Part 3 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.
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THE BEGINNING OF DENSIFICATION
While our self-image in the early 20th century may have been of a city of gracious homes set in a luxuriant landscape, almost immediately denser development began to intrude. The West End was the first to see ‘streetcar apartment buildings’ rise above the rooflines, beginning with the Manhattan on Robson in 1908.
Still among the densest residential buildings ever built in Vancouver, these pre-World War I flats completely filled their sites from lot line to lot line, with penetrations for light to reach the interiors.
The Manhattan on Robson, built in 1906.
By the 1920s, new controls required setbacks and lawns, while effectively banishing rowhouses.
Given a more modest scale and rising demand for personal accommodation, these smaller buildings proved that apartment living could be gracious and acceptable. Whether Tudor or Deco, with no requirement for parking, a small apartment block could fit comfortably into its surroundings. Even more affordable accommodation popped up occasionally above storefronts along arterial corridors and corner lots.
However, zoning for multiple-family dwellings of three and six storeys was restricted to the central area, generally in already aging districts in the downtown peninsula and around False Creek.
Rental buildings, accommodating many different classes of society, were viewed suspiciously by homeowners, particularly on the west side of the newly amalgamated City of Vancouver of 1929. Reflecting the values of the Garden City movement, many of Vancouver’s residents associated density with the pollution, crime, and decay of eastern cities – exactly what west-coast citizens knew they didn’t want.
But the reluctant inevitability of densification is detected in a 1963 speech delivered by Vancouver Director of Planning G. F. Fountain, titled “The Changing Face of the City”:
The Vancouver of 50 years ago was a pleasant place to live. Its setting on Burrard Inlet with the back-drop of the mountain on the North Shore was superb. The place was fresh and green, with Stanley Park close at hand with the undeveloped, untouched forest land all around. I remember particularly the beautiful gardens in the West End before the more prosperous people moved out and into Shaughnessy Heights. …
However, as time progressed it became evident to many that this pleasant city of yesterday (the West End in the 1910s and 20s) was becoming outmoded and that many things we had accepted or had endured uncomplainingly needed to be improved. Our population was growing and housing was becoming congested …
Zoning, in fact, came as a godsend to the City Council of that day as it solved the current controversy as to whether and where apartment buildings should be allowed.
Regardless of zoning bylaws or political constraints, when a housing shortage gripped the city at a time of rapid growth, war or economic hardship, there had to be change. Newcomers needed a place to live. Without appropriate accommodation, the result could be ‘overcrowding’, or worse – homelessness. Consequently, mansions became boarding houses and simple two-storey houses with attics and basements became warrens of illegal suites. Throughout the First World War, Depression, and World War II, older neighbourhoods densified from the inside out.
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Density in a City of Neighbourhoods (full document)
