Vancouver’s heading into an exciting municipal election!

Yes, yes, it’s exciting in all the normal ways elections are exciting: rah, rah, I really want my team to win! Strategy, strategy, wonder what messaging will work? Etc. (I’m a bit of a political junkie).

BUT this election is also super interesting to me as a major test of backyard building (-IMBY) coalitions and positioning. There are parties that tend toward Yes! build more housing in-my-backyard (YIMBY), and there are parties that tend toward No, No, No more building in-my-backyard (NIMBY). What’s great about this election is that there are SO many parties involved that we can actually fill out a scatterplot of IMBYism positioned within more traditional left-right coalitions. The folks over the Cambie Report did a bang-up job of illustrating this, with their crowd-sourcing of positioning for the parties (and major independent mayoral candidates). Borrowing from their crowd-sourced scoring of party and major mayoral candidate positions (but centering the scores and inverting the urbanism scoring), here’s pretty much what the political landscape looks like:

The election is very exciting because there’s someone in every corner! Assuming everyone shares these perceptions of the parties and they’ve been able to get their message out, we get a real test of how urbanist welcome (YIMBY) coalitions line up with more traditional left/right divides in terms of voting strength.

Do most (voting) free-market fiscal conservatives vote YIMBY? We’ll be able to compare the Yes Vancouver! vote relative to the NPA/Pro Vancouver/Coalition Vancouver vote to find out. Are most NIMBY voters progressive-leaning or conservative-leaning (or somewhere in the middle)? We can look to compare COPE to the N/P/C vote to the Greens. Do left-leaning YIMBYs outnumber left-leaning preservationists? Compare OneCity & Vision turnout to COPE/Greens.

And just who makes up YIMBY coalitions anyway? This, I think, is perhaps the most interesting question, primarily because debates sometimes frame YIMBYs as anti-regulation free-marketeers, when in fact there appears to be a rather large group of re-regulation socialist-friendly YIMBYs out there. This election should provide some insight into just how large these different facets of YIMBY coalitions might be by comparing OneCity & Vision votes to Yes Vancouver votes. Fun!

Of course, there’s also bound to be a lot of noise. The chaos in this election suggests that low-information voters, in particular, may fall back on familiar rubrics, perhaps benefiting parties that have been around awhile (NPA, Vision, Greens). The Greens, in particular, may benefit from their mixture of party recognition at other levels of government and progressive sheen mixed with centrist positions historically appealing to many homeowners (there’s a reason Carr was the most popular candidate in the last election). There are also real efforts underway to retain the strength of more traditional left-right divides, at least on the left, where the Vancouver District Labour Council (VDLC) has attempted to broker an alliance. (Does Labour have a stake in this election? Oh yes! Lots of contracts coming up…)

In order to form their slate, the VDLC had to choose between the two mayoral candidacies of Sylvester and Stewart (setting aside left-leaning alternates like Campbell and Condon, who’ve now dropped out). They chose Stewart, previously an NDP parliamentary politician representing nearby Burnaby. You can scroll through their fancy collector cards (cute gimmick!) on twitter.

In addition to the more organized efforts of parties and labour organizations, it’s worth noting that this year’s election is just a bonanza of independent candidates. Aside from Stewart and Sylvester, the two serious independent mayoral candidates, there’s just a ton of independent council candidates. I can’t fit them all on here, but just to demonstrate a couple of candidates (and a party) missed by the Cambie Report survey, I’ll estimate positions from following folks on twitter as below.

Bhandal has positioned herself close to OneCity. Cook and Crook are proud YIMBYs and look closer to somewhere between OneCity and Yes Vancouver. Blyth has mostly focused on calling attention to the opiod crisis (to her everlasting credit!) but also seems to have placed herself (or been placed) close to OneCity. Altogether, you could fill out significantly more quadrants using independent candidates. (I just don’t have the time or energy to do it!)

So… where do I fall? Relying heavily on my read of Iris Marion Young’s* brilliant Justice and the Politics of Difference, and in particular, her understanding of the City as an Ideal for Justice, I very clearly fall into what I’d call the “inclusive urbanism” camp, exemplified by OneCity (note: it’s possible I have a sign supporting OneCity out on my balcony right now). I swoon over their campaign slogan of Every Neighbourhood for Everyone. And what do you know, when you add in independents, there’s enough other candidates in that quadrant to fill out a whole ballot! This includes the reigning Vision party, who in my view does not get enough credit for tacking against the broader North American winds to move Vancouver in a more inclusive and urbanist direction.

That’s not to say there aren’t lots of other good ideas floating around out there in urbanist camps (hi Yes Vancouver!), and good energy in other left-leaning parties (COPE gets full credit for making politics built around fighting class inequities look like fun!) Speaking of fun, I’m gonna do an animated gif thing to round things off. Here you go.

Some Related Takes:

Cambie Report Data: google doc

Tom Davidoff‘s gradesheet approach: google doc

Christopher Porter’s (nicely done!): housing platform comparison

Allen Pike’s: breakdown

 

*- Worth noting: Iris Marion Young practically takes an anarchist stance on zoning: that it challenges the urban diversity she dearly wants to foster. As I discuss in my book, I’d rather reform zoning than abolish it, but overall she’s not wrong. She also thinks all planning should be done at a regional level (kinda like Metro Vancouver!).