Livability, a major factor in our standard of living
In school we strive to learn to improve our life, at work we strive for fair wages and working conditions to live more comfortably... in our neighbourhood and in our city, our standard of living is determined by whether or not the place where we live is livable.
We want to come home from work to a quiet neighbourhood where people are friendly, to a comfortable home with enough privacy, to green surroundings that can allow us to relax, to accessible amenities that allow us to meet or to exercise. The place where we live is a major component of our standard of living.
This is why we don't want gridlock and we want our city's growth to happen responsibly and at a reasonable pace.
We want a city that favours affordability but with livability, and this cannot be achieved without community control over city development.
We want housing that facilitates improved lifestyles
Neighbourhoods must have the right to say NO to multi-story construction, and to demand that City Council come up with the necessary infrastructure before densifying a neighbourhood.
And when neighbourhoods are given control over city development, we will choose green low-rise safe attractive spacious housing -- not a multitude of towers.
We will fight to go back to the time when buying a single family home was not impossible for the wide majority of people, and we will strive to build beautiful green affordable housing, like many of the housing cooperatives we have in Vancouver, or like those BC housing complexes where each unit is a detached unit and has a small front and back garden. We will build a community-oriented livable city with a variety of housing styles, not a concrete jungle.
A variety of housing styles, not a multitude of towers
Those who are not blinded by speculative profits will agree that towers are generally not livable, and that a tower should only be erected when a neighourhood decides that they need it to fulfill particular collective community needs.
When given the choice, neighbourhoods will favour a variety of housing styles, making sure that safety and livability come first. They will certainly not favour six-storey or eight-storey buildings made of wood. All it takes is one person forgetting a lit cigarette for the whole structure to burn to the ground right away.
And, given the chance, neighbourhoods will ensure that hand in hand with amenities, transit and green space are improved and increased. Transit is particularly important for seniors and special-needs persons, so is a nearby community centre. Vancouver has very little geared to seniors. There should be housing and community buildings devoted to seniors with much reduced costs.