You have to love Canadians.  Just the other day I reported on Vancouver’s effort to maintain a sustainable community by keeping a healthy homes-jobs balance. Today, they warm my heart by imposing some of the strictest green building standards on the continent and moving forward with their “Ecodensity” campaign. Vancouver’s Ecodensity campaign involves a variety of interesting elements to promote  sustainability, affordability and livability:

- increased power and discretion for planners to negotiate with developers

- rezoning for city-wide land use planning

- allowing and encouraging “laneway” housing, or small infill bungalows on single family lots to use the land more efficiently

- dense but ‘livable’ mixed use throughout the city

- a focus on affordability

- building ‘suites within suites’, or subapartments designed for renting

- promoting distance based car insurance rates, where drivers pay less if they drive less

- increasing mass transit

You can read all about it in Vancouver’s 30-page Ecodensity booklet, which promotes the positives of density to those who may be suspect of the whole thing and like Vancouver as it is. The booklet in itself is an interesting move, either educational or propaganda, but in either case helping to create the feeling that the changes Vancouver will see are a positive set of community choices.