Douglas Todd: Residents have accepted the "grand bargain" when politicians create dense tower zones and leave other neighbourhoods mostly alone. But population growth and development is now feverish.

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“The grand bargain” is hardly ever acknowledged aloud. But nearly every Metro Vancouver politician understands they have to play by its unspoken rules.

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It’s the formula that explains why voters aren’t in more open revolt against the feverish pace of construction across Metro, where the population has grown by 30 per cent in a decade.

Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councillor who once headed Simon Fraser University’s City Program and has a penchant for thinking about the big picture, years ago came up with the term: “The grand bargain.”

The urban planner coined it to capture the hidden contract that civic politicians expediently make with voters when they focus the most intense new pockets of people into tight, massive highrise clusters. That has customarily made it possible, he believes, for politicians to leave much of the region, and many neighbourhoods, more or less unchanged.

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The grand bargain has meant most residents can almost relax because,