Paul Krueger, now a planner with the City of Vancouver, sent a new report from the States on the link between transportation costs and housing affordability.
You can get the whole report here.
It’s mostly common-sense stuff. But it makes the decisions of the our governments all the more mysterious. We have money to build freeways and serve car-dependent land use, but not the resources to proceed with the Evergreen light-rail line, the Broadway extension of the Millennium line, and – worst of all, really – the Surrey Rapidbus lines. The very people who need relief the most are being promised something that will only make their combined costs more onerous.
“This study presents, for the first time, the combined housing and transportation cost burdens of working families in 28 metropolitan areas at the neighborhood level. … [Working families] spend about 57 percent of their incomes on the combined costs of housing and transportation, with roughly 28 percent of income going for housing and 29 percent going for transportation.
… it is imperative for cities and regions to consider housing and transportation policy together.
The study also points to the importance of infill development that expands the supply of affordable housing in inner city and older suburban neighborhoods that have good access to traditional job centers; the development of more affordable housing near transportation hubs and suburban employment centers; providing good quality and reliable transit for suburb to suburb commuting, as well as for helping families in the outer suburbs get into the central city; and policies to encourage car sharing and to reduce the costs of car ownership for families who cannot easily get to work via public transit.
The City of Vancouver is the biggest offender in failing to densify in response to transportation infrastructure. Instead, it caters to the nimbys under the guise of preserving neighbourhoods.
i.e. Broadway and Commerial is the biggest rapid transit hub in the region outside of downtown. Yet the City has failed to allow densification of the area because it would disturb the neighbourhood. It should be the biggest transit-oriented development in the City. Instead, the City is allowing high density to be built at Kingsway and Knight and at Kingsway and Nanaimo, far from the Skytrain because consolidated sites exist at those locations and the neighbours view it as an improvement to the area.
Which makes more sense as a high density node?
Vancouver has only allowed high density development around rapid transit stations where “ugly” light industrial has been converted (to the detriment of the City’s industrial land supply) to “pretty” residential use – at Main Street and at Joyce. Broadway & Commcercial, 29th Avenue and Nanaimo Stations all remain undeveloped areas.
The model should be nodes of development akin to the first phase of Toronto’s Yonge Line, with nodes of development at each station outside the core – at Davisville, St. Clair and Eglinton.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens along the Canada Line, and whether development pressures will favour conversion of the “ugly” industrial lands at Marine Drive Station to residential use, while the other stations (apart from the Oakridge Centre site) remain surrounded laregly by single family homes.
So if the City of Vancouver is unwilling to densify around rapid transit stations, why should it expect the suburbs to densify in areas where rapid transit is only on the wish list?
I think Ron has hit the nail on the head with his indictment of Vancouver’s planning department neglecting to densify areas of our City outside of the sacred downtown peninsula. Larry Beasley may have made a name for himself with the Expo and Coal Harbour lands, but he did it at the expense of the rest of the City.
I, too, am puzzled by the lack of planning attention that the Commercial/Broadway hub has received. It is crying out for well planned residential density which would make a huge contribution to ameliorating the current bleak deportment of this transit hub.
And I concur that it is unfair to demand that the suburbs densify (without transit infrastructure) while we do nothing with transit infrastructure. It’s a curious conundrum.