Interview with a Vancouver city manager

"Vancouver, Canada is about 37 to 38 percent renewably powered now, largely because of [clean electricity from] the BC Hydro dam.


From 1990 to 2015, we've increased our population by about 30 percent and jobs by about 30 percent and decreased carbon [emissions] by about 15 percent.


A lot of the heating load right now is natural gas, so we're trying to focus on district energy systems that use renewable heating sources.


We built one system that we own and operate ourselves, which uses sewer heat. We’ve got a big sewer main that comes out of downtown. You run your dishwasher or you take a shower and there’s a lot of hot water in the sewer water. Just like you take the heat out of the earth with geothermal, you can take the heat out of the sewer water with heat exchangers. So we built a pretty massive set of heat exchangers that divert sewer water and take the heat out of it and convert it to hot water and run that through a series of pipes in the ground; that heats an entire neighborhood in the city.


We’ve mandated now that any larger development in the city must build their own hot water energy system. Then others nearby can plug into it.


The largest user of fossil fuels in our city is the city’s central heat plant. They burn natural gas to produce steam, and they heat 200 buildings downtown on a loop. We are now working to convert this system from natural gas to biomass.


We consider wood to be renewable if it comes from urban wood waste; it can’t be from a virgin wood source. And it has to be from within the city. We’ve banned all clean wood from entering the landfill, and that’s creating a supply of wood waste that can be burned instead of natural gas. That was our way of making sure you're not cutting down a forest to heat a neighborhood.


We build into the city code requirements for X tons of carbon emissions per square foot per year. Then you achieve it the way you want to achieve it.


Since the 1990s, we’ve seen a 75 percent increase in the number of people living downtown. We’ve seen a 25 percent increase in the number of people coming into downtown on a daily basis, but a 15 percent decrease in the number of people driving into downtown daily. And still people complain about congestion.


Some of the most liberal parts of the city fight hardest against higher population density. The greatest challenge we face is our residents being able to accept the changes and being willing to put up with them.


We’re seeing that millennials get it more, but a lot of the older decision-makers in our community, even the ex-hippies, they just don’t want to see a change to the single-family lifestyle that they’ve had, with the yard to mow and all of that.


It’s a challenge to think about the pace of change we’ve already seen — 30 percent population growth since 1990. People have seen their city completely transformed, and a lot of them don’t like that Hong Kong–like density. To them it’s the opposite of the sleepy town that they had. They can’t get their kids to live in the city because it’s too expensive. They can’t get their grandkids into a dance class — everything is so full.


And we’re saying, well, if it’s not here, then it’s out somewhere in the greenfield and people are wasting time and fuel driving back and forth. So we need to find ways to accommodate more people in the city.


We’ve done a lot of softer densification — secondary suites, laneway homes, those types of things — and they’ve been very popular. We allowed a hundred accessory dwelling units, sometimes called backyard cottages or mother-in-law units, as a pilot. The agreement was when we had 100, we’d report back to city council. The 100 went over so well, we now have 2,000 of them.


It’s providing rental stock in the community. It’s enlivening the lanes and the alleys. It’s extra income. It’s a way the elderly can live in the back and the younger family with the kids can live in the front — it’s creating a little enclave for a family unit. So that’s been pretty well-received.


We’ve also found ways to bring big-box and retail into a multi-story form around transit. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a high-rise, but more than one floor for more density.


Vancouver has an increasingly seamless bicycle infrastructure, including separated lanes with their own signals and green paint on the road everywhere cars and bikes interact.


The business association downtown did an in-depth study on small business vacancy rates on the bike path before and after. Vacancy went way down after the bike lane. It was very, very clear that the bike lane added value to the economy on that street.


So I think businesses are starting to acknowledge that bikers can stop more easily, can park more easily, and there’s more of them on a bike lane than you’re going to have with cars that are racing down there at eight times the speed and with the hard time to find larger vehicle parking.


We did a series of bike lanes downtown three years ago- you’d think we had opened a hog farm downtown. It was just a huge political (*)(*)(*)(*)storm. And this summer we’ve been installing probably triple the amount of bike infrastructure and there’s been not a peep.


Well, there was one peep. The armory, which is where the military stores equipment, had a volunteer corps that came out and did a big press conference saying we were jeopardizing national security by putting a bike lane in front of their armory. We still built the bike lane.


I see the challenges with poverty and income disparity — the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer — impacting all the challenges we face with homelessness, drug addiction, and mental health. All that is getting worse, and Vancouver is becoming more and more expensive. That’s jeopardizing the fabric of our community. I’m really concerned about that.


We can be this amazing green mecca that people want to live in from all over the world, but if we can’t find a way to make it accessible to all different types of people, not just wealthy people moving from Asia, not just wealthy techies coming from Silicon Valley … how do we not become a resort community?


The average — yes, average — home price in Vancouver has risen to $960,000 US Dollars as of Jan. 2016."


From:
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http://www.vox.com/2016/7/26/12074370/vancouver-100-percent-renewable
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