I had always thought that the last round of fighting Beedie over 105 Keefer in 2023 after the BC Supreme Court ruling was the final round of procedural battles at City Hall.

It turns out I was wrong. I was caught by surprise when Beedie came back again with another Development Permit application, this time asking for a bigger, denser, and even more gentrifying building than ever before.

Why is the City even considering letting Beedie come back with a different building? What is the reasoning behind asking for relaxations in height, setbacks, and more?

The staff report for Beedie’s 105 Keefer / 570 Columbia proposal finally came out just days before the public hearing. There, we can see the reasoning for why the City is entertaining changes that violate its own bylaws and what supposedly justifies them.

It turns out the entire project hinges on a Privately Owned Public Space (POPS), which is a so-called “courtyard” or “corridor” that the public will have partial access to. This POPS is being used to justify additional density, height, and reductions in setback, all to ultimately create more total floor area for the developer to sell.

POPS have increasingly become a developer tool, as common as community gardens or public art. Developers build a “public space” on their property and claim it provides a public benefit, using it to argue why their projects should be approved.

What is unique about POPS is not the specifics of how “public” they are, because in reality it is usually the strata, not the developer, that will have to manage the space if it is ever built. Instead, it’s how they have become a design loophole, a Trojan horse, and a rhetorical device for developers to push projects through.

In the case of Beedie’s proposal, the POPS is the justification for all the relaxations. But once you start arguing about the minutiae of the “public courtyard”, such as quality, size, access hours, or duration of public access, you have already presupposed that the building exists and are now negotiating its details.

If the POPS included a children’s playground instead of retail, or if it were open to the public for longer hours, even permanently, would that make a gentrifying building any better? Does that justify its existence at all?

By forcing the opposition to focus on the details of the POPS, Beedie and the City push critics into a frame that assumes the building is inevitable. It is a dangerous trap. You end up debating how “public” a “privately owned public space” should be, rather than whether the building should exist in the first place. The POPS becomes a decoy that distracts and reframes the debate to the developer’s advantage. It is the mechanism of the frame: the tool that manufactures, manipulates, and operationalizes the developer’s narrative.

The tricky part is that in Beedie’s case, their entire proposal for 105 Keefer / 570 Columbia and the rationale for their relaxations depend on the POPS. It is precisely what makes it a design loophole: a justification to let the developer violate the City’s own bylaws.

This is why we need to be conscious of the frame itself and step outside their narrative game to rewrite the centre of the story on our own terms.

But that is hard to do. It is human nature to respond within the rules and frames we are given, especially when they come from an official bureaucracy or a monied interest that presents itself through technocratic procedures. Opposition to an entire building gets reduced to debate over minutiae and “consultation” instead of fundamental contestation. Technocracy becomes ideology. Opposition becomes negotiation.

Because it is so hard to step out of that frame, and because it has been such an effective rhetorical and design strategy, POPS have proliferated everywhere over the past decade, from Vancouver to Toronto to New York City. It is neoliberal urban logic, aligned with policies like inclusionary zoning, where developers build fifty-storey luxury condos in exchange for a handful of social housing units.

The narrative frame of POPS is the real battleground, and it has been a winning strategy for developers everywhere. They do not win by defeating opposition, but by changing the frame before opposition even begins, so that participation in the public debate itself becomes the project’s legitimacy.

The first step to dismantling this framing fallacy is recognizing that it exists, so we do not fall into the same trap of presupposing the very premise we are fighting against.

Refuse the building. Don’t negotiate the POPS.