NORTH Van City Voices folks made a delegation before council Monday with a familiar message: that they believe the city is growing too dense, too fast and on a trajectory likely to far overshoot population targets in Metro Vancouver's regional growth strategy. This, as the city is advancing in City Shaping, its own official community plan review.
Now, the city is not beholden to the regional growth strategy and if council doesn't want to take its marching orders from Surrey and Port Coquitlam, that's fine but it should do a better job explaining what the relevance of the regional growth strategy is and what the rationale for exceeding it may be.
And since we have another municipality on the other side of some arbitrary borders struggling with the same growing pains, the District of North Vancouver would do well to answer the same question. A small revolt is brewing in Lynn Valley, where the OCP already allows for high-density development.
City Voices also notes that the Squamish Nation is planning its own residential towers and it's not clear where those fit in the RGS. This will be even more important going forward in West Vancouver as opponents of the Grosvenor development are licking their wounds and Park Royal has big plans for residential development.
We don't have to follow the lead of Metro when it comes to planning for the future of our North Shore, but with three local governments working in seeming isolation, we could stand to have more of a bird's eye view locally.
