Ray Spaxman received this from a contact:
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There is a real estate listing today for 1070 Barclay Street:
(The full marketing brochure is downloadable under the “Documents” heading.)
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The listing notes that with purchase of 1080 Barclay Street (north-east corner of Thurlow and Barclay), the site represents:
… an opportunity to develop one of Downtown Vancouver’s tallest residential buildings. Located near the southeast corner of Barclay Street and Thurlow Street, the property is ideally situated in the heart of the downtown peninsula. The 8,646 SF site falls within the West End Community Plan, which allows for the development of a residential tower up to 550 feet in height (if assembled with neighbouring property at 1080 Barclay Street – also available for sale).
Under “Features” the listing notes:
Achievable density upwards of 24.0 FSR with allowable 7,500 SF floorplates. 25% social housing requirement.
We have never seen FSRs of anything close to 24 for residential development – the Brenhill development in Yaletown was at 17.2 FSR. And because of the bizarre way the City has redefined “Social Housing” this really means that one-third of this space is truly social housing (or just over 8%) and the rest can be market rental.
Be interesting to see the shadowing impacts on Nelson Park for this project. And god help the people that currently live within this block and the development proposed for this site, and the two other gigantic towers fronting on Nelson Street in the same block.
I find it hard to believe city planners would approve a neighbourhood plan that allows a 24 FSR in the West End. Have asked Michael Gordon to respond via Twitter! If true, we need an enquiry as to why and how this happened.
Gord, Ray and Michael – If this is true, I’m very sorry that our recent individual and collective ad hoc efforts to provide urban design commentary for some city initiatives (Brenhill, 555 W. Cordova, the Kettle, etc.) completely missed this one.
OTOH – could this advert may just be real estate hype? If not, that industry is way ahead of the community and urbanists in such situations.
We have an affordabily crisis in the city caused mostly by overly restrictive zoning. And rental vancancy rates that are as pretty much as close to zero as they can get as a result of not enough rentals being built. Plus transit funding was rejected. The only option left is to have more people living within walking and cycling distance of downtown. Developments like this help solve real problems and should be welcomed.
Absolutely, I think there are few too many of us pushing for this kind of density. Its often the no sides that get the attention.
Really Richard? Do tell us how The Residences at Hotel Georgia, Jamieson House and Trump Tower are helping to solve the affordability crisis…?
Bob, if we don’t supply that kind of residences then they will push up the price elsewhere.
Richard – I’m sorry, but I do not think you know what 24 FSR means in terms of scale and neighbourhood impacts. Keep in mind that until the last few years, highrise apartment buildings in Downtown South and Yaletown have been generally built at 5FSR and 300 feet. Perhaps you can now understand why expert planners like Ray Spaxman and Michael Geller are alarmed by this truly unprecedented shift in land use intensity. I don’t think any planning staff and council could be sufficiently experienced to make an informed call on a project at such a scale, for the simple reason that North America hasn’t seen much if any of this density and scale before. And, it will certainly not be affordable.
It’s just one of a few nodes with taller buildings in the West End Community Plan.
i.e. it’s tall so that the rest of the mid to low rise in the West End can remain that way.
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showpost.php?p=7109357&postcount=12304
Bravo. Only more supply lowers housing cost. West end is very low density, far too low for its unique & awesome location near downtown, Stanley Park AND beaches. We need more of this, some of it with mixed lower end affordable housing on lower floors. FAR MORE !
“West end is very low density,”
I’m a little horrified to know what you would consider to be high density. But I’m not sure “low” or “high” should be the aim, but rather “liveable,” that is, enough people to support transit, walkability and bikeability, but enough space that people can feel comfortable. And that certainly means we can’t blanket the whole neighbourhood in 24 FSR.
No one is suggesting FSR 24 or 30+ everywhere. However, compared to Yaletown the west end is far far lower density overall in a much more desirable location. It is very walkable. As such we should not create artificial subsidized low end housing for the few that got lucky and moved in 20 or 30 years ago, living in rent controlled apartments well below market average, at the expense of those that seek modest accommodations without a long commute from Surrey, New West or Burnaby. To create more housing we need more supply. With limited land that means density.
A subway below Robson, Denman and Davie would be great, too, as would be 50% of all roads closed to cars to make them more walkable / mini-parks. far too many cars still, with parking that is far too cheap.
A subway below Robson would be a subway to nowhere. The West End is just that – the end, it doesn’t lead anywhere. It’s a financial absurdity to build a three-stop subway to service an area that’s already so dense and already achieves such high levels of transit, walking and cycling – better to improve those existing cycling and transit connections. We don’t have $20 billion to spend on subways – we can’t even wrestle $3 billion for a UBC line.
Of course we need more density, but there’s the entire city to think about. There’s plenty of much lower density land throughout the city of Vancouver. That’s not to say we can’t add development in the West End, but to characterize this neighbourhood as “low density” is really off-putting to the majority of Vancouverites. We’re not going to grow to 20 million people or become Tokyo in the next decade. Let’s keep stuff in perspective.
I agree. It’s less dense than Yaletown but still dense. And the traffic calming has made it walkable.
All it needs is more transit and maybe even luxury transit like the West Van buses. Even just a community shuttle new route between Davie and Robson. (Nelson for example.)
If the site can really achieve 24 FSR (and let’s nor forget it’s a realtor trying to sell the site who suggests that it might), then it won’t be unique in terms of density. Jameson House (which has an office base, but a similarly small site) was 23 FSR. The Capitol residences, with space for the Orpheum back-of-house and the VSO in the podium is also over 23 FSR on a larger site. The Private Residences at Hotel Georgia tower, which also has an office base, is 515 feet tall and is over 30 FSR.
There are several other sites in the West End Plan where up to 550′ towers were contemplated. Any tower here will have to provide 25% of the space as social housing or one-for-one replacement of the existing market rental housing with social housing units, whichever is greater. Most of the Plan limits new development to 7 FSR or 8.75 FSR, but a few sites between Thurlow and Burrard have a height and floorplate limit, but not a density cap. Rezoning is never guaranteed, and certainly density isn’t. The plan says “Rezoning applications will be subject to urban design performance (including consideration of shadow analysis, view impacts, frontage length, building massing, setbacks, etc.)”
thanks for the context. This sort of information is really helpful to put this in perspective.