Frances Bula has jumped into the deep end of the pool on one of the city’s hottest arguments – the scale of new development – both in her blog (Does Vancouver have to be a high-rise condo city? Or are there other choices?) and in Vancouver magazine (“The Middle Ground“).
… it is puzzling to me that Vancouver, a new city, an innovative city, seems to have invented only two distinctive types of housing: the podium-and-point-tower high-rise and the Vancouver Special single-family house in all its increasingly awful permutations. (The older ones are actually starting to look like Greek temples, with their clean and simple lines.) …
And we have a strange gap in our architectural ecology: the small mid-rise.
I posted some numbers last week in “The Highrise Myth” to make the case that mid-rise is mainly what we’re doing; most of the city’s development is in fact low- and medium-rise. It’s just not as visible as highrise.
To make the case again, I went to this week’s issue of Novae Res Urbis – the weekly newsletter on municipal issues in Vancouver – and culled the renderings from the most recent meeting of the Urban Design Panel.
.
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All mid-rise (five to twelve storeys).
Still ugly.
Up until recently, the maximum for wood frame was 4 storeys (i.e. low-rise)
If you built a midrise, it would have to be concrete – that impacts the pricing. A small 5 storey concrete may be expensive to build and tough to sell.
Only in recent years has the building code changed to allow 6 storey wood frame buildings – and has zoning changed to allow 6 storey buildings along arterials.
Many buildings are capped at about 4-5 storeys even now – plus there’s the NIMBY factor.
This 6 storey proposal in Kerrisdale was withdrawn afer neighbourhood outcry.
http://former.vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/rezoning/applications/2095w43rd/index.htm
… and resubmitted at 4 storeys:
http://former.vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/rezoning/applications/2095w43rdav/index.htm