The former Director of City & Regional Planning for the City of Calgary joined the City of Vancouver on May 1, 2024.On March 20, the City of Vancouver announced that its new General Manager of Planning, Urban Design and Sustainability would be Josh White, filling a role that had been vacant for six months after the City parted ways with Theresa O'Donnell — who also held the title of Director of Planning — in September.
It's been interesting seeing some of the major developments that have started to unfold outside the downtown core, whether that's, or Renfrew-Collingwood and out that way. It's been really interesting to see how those hubs of activity and transit-oriented development have started to play out. Same with Marine Drive and Marpole. Vancouver's done a good job of starting to grow in more places like that, in a transit-supported way.
We're quite close to City Hall. We bought a condo closeby. It's a shift in lifestyle for us. I live in an inner-city neighbourhood in Calgary. It's kind of like Mount Pleasant in terms of scale and type, and close to downtown. My house would be triple the cost in a similar area in Vancouver.
It's great to go to a place where people care so deeply and understand the impact of the work that city-building does. Development and planning is almost like a sport, in terms of how people follow it in Vancouver. I really enjoy it.
At this point and time in my career, when the opportunity arose, I felt like there was a bit of a match between my experience and what the City of Vancouver was looking for. Some of that includes making the types of improvements in process and policy that I've been a part of and helped execute in Calgary and — adding on some of my other experiences — it seemed a good match, so that's why I took a look at the opportunity.
I know that it's not always comfortable to have things imposed upon a municipality by the Province, but I think these are good reforms, good directions. Applying them across the entire province, across different contexts is not an easy task, certainly, but I think they've done as good of a job as they can.
Outside of the legislation implementation, what are some of the big items you and the planning team will be working on the rest of the year? I think there's clearly a priority and a mandate on achieving more housing, more development, and more equitable distribution of how density and development occurs. The Vancouver Plan certainly lays out that vision. Now we need to get into the hard work of implementing that, which will include the TOA work, the villages work, the creation of an ODP as an implementing mechanism.