As City of North Vancouver council painstakingly scrutinized the document that will dictate the next 30 years of planning and development for the municipality, one thing was certain: there was hardly a consensus on what should be done.
Council plodded through each neighbourhood in the draft official community plan, during the 90-minute debate Monday night, targeting mainly density.
Perhaps the most contentious piece of the planning puzzle is the East Third Street area. A group of Moodyville residents joined neighbour Trevor Gorety, who lives on the north side of the 700-block of East Third Street, to support six-storey midrises with commercial storefronts at ground level.
But Coun. Guy Heywood moved a wholesale change for East Third – suggesting density only take the form of townhouses.
“It’s unfortunate, but most of our OCP process seems to be taken up with the periphery of our concern, which is really the kind of style of housing in the Third Street area – as opposed to the core, where we are accomplishing the city’s main goals for affordability, density, potential amenity,” said Heywood.
He further explained, it would not be prudent for the city to allow a 350 per cent increase in density along that stretch of East Third Street, without first seeing how the area takes shape after the Low Level Road construction is completed and traffic patterns are normalized.
Read more: http://www.nsnews.com/news/city-of-north-vancouver-council-divided-over-ocp-1.1202176
