With the recent controversy over the Le Marché St George, on of the points listed in the Scout magazine piece already posted http://scoutmagazine.ca/2015/12/08/vancouver-would-be-cooler-if-259-le-marche-st-george-could-keep-operating-as-is/ is the note about how this kind of neighborhood development is now illegal. “It’s important to remember that markets similar to it used to operate everywhere in Vancouver, that is until planners convinced the City to phase them out beginning in the 1960s.”
By not conforming to the neighborhood zoning bylaws, no-one could now create a new version of the same thing, so while little neighborhood spots like this are almost universally acclaimed to be great, they exist only because they still exist, in older neighborhoods … no-one else can ever have one, and that’s a shame, because it represents a void in potential civic interest, something that can forever never be there, and one more reason that people in newer neighborhoods feel they must drive everywhere – they don’t have what everyone used to have, the corner shop, that didn’t have everything, but was always handy to have nearby.
By not conforming to the neighborhood zoning bylaws, no-one could now create a new version of the same thing, so while little neighborhood spots like this are almost universally acclaimed to be great, they exist only because they still exist, in older neighborhoods … no-one else can ever have one, and that’s a shame, because it represents a void in potential civic interest, something that can forever never be there, and one more reason that people in newer neighborhoods feel they must drive everywhere – they don’t have what everyone used to have, the corner shop, that didn’t have everything, but was always handy to have nearby.
There was a good piece written a couple months ago titled ‘my illegal neighborhood’ http://cityobservatory.org/my_illegal_neighborhood/
And that is why single family houses in such charming neighborhoods are so very expensive !!
So we can protect the low density and charm and small neighborhood stores, or we can create higher density and new housing, incl. rental properties and more affordable condos .. but we cannot get both .. unless a non-growing more rural town like Port Alberni or Kimberley.
Um, the West End has many such charming stores, and its not low density, neither is Kits near the beach, again, lots of cute stores, and at least a significantly higher density than average (not necessarily ‘high’ density in an absolute sense).
Most of those cute stores had an apartment on top, were built with no setbacks, and often covered their entire lot, so FSR near 2.0, how does that require a non-growing, low density town?