EcoDensity: Playing the Real Estate Game

This is one of the best articles written so far on EcoDensity (and a certain planning director thinks so too).

From Vancouver Magazine … 

Playing the Real Estate Game

The single-family house is an endangered
species in this city. What’s a guy who’s always wanted a house to do?

WHEN I WAS SEVEN, my family moved from a rented rancher in north Langley to a five-acre farm across the border in Blaine. Two dozen gnarled plum, pear and apple trees surrounded the four-bedroom house, and beyond the orchard was an old dairy barn. There was even a treehouse in the front yard. In summer, lounging in that elevated, 50-square-foot pad with X-Men comics, ghetto blaster and root beer, I had my first and only taste of the condo lifestyle. Price for the whole rural package, circa 1979: $55,000.

I’ve lived in cities for more than 15 years, but my real estate expectations—what home means, what a decent amount of space is, how much I ought to pay for it—are undeniably rural. When I browse the real estate listings, I remind myself that for the going rate of an entry-level, 650-square-foot condo, I could, in many parts of the country, purchase a farmstead similar to the one where I grew up. (Then I think of the 15-acre farm my parents bought two years ago in Cape Breton for $85,000, and consider, yet again, whether I ought to pull a Shipping News and head east.) This partly explains why new condos don’t appeal to me, why I live on the top floor of a drafty Craftsman deep in the east side, and why I’ve come to realize that, like most of my generation, I’m probably never going to live in a single-family home in Vancouver.

 

Reduced expectations are at the heart of the density issue, and, not coincidentally, the sustainability movement. Like most of my thirtysomething generation, I’m guilty of wanting the level of luxury that my parents enjoyed. I sulk at the thought of living with less. Do I really want to move to the far-flung suburbs in order to have a single-family house? If so, I want it to be my choice, rather than an imposition of the market. My friends and I can rant for hours about real dollars, speculative bubbles, Olympic hype, all the factors that appear to have priced us out of the market, but we don’t leave. We have roots here, and in spite of our whining we know Vancouver is a great city.

I don’t want to move to Blaine or Cape Breton, at least not yet, and I’ll probably never have any use for five acres of soggy grassland. Still, I refuse to accept the current Vancouver alternative: paying a third of a million dollars for a one-bedroom apartment that, besides location, offers at most an exercise room, a lounge with a plasma screen TV, and a Starbucks inset into the southeast corner. I think density is a great idea, on both cultural and ecological grounds, but I don’t want the glossy, Euro-clad lifestyle package of the recent condo boom. I want density with soul. If I’m going to live in a small space—and more and more of us are, as people crowd into the Lower Mainland and force more vertical development—I want it to be distinctly my own, not some cloned version of granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.
Density has always been a tough sell in North America. If you live in a condo, where do you put the barbecue, the ski-boat, the Winnebago? For the bigoted and skittish, dense cities also bring the unsettling possibility of living cheek-by-jowl not only with other races and cultures, but with all the other urban bogeymen—addicts, artists, the homeless, lord knows what else. Given the psychological integration required to deal with such diversity, the popular response has been to flee to the suburban edges. Time-lapse satellite photos of the continent from 1940 to 1990 would be queasy but fascinating, 50 years of sprawl leaching out from the city centres like a greyscale infection of nanobots.
Vancouver’s response to sprawl and its acidic side-effects—urban decay, clover-leaf gridlock, gobbled farms and wetlands—has been a bag of urban renewal tricks, with an emphasis on densely populated, mixed-use neighbourhoods. Thanks to the efforts of municipal savants like former co-director of planning Larry Beasley and marketing geniuses like Bob Rennie, condo living was rebranded from a squalid lowbrow compromise into a prêt-à-porter downtown cocktail party, complete with those granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.

In the past 15 years, our downtown population has doubled; the success of our density effort even coined a global urban design buzzword, Vancouverism. Now, at least for a certain upscale, trend-conscious audience, the term density no longer connotes the nasty scratch-and-claw of the urban jungle. It has visionary loft to it, the conceptual shimmer of a halcyon metropolis. A condo, a futon and a latte for every citizen—at least those who can handle the mortgage. 

Most of our designer condo towers sprouted from old industrial lands and brownfield sites, which in development terms are low-hanging fruit: no neighbourhood associations to impede progress. Such pluckable brownfields are almost gone, and much remaining square footage downtown is reserved for office space. So as Vancouver proper adds over 4,000 new residents each year, and the GVRD grows from 2.2 million to a projected 3.3 million people in the next 25 years, enter Mayor Sullivan and so-called EcoDensity.

Sullivan’s initiative makes candid use of the ecological footprint model of UBC community and regional planning professor William Rees. “If all people on Earth lived the way we do in Vancouver,” the brochure reads, “it would take four planets, not one, to sustain the population.” Half the world’s population lives in cities, Sullivan points out, uses three-quarters of its resources and kicks out three-quarters of the pollution. In this context, Vancouver, like every other city, needs to do more to be sustainable.The EcoDensity plan, with its long list of please-everyone goals—affordability, sustainability, economic growth—could easily be laughed at as green-hued political fluff. But Brent Toderian, the new director of planning, is not laughing. Now that the old industrial lands have been harvested, the mood of global climate crisis and growing political will affords him a unique opportunity: moral justification for pan-Vancouver densification. Arterials and neighbourhood centres like the Kingsway-Knight redevelopment have been on the radar for some time, but Toderian hints that the whole city is due for a wake-up call. “We’re looking in all contexts,” he says. “Neighbourhood centres, arterials, yes, but also single-family neighbourhoods. The ideas will be different, but opportunities exist in all three.”

You can already see it happening: townhouses in West Vancouver, infill housing in Shaughnessy, Dunbar’s shrill but ultimately futile resistance before the steamroller of densification. Toderian calls the new paradigm “resilient livability.” The term defines livable density not as the artful presence of view corridors but as development that acknowledges global warming and peak oil, and will, over the long-term, enable Vancouver to, as he puts it, “weather the storms that are coming, better than any other city.” Resilient density also means that I can say goodbye to the idea of a single-family home in the city, and so can all those of my generation who do not have substantial wealth or a fat inheritance headed their way.

My prodigious sense of entitlement, nurtured on that property in Blaine, is being subjected not only to globalized real estate markets but to a long-overdue ecological calculus—the sort of ethical, responsible, full-context planning I’ve spent years arguing for. True, the mayor, the city planners and the development community are using the global environmental crisis to lubricate some profitable projects, but that’s fine with me, because in principle they’re right.
Densification, particularly densification that encourages green building practices, is a clear and present need. My question has to do, once again, with soul. Character. Individuality. Creating a living space that transcends the cookie-cutter version we’re so adept at selling to one another.
My rural upbringing depended on my father making a tedious and expensive commute to Richmond and back five days a week. If someone can offer my (as-yet-unborn) children an urban alternative that’s anywhere near as rich as my own childhood was, I’ll let go of the longing for my own house, the huge yard, the treehouse for my kids. And here’s the good news: Vancouver, as you’ll discover on the following pages, is full of people who think the same way and are inventing vibrant ways of living distinctly, densely, and well.