Density in a City of Neighbourhoods (2)

Part 2 from a discussion guide, Density in a City of Neighbourhoods – my perspective of a journey from the earliest years of land-abundant settlement to the towering glass city of 2012 – written for Carbon Talks at SFU.

BOOMS & CRASHES

By World War I, bungalow suburbs surrounded False Creek from Strathcona to Kitsilano with the occasional apartment house mixed in. Residents lived within walking distance to work or a short commute by streetcar. Even the West End started out (below right) with single-family houses of various sizes and qualities – the McMansions and Vancouver Specials of their day.

When zoning became a legal tool in the 1920s, most residential parts of the city were kept off-limits to anything but single-family homes, as documented in the Bartholomew Plan of 1929:  Of the 22 percent of the city that was residential, a full 20.9 percent was zoned single-family.

From its founding, Vancouver was a real-estate rollercoaster: tumultuous growth and speculation, particularly in the first decade of the 20th century, with crashes about every 20 years or so. Sometimes, given excess inventories, it would take decades for prices to recover. But even depressions couldn’t halt population growth; they just slowed it down.

Vancouver often found itself playing catch-up with demand. During times of steep population growth, it has had to find ways to accommodate growth, whether legal or otherwise.

The easiest way for most of the 20th century was to subdivide open or vacant land (greenfield sites), typically at the urban edge or along new road or rail transportation routes. Over time, individual builders would infill empty lots left over from the initial round of development. Whether through whole subdivisions or single lots, it has taken well over a century to build out our residential land base.

Looking out over a young, and relatively sparsely populated, Vancouver circa 1940

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The Canadian Pacific Railway, given a land grant (left) that comprised a large percentage of the city, was careful to release its holdings incrementally so as not to depress market values. The natural ocean and river boundaries would eventually constrain development, but so long as more land could keep coming on to the market, Vancouver avoided a situation of scarcity and a permanent increase of land prices.

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Part 1: Early Days here