foundry and Machine Works maintains its operation on Princess Street between Government and Douglas. If you want to stretch the definition of “industrial,” Vancouver Island Brewery operates a bottling plant on Government Street, near Bay Street, and there is a major recycling operation on a side-street. Let’s face it: Rock Bay looks like crap, has no coherent identity, and is a stretch of urban crud between the northern reaches of downtown and the Oz of automotive sales and servicing north of Bay Street. Rock Bay is like the sitcom closet out of which falls unwashed laundry, month-old pizza, shoeboxes, a tennis racquet, suitcases, a stuffed owl and a tuba. It does have some things going for it, though. First, it’s a bowl sloping from every compass point toward the harbour—there are fabulous south-westerly views to be capitalized on. Second, it’s close to downtown and, assuming the Hudson makes good on its supermarket boast, close to food. Third, it’s a relatively unpainted canvas and is crying out for new, brilliant urbanism. Fourth, in spite of claims of a red-hot market for industrial land, the Rock Bay property market remains moribund. Rock Bay land use is all over the place, suggesting that future zoning for multi-use would simply expand and capitalize on, not frustrate, the area’s current DNA. Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin, without being too specific, has put forward a vision linking Rock Bay’s future to “jobs,” hinting that an efflorescence of tech business would be a welcome outcome. The Downtown Victoria Community Alliance, during its Downtown 2020 conferences, a few years back, speculated that Rock Bay might, alongside other uses, become the home of thousands of new residents feeding the downtown economy and animating its streets. For its part, the city, during its recent renovation of the Downtown Plan, extended downtown’s planning umbra to include the entire Rock Bay area, but didn’t move downtown’s official boundaries north. (Like the most attentive of lovers, the City was sensitive to the feelings of the Gorge-Burnside neighbourhood who uses the Rock Bay body count in its claim for municipal goodies.) The City has yet to define a vision for Rock Bay or frame its land use potentials. With the exception of council, who all sing a rousing chorus of “working harbour, working harbour,” no land use narrative has taken hold. And there it sits. When folks try to understand the mind of the developer, they often fail because they make the mistake of imagining that developers are complex, textured, charitable, nuanced, able to embrace ambiguity—that is, human. But to get an accurate picture, you have to zoom in from mammalian consciousness, through reptilian consciousness, to plant or single-celled organism consciousness. There is only one elemental life force beating out a tattoo within the developer’s being: Risk…reward. Risk…reward. Lub…dub. Food…eat. Air…breathe. Water…drink. Risk…reward. Then you have the City of Victoria, infected by apparently incurable bunny-itis, playing the Mr Bill role (Google it if you’re under 40) in the planning/zoning/development process: “So remember, kids, the developer is your friend, and he will always clean up contaminated sites for free and provide park space, community amenities and affordable housing funds. Isn’t that big cement truck a little close to me? Ohhhhh nooooooo!” It approaches the cringe-worthy to observe Victorians responding to the words “appropriate” and “scaled” and it’s an outright x-rated experience to witness how they make them cuddle: “appropriately scaled” and “scaled appropriately.” Unfortunately, there are two tall, dark strangers which “appropriate” and “scaled” have never met in their travels: “risk management” and “financially viable.” You can hear the idea expressed around City Hall that the City prefers not to “intervene in the marketplace.” But this is baloney. The City is a vast intervener and player in the marketplace—with every zoning decision and every development cost charge and every site- or area-specific capital expenditure having an economic consequence, and arbitrarily showering value and opportunity throughout the marketplace. (In this context, it’s useful to know that downtown commercial vacancies are up and retail register sales are down. The reverse is true in the suburbs.) I appreciate that Victoria has a genius for inertia and that this talent happens not by accident, but intention. I understand that downtown has been volunteered (some would say sacrificed) to prove the virtues of caution and immobility in a scary, jumpy world. I get the nuanced messages behind the stance: memory is a safe refuge; pride (or its Victorian simulacrum, height) cometh before the fall; love of change is just cloaked hunger for novelty…itself folly; when in doubt, tend your garden and mend your gate; and so on. In a moment of meditative insight it comes to me that Downtown is just social theatre in which these beliefs merge into a female expression or personification of the city; and that really what Victoria endlessly, ceremonially recapitulates is a rejection of the wriggly, spermatic assault of “The Modern”—like Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, the Unfulfill’d Queen (the frigid queen seeks satisfaction but cannot trust herself to love; and upon her shoulders, she believes, rests the responsibility to ensure that civilization does not descend into darkness and madness); or Tennyson’s “Princess”: Not peace she look’d, the Head: but rising up Robed in the long night of her deep hair, so To the open window moved, remaining there Fixt like a beacon-tower above the waves Of tempest, when the crimson-rolling eye Glares ruin and the wild birds on the light Dash themselves dead. She stretch’d her arms and call’d Across the tumult and the tumult fell. But every Victoria, including our own, must respond to the shifting future, including the scary bits. All this desperate, tight control is bad for health: it gives the city cancer. The future comes knocking, even if you’re hiding in your shell. So, let’s pose an open question: in Rock Bay can market realities and City policies ever commingle, merge, conjoin; or, to take things down from the imagery of hot, raw sex to holy matrimony, at least create a productive collaboration? Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.

July 2011 Is a billion-dollar LRT for the Langford-Downtown corridor the best way to solve a $25 million problem? I HAVE THE PLEASURE OF INTRODUCING YOU to the exquisite Italian fashion model, Bianca Balti. Can you imagine your life if you were involved with her romantically? Or if you were her best friend, with benefits? Your life would be perfected, a dream, right? You would feel youthful, alive. You would always be happy. Could she be stupid and nasty? Could her appetites put a big hole in your bank account? Don’t be silly! Your very existence would be perfumed and your entire life would be a dance in the air. Days would be tropically warm, evenings molten. You would sail on rails of silk past the traffic gridlock on the Island Highway between Millstream and downtown. Poof! What the hell was that? That was the sound of reality finding a parking spot—a not un-apt image for the subject of this piece: the steadily quickening dream of light rail transit in the Capital Region. Media has been flogging the light rail story and the blogosphere has been alight for a few months, ever since BC Transit released news of its considered preference for light rail over a bus option as a response to mobility challenges (and opportunities) between WestShore and the downtown core. If this piece on light rail transit begins with the image of a distractingly beautiful woman, it’s because there is a not dissimilar cloud of projection and fantasy around light rail: it’s easy to be dazzled by rail enthusiasts whose expectations approach the Catholic belief in transubstantiation; by complex social semeiotics and the perceived ‘sexiness’ of light rail; and by studies, data and analyses that can get your toes tapping during an initial read, but which raise as many questions as they answer once the buzz wears off. Yes we can’t Light rail, by some accounts, has the power to do everything including raise the dead. It will whisk people quickly and pleasurably between WestShore and Downtown (with some key stops in between). It will trigger economic re-animation by inspiring new density around the ‘nodes’ of station stops. It will get everyone out of their cars, reducing fuel consumption and countering global warming. It will end the crush of slow-moving or standstill traffic on rush-hour arteries. Plus it’s a progressive crowd-pleaser (who’s not a progressive?) and so twenty-first century. In such a jumped-up atmosphere, it becomes difficult to understand exactly what job or jobs light rail is meant to do, and equally difficult to make an objective or informed judgment about value for money. Ballparked to cost about $950 million (the always dodgy ‘$9.99’ of infrastructure cost-estimating), the system is being floated for shared (presumably one-third) funding by the feds (taxpayers), the province (taxpayers) and the CRD (that is, the CRD’s municipal constituents)(that is, the taxpayers). Saanich Mayor Frank Leonard is a man with a public persona so reasonable and placid that I’m convinced he goes home and kicks the dog, or re-enacts famous train wrecks in his basement, or has some other unspeakable emotional outlet. I mean, there he was, mid-May, prudently and all-too-temperately suggesting that maybe the idea of public spending on light rail be put to a non-binding plebiscite when people go to the polls this November, instead of shrieking: “Are you insane? “Are you out of your effing mind about loading homeowners with another $250+/year on their property taxes, and commercial property owners (read: commercial tenants) with five times the current transit levy?” The outburst is fictional, but the fact is that he stands alone amongst regional politicians in questioning the cost-benefits of LRT. His call for public temperature-taking this fall is intended to…what? Measure public appetite? Stall? Slow the momentum behind the push for LRT? Give people time to study the facts and sober up? Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin, while echoing Leonard’s call for a plebiscite, clearly laid out his transit preferences: “I would be quite happy to get out there and campaign in behalf of the yes.” Transportation science or woo-woo? If you were looking for a knowledgeable, Smart Growth-oriented transportation expert, and a champion of diverse mobility options to serve the community’s needs and provide travel choices, you would have to go no further that Victoria’s Todd Litman, founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, a research organization and think tank dedicated to the analytical study of transportation and mobility policy choices and impacts. Over coffee in late May, I ask Litman to frame the broader context for LRT in Victoria. More than once during our conversation, he returns to the cautionary thought: “You have to be careful how you define the problem. Will LRT ‘cure’ traffic congestion? No,” he says, and adds that LRT may offer an appealing alternative to car commuting for some small slice of the traveling public. It’s his view as well that the business case for LRT rests significantly on the potential longer-term benefits tied to evolving land use. That is, there is an expectation among planning professionals that greater residential densities will spring up around LRT stations, generating increased economic activity, raising land values, and making those populations somewhat less car-and-energy-dependent. Litman is fairly direct in claiming that the only way to justify the capital costs of LRT is by calculating such ‘externalities’ as these. I ask him coincidentally to make a distinction between LRT and busway options. He acknowledges the difference in capital cost (BRT is cheaper) but minimizes the operating distinction, suggesting the differences on the results side are not that great. Who wants to ride the ‘loser cruiser?’ But warming to the subject of bus transit as it exists now, Litman observes: “Waiting conditions are key. BC Transit needs to stop thinking like engineers…needs to take more of a marketing and customer service approach.” He begins to tick off the amenity improvements that could and, in his view, should be made: more, and more comfortable and attractive bus shelters; digital read-outs at stops so passengers know how soon the next bus will arrive; a universal swipe card for fares; cupholders, so you can bring your latte on-board; improved frequency and guaranteed seats (no standing) for commuter runs; high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes for higher rush-hour speeds; sexier-looking buses with more comfortable seats (no sardine seating) and more amenities like wi-fi…. The list goes on. Such ideas do raise provocative questions and issues. Why are so many features—the so-called ‘service continuum’—of bus transit designed to reinforce the idea that public transit is a second-class travel option, that the only people who take the bus are ‘losers’ who can’t access a private vehicle—the young, the old, the poor? Why—as transit attempts to rise to the provincial challenge of expanding ridership and doubling travel share—does the system put so many practical and psychological obstacles in the way of enjoyable bus travel? Why have things been designed so that a billion-dollar train between Langford and Downtown seems like an inevitability? Consider the potential bus-user’s thought balloon: “I have to stand in the drizzle or drag myself an extra six blocks to a more distant sheltered bus stop. I have to freeze my ass off for six months of the year. I have to guess/hope the next bus will be here quickly. I’m stuck on this vehicle whose physical presence owes more to penitentiary design than riding pleasure. It’s a crapshoot whether I get a seat. What have I done wrong that I don’t deserve any comfort or amenities? Why do I do this? What’s the matter with me? I hate my life!” Hint to BC Transit: This is not the secret formula for increasing market share. Chris Corps, Principal of Asset Strategics, a Victoria-based chartered surveyor and the former President of Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Canada, directs me to a US General Accounting Office 60-pager produced in 2001, comparing bus and commuter rail service: “While transit officials noted a public bias toward Light Rail, research has found that riders have no preference for rail over bus when service characteristics are equal. “While environmental benefits have helped justify Light Rail systems, the gap in environmental benefits between rail and buses may be narrowing. FTA and bus manufacturers have focused on improving the design of buses not just to increase their attractiveness, but also to reduce their noise levels and emissions.” Victoria’s ‘rush minute’ It’s interesting to consider how these grandiose infrastructure ideas take hold and how, unwittingly, they can produce weapons of mass transit, when a flyswatter is called for. If you want to understand, in part, BC Transit’s thought process and how it came to the conclusion that light rail was the way to go, this excerpt from BC Transit’s recent Victoria Rapid Transit Work Plan will help: “In January 2008, the BC Government released the Provincial Transit Plan (PTP) committing $14 billion for transit projects throughout BC between now and 2020. This plan is focused on expanding fast, reliable, green transit and calls for a doubling of transit ridership, increased mode share and expanded accessible services in British Columbia. The accelerated implementation of transit in this provincial plan presented the opportunity and impetus to undertake a more detailed regional study and advance a full rapid transit network plan with a target of finalizing a recommendation to proceed with a downtown Victoria to Westshore rapid transit link as the first phase. Therefore, the Douglas Street Busway project has been put on hold.” Intermission Let’s take a break from this earnest subject and give ourselves a bit of a palate cleanser before we plunge back into the transit story. It’s almost “Jim Who?” here in Victoria. That’s how long it has been since the febrile and enterprising mind of Jim Hartshorne has prospected for development opportunities in the core area; but us oldtimers can remember when his name was scrawled next to an extraordinary percentage of core area development—condo blocks, commercial strips, ‘care-aminiums’—in Victoria and Saanich. So where’s Jimmy now? Well, he’s working for his longstanding local patrons, near-billionaire brothers Reg and Roy Stewart, as the development manager for Westhills, adjacent to Langford Lake—an emerging community of 6,000 homes and, in due course, a million square feet of commercial. (For reference, 6,000 homes would produce a population roughly equivalent to that of James Bay.) Jim has moved his own office out that way and I gather he’s having a heluva good time with the Westhills project, remarking here and there that he will be chasing every attractive, viable downtown retail, service and office business he can, hoping to convince them to move to Westhills as the development’s commercial component kicks in. And in a parallel story, you caught the news that Cineplex Odeon is mid-construction on a new 7-theatre installation in the Langford shopping nexus? State-of-the-art. Along with Fright Night 14: Revenge of the Hypoglycemic, they’ll be hosting live simulcasts of the New York Metropolitan Opera and other high-concept fare for the Westshore culturati. Not too shabby for the back of beyond, huh? A decade ago, culture in Langford was demolition derbies. Look at the place now! Makes me wonder how long it’ll be before Westshore, appropriating more and more of the regional economy, starts to claim a share of provincial offices. It would mean more hell for the Victoria economy but, ironically, it would take some people off the commuter hamster wheel. Now, back to transit. Somewhere over the trainbow… A cheerful and forthcoming BC Transit representative, Erinn Pinkerton, spoke in early June to a large, interested UDI (Urban Development Institute) luncheon audience about the recent history leading up to the decision to go with the light rail option between the urban core and Langford. As bar graphs and pie charts flew by on the screen, Pinkerton narrated the wandering, multi-year history of regional transit decision-making, leading to the selection of LRT as the preferred choice. Fielding questions at the end of her presentation, Pinkerton volunteered that in some future “Year One,” ridership on the LRT is projected to be 7 million. BC Transit says current annual bus ridership in this corridor is 4.5 million. If everyone who is now taking the bus shifts to LRT, then Pinkerton is counting on 2.5 million rides materializing from...where? Well, her hope is that they come from two sources: people who don’t yet live in WestShore but who will choose the LRT once they get there, and people currently driving cars and trucks through the corridor. If BC Transit could find those 2.5 million new rides, what would it look like in terms of relieving congestion? For example, how many cars would the LRT remove from the evening Colwood Crawl? Let’s do a little napkin math. BC Transit is assuming that 60 percent of new riders will come from population growth and 40 percent will come from people shifting from cars and trucks to LRT, thereby getting out of the Colwood Crawl. Forty percent of 2.5 million rides is 1 million. Since these are two-way trips, that works out to 500,000 roundtrips each year. Dividing that by 300 days of the year (that’s how BC Transit does it), we get 1667 actual riders. That’s how many cars we would be removing, in total. But not all of these riders will be using the LRT during the evening rush. CRD traffic studies show that 28 percent of daily traffic occurs during the 3-hour evening rush. That means that of those 1667 daily riders, only 470 are likely to ride sometime during the three-hour rush. So, in “Year One,” using the best assumptions available to us—courtesy of BC Transit— we calculate that LRT is likely to take only 470 vehicles off the Island Highway for the full three-hour evening rush. Turning our napkin over and dividing our capital investment of $950,000,000 by those 470 vehicles, we come to the jolting conclusion that, with LRT, we are going to spend roughly $2 million per vehicle removed to ease traffic congestion to WestShore. Slightly. Hmmmmmmm. LRT Ridership Scenarios—WestShore to Victoria Loss leader, anyone? Consider the IKEA 50-cent hot dog A confession: When I’m on a Vancouver day-trip, and if time permits, I will detour off Highway 99 and make my way to IKEA just to buy two hot dogs for a dollar. The idea of saving four bucks or thereabouts is so compelling that I can’t resist. I’m a slave emancipated by a bargain. Gene 1, IKEA 0! Put it to the Swedes! Oh, and maybe since I’m there, I’ll pick up a dozen Snitt wineglasses and a Snott closet organizer and a Snort magnetic knife holder…. If we went with Todd Litman’s idea of snazzier buses with wi-fi and all the other service goodies including an on-board restroom and complimentary coffee, tea or juice (hell, throw in a muffin), coupled to HOV lane restriction for greater bus speed, might we attract another thousand riders? What would that cost all-in (new vehicles, road improvements, etc.)—$25 million, covering vehicle lifecycle capital costs and operating deficit? Alternatively—since Erinn Pinkerton indicated that there is already a healthy carpool culture on this commuter route, how about if we paid for gas or in some other clever way rewarded new recruits to the world of carpooling? I’m guessing wildly that we could do that for $2 million a year, or less, and remove roughly the same number of cars from the road as LRT. Or we could do both of these—upgraded express bus and carpool incentives—together, and simultaneously increase transit ridership, reduce highway volumes, and achieve beneficial environmental outcomes. Or we could tackle the peak period problem at its source and create a Langford office centre for government workers who don’t need to be physically present downtown. One thousand workers times 300 square feet equals two 12-storey office buildings. (Sounds like Westhills would love to step up.) Is there any possibility that light rail poses a billion-dollar solution to a roughly $25 million problem? Fixed rail, fluid destinations and the deceiver blob On its website, BC Transit has a graphic image of the Capital Region filled with flow lines of various colours and circular blobs representing origin points and destinations. The only thing such a graphic overlooks is reality. People don’t travel from or to a blob. They travel from 947 Turnstone Drive in Langford to a medical secretary’s job at a walk-in clinic on the corner of North Dairy and Shelbourne; and while they may hate the Colwood crawl, a commute involving car or bus to LRT station, light rail to a Hillside Avenue stop, bus to the Hillside Shopping Centre, and a walk to the office is not likely to become the travel mode of choice. And there are similar uncertainties with BC Transit’s base numbers. While it’s easy to think of those numbers as a statistical portrait of the river of Westshore-downtown morning or afternoon rush-hour traffic, nothing could be less true. The real model is a distributed one, with vehicular traffic originating from a wide geography across the Westshore and even north of the Malahat, and peeling off to a hundred destinations fanned across another enormous geography stretching from the airport to the university to Downtown to Naden in Esquimalt. Presumably, much of this, under a light rail regime, would involve transferring from light rail to the finer grain of the existing bus system, implying waits and lost time, and a loss of convenience for travelers. Weighing comparable all-in travel times by transit or car, and a comfort and convenience factor, might the commuter be pardoned for choosing his or her own car, even with the annoyances of peak-time slowdowns? Innovation bankruptcy: if BC Transit was BC Mobility… Read and weep: "Power companies in Britain have been required to progressively reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and this year 68 percent of that reduction had to come from subsidizing professionally installed insulation in customers’ homes. Low-income and elderly customers got the home improvements for free. Others paid less that $1,000 to insulate a four-bedroom home, the full cost subsidized 40 to 60 percent. Residents recouped their investment in 12 to 18 months as fuel bills after insulation typically decreased 20 to 30 percent." (NY Times, June 8, 2011) Other British initiatives include payments to homeowners who generate electricity and heat with renewable power. I mean, BC Transit could give a thousand people a new deluxe barbecue, or a mountain bike, or a $500 food credit at the Superstore as an inducement to enter a carpool or an express bus system; or free, introductory fare for six months…at an annual cost of $500,000. It could double the incentive or the number of enrollees, and still just spend a million. It could do that for the next 950 years for the price of a Langford-Downtown LRT. Of course, BC Transit is not mandated to give people bribes—sorry, incentives—to take the bus, but the corporation could make dramatic improvements to the existing bus system and transit-way to directly influence travel consumer choices and achieve the same beneficial outcomes. And really, isn’t LRT something of an expensive bribe? Touching the “third rail” of progressive sensibility Folks for whom the ecological agenda is paramount see in light rail the promise of a cleaner, greener, cooler world; and see the rejection of light rail as a blow to the ecological agenda and a victory for the troglodytes. I have enormous sympathy for these views. The world’s going to hell, and it would be unconscionable to mock or criticize people who have dedicated their lives to changing our suicidal behaviour. But even if it’s a holy war, specific practices and choices need to be scrutinized, and need to pass muster. There is also financial ecology. Every regional or municipal expenditure forecloses on other expenditures or investments, so it becomes important to consider ecological value for money spent. And with bang for the buck it doesn’t matter whether you favour the hundred-mile diet or 100mph at NASCAR—we’re all citizens and taxpayers. Here’s an excerpt from a World Resources Institute report in Grist online: “Another exciting possibility for cities [trying to manage greenhouse gases] lies in bus rapid transit (BRT). Cities are installing these systems because they bring reductions in cost, commuting time, and traffic, among other reasons. But another co-benefit of BRTs is the reduced emissions. “BRT installation is accelerating at a tremendous pace. Around 120 cities now have BRT systems or bus corridors, and the vast majority of them were constructed in the last 10 years. Interestingly, most cities embracing BRTs are in the developing world, where they have proven a less costly alternative to light rail.” So why, exactly, is light rail the right choice for Victoria? Isn’t it ultimately ecological to seek solutions scaled to the size of the problem? I mean, if a $950,000,000 capital expenditure will only remove several hundred cars from the highway system, doesn’t that create an obligation for us as a regional community and for the agencies that serve us to innovate, to find a solution at least as good, and much cheaper? A date with the data One of the most interesting aspects of preparing this piece has been a review of online sources reporting on, analyzing, discussing every conceivable aspect of transit systems—individually and comparatively; in Canada, the U.S. and globally; now, then and projectively; from an engineering, financial, energy, ecological or ideological perspective. I have reviewed more than two hundred documents and, hoping for the reader’s trust on this, my conclusions are that the data can be spun to produce any outcome you favour, and that it is impossible to make an objective, hands-down case for LRT over other transit options. The bus stops here. And here. And here There is concurrence on one point, though. Urban geographies have become highly ‘distributed’ and multi-nodal, and linear or radial transportation systems based on an outdated image of the city and the moribund idea of downtown as the commercial, office and even cultural centre of a region—the place everybody goes to for work, shopping and fun—are fighting a risky, possibly a losing, battle. People want to ‘get where they’re going.’ Their daily lives are cluttered with multiple demands spread across a large urban geography and can only be effectively met with a highly adaptive, responsive and convenient mobility system. Welcome to the car. Transit systems compete with this reality and, in my view, the more car-like they can be, the better they will do. This has largely to do with service, convenience, amenities and speed; and long before agreeing to astronomical transportation investments, this regional community might reasonably ask BC Transit to maximize the potentials of the existing bus system. The biggest externality of all: The Future Read the news today? Oh boy! Two recent news pieces on Huffington Post caught my attention—this: “Responding to the possibility of a ‘double dip’ recession, Robert Shiller, co-founder of the U.S.-based Case-Shiller Home Price Index noted in a recent interview that he wouldn’t be surprised to see U.S. home prices fall by another 25 percent during a slide over the next 20 years.” And this: “Exhausted by the political stalemate over the sputtering U.S. economy Democrats and Republicans have been reduced to magical thinking, hoping that things will eventually get better by themselves. But time isn't on America’s side. The country is suffering its highest average duration of unemployment since at least 1948. ‘The longer this goes on, the greater the danger that the cyclical downturn becomes structural. People and things that lie idle start to lose their productive value. Then you’re into all sorts of troubles,’ says Karen Ward, senior global economist at HSBC Holdings in London.” When I consider the economic, environmental and social roller coaster we’re all riding these days, and add that to the bill for the new sewage system and other infrastructure commitments current and pending, and to municipal tax bills that are going up by significant increments, and to declining municipal reserves, I think: wouldn’t this be the perfect time for regional politicians and community-serving utilities to hedge bets, stay lean and innovate brilliantly, not expensively? Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space Arts Centre, Monday Magazine, and the Gaining Ground Sustainable Urban Development Summit.