1) The Farm density was not density to which UBC was entitled. It was density which would become available only if that land were no longer needed for academic purposes. This condition has not been met. Over the years, there has consistently been no distinction made between what could conceivably be built and what absolutely must be built.

2) There are a few motivations behind the strong push to maximize market housing: First, the planners want to enliven the campus, which is utterly dead at night and can’t support the variety of retail that some people would like to see. Second, there’s a strong feeling that leasing land and putting the money into the endowment will do incalculable good. Third, unless things have changed in the past two years, a lot of the proposed income has already been spent and has been borrowed against.

The first one is, in some senses, a fine goal, which will be partially accomplished when there are enough student residence beds on campus. The problem is that there has been little to no recognition of the fact that a research university is essentially light industrial zoning, with the added bonus of obnoxious drunken youngsters running around noisily at all hours of the night six months of the year. The maximization of profit has created stakeholders who view a university as a tranquil park, and want to change it to match this view. It would have been good to think about what sort of stakeholders were being created before creating them.

The second point appears at first blush to be solid long-term planning, trying to set up the best university possible for the distant future. Unfortunately, it’s breathtakingly short-sighted and self-defeating. The two basic problems are that students don’t want what’s built or planned, and that market housing that transparently has no connection to the university is being built while massive waitlists exist for student housing. This tells the students that they’re visiting a greedy, rich property development company that happens to run a university on the side. Students who view the university this way are not likely to grow up to be donors, and the vast majority of the endowment is donations. UBC is creating perhaps a billion dollars of discretionary endowment now, at the price of untold tens of billions of non-discretionary endowment over the coming decades. The reputational damage may be even worse than the cost to the endowment.

The issues with the third one don’t require discussion.

In an ideal world the AMS, as the closest thing UBC has to a representative governance system, would run its own consultations, come up with its own outline of a land use plan, and take it to Board. If some representative governance system were eventually created, an AMS version would be far less likely to be rescinded than the C&CP version.

Should community stakeholders not feel the process is fair, or consultative, Minister Stewart is readily contacted.