Just to stir the pot up a bit – an essay in The Atlantic by Edward Glaeser.
Besides making cities more affordable and architecturally interesting, tall buildings are greener than sprawl, and they foster social capital and creativity. Yet some urban planners and preservationists seem to have a misplaced fear of heights that yields damaging restrictions on how tall a building can be. From New York to Paris to Mumbai, there’s a powerful case for building up, not out.
Is Yaletown really more “architecturally interesting” or “more affordable” than Mount Pleasant? Which itself is growing less affordable as it densifies and, accordingly, gentrifies.
Paris, I would argue, provides a perfect example of why in most of the city we should build dense, but not up, and not only that but it shows how a city can be extremely dense while still being built entirely at heights six stories and less.
Interesting read for the historical tidbits, but still naive if you ask me.
Paris with its eight story structures is always put forward as an ideal, but buyers in Vancouver don’t want short buildings side by side, do they? They seem to want space and height. Maybe someone could tell me where we could build something like Paris in Vancouver, where air rights are traded as real property.
The West End as we know it was built prior to 1973. It is the most affordable housing stock that we have in the city by and large. Can anyone possibly imagine building the West End today, especially if it was block after block of 1910-era wood structures as it was before? Does anyone consider the West End a failure of long range planning, or suggest that we should return it to 4-story buildings only?
Mount Pleasant is becoming less affordable because the demand is increasing. When you have high demand and short supply prices go up. If you increase supply, demand goes down. In order to increase supply in limited space you must go up.
It seems to me that people want affordability without increasing density, or perhaps, creating density that they think is more acceptable. If that’s the case, then we’d probably be building it.
Note that we tried to build more squat structures in the Olympic Village. Planners thought it was a brilliant innovation, but buyers are less convinced.
Please discuss.
The West End is far from the most affordable stock of housing in the city (unless maybe you’ve been living there 30 years with rent control). I couldn’t afford to live there, yet manage reasonably well renting an East Van duplex.
The problem in Vancouver is our form of densification tends to come with a great deal of gentrification heaped in, and I think that’s often true in modern times, though of course it doesn’t have to happen. While the article is correct that increasing the overall supply of housing in a city can result in cheaper housing, it’s often not the newly dense neighbourhoods that are most affordable, so that’s the conundrum when you go knocking down places like Strathcona, as was proposed, and replacing them with towers.
As for the Olympic Village, that was built and designed to be luxury housing, which only a very small segment of the population could ever have afforded. Low- to mid-rise housing is built all over the city and sells extremely quickly: think of all those four-storey buildings built along the arterialss like Main Street, Commercial Drive, Broadway and Fourth in Kits, Hastings and Kingsway and all over Burnaby and now Marine Drive in North Vancouver. Building non-tower density is hardly a revolution in the city, it’s just that because it’s not a big honking tower people don’t notice it as much.
That said, I wouldn’t go back on the West End, nor Yaletown. Nor would I go back on some of the towers popping up in strategic locations around Skytrain stations, especially when those skytrain stations weren’t built out neighbourhoods to begin with (i.e. Joyce, Brentwood, which needs a lot of work.) But there’s too much of the tower design going on in this city and I don’t believe we should hoist this one-size and one-style-fits-all approach on the entire city. The old nickname of Vancouver was the “city of Neighbourhoods.” I’d like that to remain true, and enhance the distinct character of different parts of the city.
Most of the city is far better off at buildings that max out around six stories, where there is ample sunlight provided, where buildings are ground oriented and can be accessed by stairs, and where you can also build more affordable units (all-wood construction, for instance, or stacked townhouses that include secondary suites). I’m talking about a mix of laneway houses, rowhouses (in praticular fee-simple), stacked townhouses, walk-ups, mixed-use arterial and mid-rise condos/apartments, with a few towers at various key points throughout the city and along transit (i.e. Oakridge, Marine Station, Central Broadway) and downtown.
And if you don’t think we can reach the required density with that, keep in mind that Paris fits the entire population of Metro Vancouver into a space the size of the city of Vancouver with hardly a building above six stories. Paris proper is also, oddly enough, more dense than New York City proper, despite all the skyscrapers built in the latter. Of course, both of these are “alpha world cities”, and their affordability problems ought to be hardly applicable to anywhere else except Tokyo and London, and yet somehow Vancouver, with its proliferation of towers, is the one city in North America that can rival their unaffordability.
This video provides a great overview of different heights and densities, and shows how tall rarely means dense in real life: http://pcj.typepad.com/planning_commissioners_jo/2010/04/density-quiz.html
I’m not arguing against density. I just want a style density that is liveable and affordable. You simply don’t need to build up be dense, especially not as tall as the article is calling for (think New York).