Colleen Hardwick says Vancouver went off the rails in 2008 and promises 'livability' if elected

Colleen Hardwick is in the running to be Vancouver’s next mayor, with housing affordability and “livability” a key component of her platform.

This is Hardwick’s second stab at the mayor’s seat. After serving as a city councillor from 2018 to 2022, she ran as a mayoral candidate in the 2022 municipal election, ultimately coming in third place behind Ken Sim and Kennedy Stewart.

Daily Hive Urbanized sat down with Hardwick on Oct. 7 to hear about what she learned during her campaign, what she views as the major issues in the city, and how she would go about solving them if she and her party, TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, are elected on Oct. 17.

“I don’t want to replace one set of incompetence with another set of incompetence, to be blunt,” she said.

“And when I look around at the competitive landscape, if I thought there was anybody else there that had what it takes to solve and address these complex problems, I wouldn’t be running. This is not a career move for me.”

Hardwick is up against four other major mayoral candidates: Ken Sim for ABC Vancouver, Pete Fry for the Green Party of Vancouver, Rebecca Bligh for Vote Vancouver, and Kareem Allam for the Vancouver Liberals.

During her campaign, she said that she’s heard from Vancouver residents that they are angry.

“What I hear when I ask people ‘are things better than they were four years ago? ‘ the answer is generally ‘no,'” said Hardwick.

“They are feeling [that] their neighbourhoods are threatened by a multiplex, playing whack-a-mole with zoning all over the place,” she said. “Safety is also a priority concern still with a lot of people, not just with the Downtown Eastside, but in their neighbourhoods.”

Hardwick added that “everybody is struggling to be able to continue to afford to live here and the job options are not expanding.”

“If we can’t afford to live here, what’s the point?”

Zoning in the city has changed

Hardwick heavily criticizes the Official Development Plan (ODP) that City Council passed in March, which she said “cancelled” the prior neighbourhood plans.

“Our focus has been on the neighbourhoods,” she said. “People have connections to neighbourhoods […] People have connection to place. It’s not just an asset. It’s your home. Its sense of place is so important. The neighbourhoods are so important.”

Provincial government legislation in 2024 amended the Vancouver Charter to require Vancouver’s municipal government to adopt an ODP by 2026, aligning the City with planning standards already applied to other municipal governments.

In 2023, the city had already repealed dozens of old community plans and land use guidelines dating as far back as the ’70s, as City staff said they were outdated or incompatible with the 2022-approved Vancouver Plan (which the ODP replaced).

Not only does Hardwick want to bring back planning to a neighbourhood level, but she also wants to introduce a ward system to give each neighbourhood representation in City Hall.

Hardwick said that the ODP and current approach in City Council is a “centralized, top-down, autocratic control.”

“Neighbourhood planning is planning with the neighbourhood. And it’s not saying we’re not going to change; it’s saying, how much, how fast, over time.”

“Out of balance”

Hardwick said that Vancouver is “out of balance.”

Hardwick uses the term “livability,” which she said is the balance between housing and infrastructure, like roads, sewers, schools, community centers, or economic infrastructure.

She said that things “got off the rails” in 2008, with the election of Gregor Robertson as Vancouver’s mayor.

“We lost the plot, in my view, instead of prioritizing a balanced approach to growth, it all became about promoting growth to meet housing targets,” she said.

According to Hardwick, the city started to rely on developer contributions — which is when it charges fees on new developments to fund infrastructure and community amenities — as a revenue stream.

Hardwick claims that this “set a business model,” where they started seeking developer contributions by promoting rezoning.

“Their pitch was ‘let’s have growth fund growth,’ but what ended up happening was that inflated land values exponentially.”

Instead of bringing down costs by adding new supply to the market, Hardwick said that it inflated land values and created an environment for land speculation.

She also criticized the fact that the City has taken on responsibilities that aren’t under its jurisdiction. In TEAM’s platform, they promise to examine discretionary and non-core expenditures, such as Community Climate Action Grants.

Hardwick said that the City should focus on its core responsibilities and build affordable housing efficiently and cost-effectively.

Daily Hive Urbanized asked Hardwick how she defines affordable housing, and she said that “we should start with the evidence, instead of just putting around the slogans.”

She said she wants to know what Vancouver’s median income is, and then look at the 30 per cent rule — the idea where it is considered affordable if someone spends 30 per cent or less of their income on household costs. She would also look at the city’s population growth.

“So, what does that translate into in terms of housing need?”

Hardwick pointed to False Creek South and Champlain Heights as successful examples of affordable housing, which were built on city-owned land with the provincial and federal governments funding the construction. They have a third below-market units, a third market, and a third above-market.

She said that for the additional housing that the City needs, they should follow a similar model: using City-owned land, making it less expensive and time-consuming on the permitting side, and working with the federal and provincial governments to get funding.

Further, she said that the City needs to prioritize affordable rental housing that already exists.

“It is in the line of fire because of things like the Broadway plan,” said Hardwick.

The Broadway Plan, which City Council approved in 2022, allows for much greater density spanning a six-square-km area and 500 city blocks. It is bounded by roughly 1st Avenue to the north, Clark Drive to the east, 16th Avenue to the south, and Vine Street to the west.

Hardwick also said that rezoning land to allow for greater density (as things like the ODP and Broadway plan do) leads to land speculation and ultimately makes the land much more expensive than it was before.

“The government’s job is to balance these things […] in the best interest of the public, as opposed to the approach that we’ve been taking, which is basically joined at the hip with the property development industry, and it’s all about producing profit for them, as opposed to quality of life for people.”

Earlier this year, the B.C. Real Estate Association (BCREA) published a report warning that B.C. home prices could jump 27 per cent by 2032 due to delayed construction.

The report drew parallels between current market conditions and the post-2008 period, when weak demand caused inventories to rise and homebuilding to slow dramatically. When demand eventually rebounded in the latter half of the 2010s, a lack of new supply led to rapid price escalation. Between 2010 and 2019, home prices in B.C. rose by roughly 47 per cent, pushing affordability to crisis levels.

When Daily Hive Urbanized asked Hardwick about this, she said that it is the “pursuit of profit by an industry which dominates our local economy.”

She said that immigration has been used as “fuel for the housing production industry.”

“We went from a natural resource-based economy, you know, forestry, fisheries, mining, certainly up to Expo ’86 — that was really the turning point — after the sale of the Expo lands to Li Ka-shing [...] That’s when we really started to see the financialization of real estate here. And then that accelerated, in particular, after the 2008 financial crash.”

Hardwick said that Vancouver’s economy is not diverse, and depends too much on real estate and property development.

She acknowledged that the City has tourism, but said that those jobs are largely minimum wage and tips-based.

“What jobs are going to draw people to this part of the world outside of that?” 

She said that Vancouver has replaced the resource-based economy with real estate. Instead, she wants to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

Public safety

Hardwick said she is concerned about public safety, and a pillar of her party’s platform is dedicated to that.

But she called Ken Sim’s ABC Vancouver public safety plebiscite a “cynical vote-getting strategy.”

When Vancouverites get their ballot, they will have the option to vote on whether or not they’re in favour of the City strengthening its laws to forbid open-air hard drug use in public spaces, and if they support the City asking the Province to convert portions of the old St. Paul’s Hospital into a medical facility with acute voluntary and involuntary care beds.

“Ken Sim and ABC are saying, ‘Well, if you’re unhappy with safety and drug use, and this is in Vancouver, then you’ve got to vote with us on this plebiscite.’ We didn’t need a plebiscite to do that. It’s an election tactic,” said Hardwick.

“Do I think we have problems that we have to deal with safety and drug use? Absolutely.”

The future of Vancouver

Now, Hardwick questions what the draw is for people to move to Vancouver.

“Because the people that live here are not having kids and grandkids. Or they’re moving out. They don’t see a future here.”

Hardwick’s central point is about the imbalance between housing and infrastructure in Vancouver, something she doesn’t think her peers running for mayor realize.

She said she thinks they are either promoting the “growth agenda” or don’t “fully understand the complexity of the problems we’re here to solve.”

“I have skin in the game. I’ve got two kids. I’ve got two grandkids,” Hardwick said. “For me, the prospect of having another generation of Vancouverites pushed out of town is devastating. So I will fight tooth and nail to make sure that Vancouverites are properly represented with the ultimate objective of our quality of life and affordability in the city.”

With files from Kenneth Chan