An Item from Ian found in Vancity Buzz.
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Greg Mitchell asks the question:
… let’s rethink the narrative. We know Vancouver is an expensive city in which to live – it seems to be all Vancouverites think about currently (yes, I’m guilty too). And we are obviously limited in terms of our land on which we can develop (mountains, ocean – enough said). So our only option is to densify – but the question is HOW to densify.
He provides, in detail, an alternative:
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Those details here.
Wow, this is incredibly prescriptive. I do like planners and planning and they have achieved important objectives. But I have to say, as a group planners have an overarching bias towards command and control solutions. They are central “planners” after all. In general I think that history has shown that command and control is not the greatest at delivering an optimal balance between supply, demand and price.
For instance, this author could have said that we are going to relax the ban on anything other than SFH homes in SFH residential districts, because it’s limiting supply and thereby increasing price. But no, instead of pointing out the economic harm being done by this particular command and control approach, he suggests substituting an incredibly prescriptive, one-size-fits-all solution to residential development in its stead. The author blithely assumes unlimited demand for his particular prepackaged solution (which does have some appeal, it should be said). But why can’t we have a diversity of housing types? Why can’t we simply tell the market what it can’t do, but within those goalposts, let it set about achieving the mix/diversity of housing types that can only come with decentralized decision-making? I suspect that many planners would scoff at that last statement.
It is hard for centralized decision making to deal with complexity and the enormous nuance in individualized human needs and desires. I don’t see why people think that engaging in this level of prescriptive planning will be any more successful in achieving affordable housing than Cuba has been at raising the living standards of its people. Putting a bunch of smart people in a room can only do so much — we should recognize our limits, set guidelines, and let the market do the rest.
I also think the argument that demos are “wasteful” is truly ironic here. A major factor driving demos is how prescriptive the new building code is with respect to renovations. The city wants old houses to be more energy-efficient. In pursuit of that aim they have essentially created a regime that tells the homeowner that if they want to do a reno of a certain degree, they might as well just knock it down and start again in a more energy-efficient fashion. If you think that’s wasteful then fine, but perhaps the solution would be to relax some existing, waste-inducing rules rather than layering rule on top of rule on the theory that we’ll end up with greater housing supply at a more affordable price. The thicket of regulation is more likely to freeze the city in amber than anything and calcify existing land uses.
I’m not advocating for market fundamentalism or some kind of Randian utopia. I’m just begging for people to consider simply identifying the restrictions on building that we really need to have and otherwise not being such development hypochondriacs. We have to be more willing to, within limits, let the chips fall where they may. Many in the planning community don’t want to hear it, but when it comes to affordability, unleashing more market and less planning has to be a focus. Just prescribing highly-specific, even though denser, land uses isn’t going to get it done.
Getting rid of existing built single detached family dwellings on a massive scale for a Canadian city doesn’t seem to be an easy, single bullet solution for affordable housing.
Waiting for a developer to come forward to build/ offer affordable housing in Vancouver’s real estate market and hoping for market forces will make this possible isn’t going to happen fast.
I’m sorry to say this and this will seem horrifically insensitive: maybe an earthquake is the only thing that will bring down the cost of Vancouver residential real estate (temporarily) because of concerns for structural safety. The greed of the real estate industry will be revealed when they quickly readjust their pricing with owners, post-disaster. Has anyone looked at this: cost of housing in earthquake-impacted big cities..after the disaster? How long does the market recover after a destructive earthquake?
While it’s useful to examine foreign ownership of residential homes, actual occupancy by owners and tax payment practices, it may be useful to remember: it takes willing real estate agents to drive the prices up in bidding wars/estimating for the owners what price, to list their properties. Can we solve this latter problem of “market” forces also?
What if we ended single-family *protectionism*
This also puts too much density too far from most amenity – unless new commercial areas are introduced within single use neighbourhoods.
A better idea might be to improve on the idea of the 5-6 storey apartments along transit arterials currently being pursued. The upside of this idea is it puts lots of people close to amenities and transit. The down sides are it exposes even more people to excessive noise and it maintains our boring linear commercial strips that are focussed on the automobile.
More people will also mean more demand for commercial storefronts. So take the next parallel street (on both sides where possible) and make them severely car-restrained streets with 4-5 storey apartments (height transition) with ground level commercial frontages for the first block or two either side of a commercial crossing. In many cases these would also be our bike routes giving cyclists direct access to shops, restaurants and services. These storefronts would attract the kinds of businesses that would benefit from the quieter urban streets of this neighbourhood hub of several square blocks. Many businesses would still be better off on busy roads but there would at least be a choice for those that aren’t.
Our commercial streets offer a lot of noise, stink and danger to pedestrians and cyclists and our nodes are currently nothing more than the crossing of two of them. They could be ringed by a much more pleasant urban experience which might lead to traffic calming of the arterial crossings as well.
The single family homes would, for the time being, remain in their more distant enclaves as the urbanization slowly expands outward from those neighbourhood nodes. Seems less disruptive and offers far more variety than banning SFHs.