Opinion: After decades of urban dysfunction, Vancouver deserves beauty again | Daily Hive

Opinion: After spending decades managing dysfunction, it's time to start building beauty in Vancouver

Vancouver's Granville Street Pedestrian Zone during the FIFA World Cup, as seen on June 30, 2026. (Kenneth Chan)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Randy Rinaldo, who is a local realtor and president of the Italian Cultural Centre in Vancouver.

Patios are where cities breathe. They transform private enterprise into public life. They slow people down. They encourage conversation. They create passive surveillance that makes streets feel safer. They invite people to stay for one more drink, one more coffee, or one more conversation.

Every great pedestrian street in the world understands this. Vancouver should, too.

If you’re wondering why some of us who are usually fiscally conservative are willing to support Vancouver City Council’s $4.75-million seven-week-long extension of the Granville Street Pedestrian Zone, the answer has very little to do with sidewalks. It has everything to do with the kind of city we want Vancouver to become.

The tragedy isn’t that people travel to Europe and fall in love with its public spaces. The tragedy is that they return, wondering why Vancouver still hasn’t built places that inspire the same feeling.

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Around the world, the most memorable cities share remarkably similar qualities: streets where people linger instead of rushing home, cafes spilling onto sidewalks, children playing safely, musicians animating public squares and local businesses thriving because people choose to stay.

Those places are memorable not because they belong to Europe. They’re memorable because they’re built for people.

Vancouver has spent decades debating housing, transportation, density, homelessness, and climate policy. Far less time has been spent asking a simpler question: How do we create a city people genuinely enjoy spending time in?

Government cannot manufacture vibrancy. Private enterprise does. Government’s responsibility is to create the conditions that allow entrepreneurs to succeed.

There is a reason Italian Day has become one of Vancouver’s most beloved festivals. Every June, hundreds of thousands of people descend on Commercial Drive, not because they’re all Italian, but because for one day, Vancouver briefly becomes the city people wish it were every day of the year.

The streets belong to people instead of traffic. Restaurants spill into the street. Music fills the air. Patios overflow. Families stay for hours. Children run freely. Businesses flourish. Commercial Drive becomes what Italians call a corso, a place where people gather simply because it feels good to be there.

Granville Street has every opportunity to become Vancouver’s own modern corso. Government spending should always be scrutinized. Fiscal discipline matters. But conservatism has never meant opposing every public investment. It means distinguishing between investments that create long-term value and spending that merely perpetuates failure. Public dollars should always be questioned.

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Vancouver’s Granville Street Pedestrian Zone during the FIFA World Cup, as seen on June 25, 2026. (Kenneth Chan)

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Vancouver’s Granville Street Pedestrian Zone during the FIFA World Cup, as seen on June 30, 2026. (Kenneth Chan)

The current plan is not to permanently pedestrianize Granville Street in Downtown Vancouver — at least not anytime soon, not for many years. Granville Street has already been successfully temporarily transformed into a pedestrian corridor during the FIFA World Cup. The plan is simply to continue that activation for another seven weeks until Labour Day.

The $4.75-million allocated for this is a lot of money. I don’t blame anyone for questioning that price tag. But here’s the question Vancouver should be asking: Why has it become so expensive to keep one street open for another seven weeks?

A significant portion of the project’s cost reflects the additional policing, security, sanitation and operational measures now required to keep Granville Street functioning as a safe public gathering place. Those extraordinary measures are, in my view, inseparable from years of deteriorating public order surrounding the entertainment district and the policy decisions that concentrated those challenges there.

That reality deserves far more scrutiny than the price tag attached to extending the pedestrian zone.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Some of the same elected municipal officials criticizing the cost of extending the pedestrian zone continue to support additional SRO development and policy approaches that, in my view, will further increase the very public safety and operational challenges contributing to those costs. They criticize the cost of pedestrianizing Granville Street, while supporting highly controversial policies they believe are compassionate, but that many residents and business owners believe have produced squalor, disorder, and chaos — making the street far more difficult, and far more expensive, to revitalize.

That contradiction deserves far more attention than the millions of dollars for the budget.

This is a textbook case of what evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy: well-intentioned policies that prioritize abstract compassion over observable outcomes, ultimately harming the very people and places they claim to help.

Federal, provincial, and past municipal policies created much of the disorder and cost we now face on Granville Street. While the current City Council majority is attempting to improve the situation, too many decision-makers still double down on frameworks that look compassionate on paper, but produce squalor and chaos in practice.

Whether one agrees with his terminology or not, the underlying principle deserves consideration.

Compassion should be measured by results, not intentions. Compassion should never mean accepting conditions that are neither compassionate for vulnerable people nor acceptable for everyone else.

Unlike many forms of government spending, this investment has the potential to create something tangible. It will put more people on Granville Street. Those people will eat in restaurants. Shop in local stores. Fill patios. Attend performances. Support small businesses. Generate tax revenue. Create employment. And perhaps most importantly, help restore public confidence in a downtown that has struggled for years to attract the ordinary families and visitors who once gave it life.

Compare that with the billions of public dollars that have been spent over decades responding to the ongoing crisis in the Downtown Eastside. Despite enormous expenditures by every level of government, Vancouver continues to struggle with addiction, homelessness, mental illness, crime, and public disorder.

Every proposal to improve general public life through projects like the Granville Street Pedestrian Zone is dissected line by line. Yet the continued substantial daily costs of policies producing poor outcomes in the Downtown Eastside rarely receives the same level of public scrutiny.

If we’re going to examine government spending, and we absolutely should, we should apply the same standard everywhere. Fiscal discipline means asking which investments create opportunity and which simply perpetuate failure.

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Vancouver’s Granville Street Pedestrian Zone for the FIFA World Cup, as seen on June 12, 2026. (Kenneth Chan)

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Victory celebrations on Granville Street in Downtown Vancouver on June 28, 2026, after Canada’s historic FIFA World Cup round of 32 match win against South Africa. (Kenneth Chan)

My hope is that this temporary extension of the vehicle-free street activation for pedestrians moves the needle toward something much bigger: a permanently pedestrianized Granville Street serving year-round as Vancouver’s premier entertainment district.

A place defined by patios instead of parking. Restaurants instead of traffic. Street performers instead of idling vehicles. Public life instead of empty sidewalks.

That broader question extends beyond Granville Street. It speaks to how Vancouver has approached public policy for decades.

During Italian Day this year, I watched two very different philosophies of government collide.

Around 9 p.m., officers instructed a busy restaurant owner — who employs dozens and pays substantial taxes — to lower the music and close the retractable glass facade. From my perspective, forcing the facade closed at peak hours was hard to square with creating a safe, welcoming environment. About 30 minutes later, a fight broke out between two girls. The owners and staff stopped it immediately. When police responded, they shut down the entire restaurant of happy patrons for exceeding its licensed occupancy.

That response was disproportionate. The venue had self-policed effectively; the real issue was contained quickly. Shutting down a responsible, tax-paying business over a technical occupancy breach — especially on the most important day of the year — feels like punishing success rather than addressing harm.

The individuals involved were removed. The business itself did not need to be collateral damage. This kind of rigid, overly cautious enforcement is part of a broader mindset that must change.

Italian Day on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. (Brendan McAlpine)

Beautiful public spaces require more than beautiful design. They require consistent order. Vancouver needs to become unapologetic about protecting that order. Open public spaces can only succeed with zero tolerance for visible public disorder — especially intoxication from alcohol or drugs.

Private venues that manage their own risks responsibly should face proportionate rules that support economic vitality.

Public streets and plazas, by contrast, have no operator on site to intervene. People have every right to personal choices, but they do not have the right to make shared spaces unsafe or unusable for everyone else.

The objective of policing should not simply be enforcing rules. It should be preserving the conditions that allow legitimate businesses and public life to flourish. The default response should be to remove those causing the problem, not shut down the businesses creating the solution.

Small business owners are not merely taxpayers. They are city builders. They mortgage their homes. They risk their savings. They create jobs. They train young people. They sponsor local sports teams. They fill empty storefronts. They generate tax revenue that funds every public service we depend on. They deserve to be treated like one of Vancouver’s greatest civic assets.

Vancouver deserves to become one of the world’s great public cities. A city known for beautiful pedestrian streets, bustling patios, independent businesses, safe public squares, and remarkable festivals. A city where families choose to spend their evenings. Where entrepreneurs are celebrated instead of exhausted. Where government spends as much energy creating beauty as it does managing dysfunction.

Because cities are not remembered for the problems they manage. They are remembered for the places they create.

The Vancouver we dream about already exists in moments like Italian Day, Greek Day, and the FIFA World Cup. Our challenge isn’t imagining it. It’s having the courage to build it every day of the year.

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1 a.m. on Sunday, June 14, 2026, at Downtown Vancouver’s Granville Street Pedestrian Zone for the FIFA World Cup. (Kenneth Chan)

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