Doing Vancouver One Better

Nick Christensen, a writer with the Hillsboro Argus (Hillsboro is a distant suburb of Portland), spent a recent weekend in Vancouver and went back to write about it.   His text is in regular font, my comments in response are in italics.

A Trip to Vancouver Brings Density to Mind

Janury 26, 2010

It’s no secret that the region we call home has a little bit of Vancouver envy.

And vice-versa, Nick.

 The Pearl District is a mirror image of Yaletown in this city’s downtown peninsula.

And the Olympic Village in this city is, if not a mirror image of the Pearl, a reflection of its medium-rise success.  When the debate was raging over whether Southeast False Creek should continue with the point-and-podium towers of False Creek North, it was the Pearl that those who wanted something different pointed to as an alternative.

Many of the AmberGlen concepts look very similar to much of the high-rise development in the Fraser Valley suburbs.

News to me.  AmberGlen from what I can tell is a combo of corporate campus and lifestyle centre, with a nary a highrise to be seen.    Must be something new in the works.

Even tiny Forest Grove frequently sends delegations to the town of Port Moody, just east of Vancouver, for ideas on how to add some vitality to its downtown.

Having conducted a few of those tours myself, I’m glad to hear that Port Moody – particularly Newport Village – is serving as a model.  It’s a good one.

I spent last weekend in Vancouver, enjoying time with my wife, eating great Chinese and Indian food and spending far more than I should have on Olympic merchandise.

You did good – at least as far as the food.  You might have even crossed paths with Seattle Times food writer Nancy Leson who was up for a foodie jaunt too – and shared her enthusiasm and recommendations here.

Those who know me won’t be surprised that I spent much of my weekend here thinking about urban growth.

As we move closer to the exciting conclusion of the regionwide urban and rural reserves designation process, I couldn’t help but think about whether Portland will start to look like Vancouver in 50 years, and whether that’s necessarily a bad thing.

But as we Vancouverize, we can do it better.

 That’s the idea!  ‘Cause then we would have no choice but to try to do better than you.

The good news is we have a history of improving on Vancouver’s successes. The Trans-Canada Highway’s Port Mann Bridge, which inspired our Fremont Bridge, is obsolete and in the process of being replaced. Our rail transit system is much more comprehensive than Vancouver’s, which only travels to a small portion of the hyper-dense downtown.

Oh, oh – you’ve lost me there.  Port Mann is closer to your I-5 Columbia River crossing – and you know how controversial that one is.  Here, under our system, the Minister of Transportation wakes up one day and decides to build a new bridge.  Token consultation – and done!  However, the chance of it actually reducing congestion in the medium term is pretty much nil (scroll down my blog for more on that).  Learn from us!

As for our rail-transit system, did you actually use it?  SkyTrain extends 15 miles and crosses the Fraser, West Coast Express travels 40 miles into the Fraser Valley, and our newly opened Canada Line goes 10 miles south to the airport and our southern suburbs.  We have almost 400,000 trips a day on our rail system, with SkyTrain sometimes running every 90 seconds; over a million trips a day on the entire transit system.

And our neighborhoods are clean, green and friendly; Vancouver’s main streets don’t have that same neighborhood feel as Portland’s avenues, and the bungalows and cottages nestled behind the shopping centers feel disjointed from the rest of the development.

Well, you’d get some argument there – but not from me.   I think Portland’s streetcar neighbourhoods are the best I’ve ever experienced, including Vancouver’s.  But fortunately we’re comparing different degrees of good

Believe it or not, our traffic situation is far better than Vancouver’s. While I’ll admit my opinion of their roads was slightly spoiled by those seizure-inducing flashing green lights, the long waits to get across bridges or through traffic lights were hard to ignore.

This is a tough concept for Americans (and a lot of Canadians).  It’s that very congestion (and the absence of freeways into our core) that makes Vancouver such a livable city.  It’s one of the reasons we’ve made density work, why we have a range of transportation choices, why we have a seawall around our shoreline, not a concrete megastructure!  And why we’re not taxing ourselves to maintain or expand a road-based car-dominant system that doesn’t work very well anywhere, including Portland.  (I’ve seen the Sunset in the morning.)

We can improve on the Vancouver model, be it by requiring more original architecture in the Pearl District or by ensuring transit comes first and dense developments go around them — not vice-versa.

Actually, I think the Pearl has on the whole better examples of highrise architecture than Vancouver, particular around Tanner Springs Park.   But I’m with you on the transit.

It’s also unlikely we’ll ever fully look like Vancouver. Downtown’s population density is about 34,000 per square mile; the city proper has a population density of 13,000 per square mile, and suburbs range around 6,000 per square mile.

Hillsboro’s density is about 3,200 per square mile; Portland’s hovers around 4,000.

If Portland’s three-county population in 2060 is 2.8 million — the top end of the forecast developed by Metro last year — the population density of the urban growth boundary will increase by two-thirds. The UGB had an average density of about 4,080 people per square mile last summer; if we hit that top-end forecast and urbanize the 28,000 acres of urban reserves as recommended in Carl Hosticka and David Bragdon’s compromise map, the density in 2060 would increase to about 6,500 per square mile.

Take it down a notch to the Coalition Map, which has a substantially smaller urban reserve recommendation. Then the density of the region goes up to 6,700 per square mile.

Either way, it’s clear that most of the Portland metro area in 2060 will look a lot like most of the Portland metro area today, the exception being those Vancouverized suburban developments like AmberGlen and a likely further bump in density in the areas around downtown.

Excellent point!  People often fear that if they allow a little high-density development into their neighbourhoods, it’ll be highrises from here to hell.  In truth, high-density development will never be the norm in western cities for a long time to come.  What we need is sufficient density – in many different forms – to provide a range of choices for many different kinds and ages of people, and that will be sufficient to generate transportation choices. 

Whether we urbanize 18,000 acres or 28,000 acres, these developments are going to happen. How well it all fits in with your own vision for Portland — and how involved each of us is in planning for that vision — will determine how successfully we integrate these new, dense developments into the neighborhoods and communities we call home.

That’s what makes Portland and Vancouver (and Seattle too) such interesting comparisons: we’re pursuing the same goals in our respective ways, each learning from the other. 

We’re fortunate to have each other as neighbours.

Come back soon.