From The Tyee, by Patrick Condon:
Vancouver’s future is dimming due to unaffordable housing and overloaded public transit. How the University of British Columbia builds student housing could make a major dent in both problems.
But not if the university sticks to its current plans.
For starters, not only is UBC building too few units on campus, the new projects it proposes will force students to pay more than top dollar, even by Vancouver standards. …
Putting far more students on campus could be done in the “street and courtyard” style found in cities like Paris, Berlin, Oslo and Barcelona — and in university settings like those at Yale and Oxford. The design allows students to circulate on active, energizing streets, or find rest and contemplation in quiet courtyards only a few steps away. Trips to classes or other on-campus destinations would be shorter if housing were mixed throughout campus instead of distilled into a few high-rise hubs. Female students might feel safer after dark because a more densely inhabited campus creates more “eyes on the street” and fewer hidden, lonely pathways. …
Build enough housing on campus the right way, and UBC will reap another great reward. The campus which now often feels like a glorified office park, would finally reflect its stated aspirations. UBC would become a true community of learning — one worthy of joining the ranks of other great mixed use university towns like Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg and Bologna. All are mid-rise, all are vital, walkable, safe, and sustainable.
This is to one extent an informative piece that highlights the vital issue of inadequate student housing, and offers a very good solution that speaks to the human activation of space in residential areas. On that, many kudos.
But in seeing the author’s name before reading the Tyee piece I bet myself a Loonie that Patrick Condon would find ways to knock high-rises and the Broadway subway. And there they were, not even a minute in! The subway even garnered its own sidebar. These are the habitual caveats and tangential agendas in almost every article written by this author, inevitably followed by admiring Tyee commenters who usually take the evidence presented at face value. Dare to ask critical questions on a piece like this in the Tyee comments section, and you’ll be shot down and mislabeled a “paid developer shill” even though all you care about is a fair representation of what urbanism is.
May I suggest that the vision presented by Condon is more limited than it should be, and requires a rebuttal? Advance apologies for the length of this one, and to Gordon et al for their commentator tolerance.
Campus:
First let’s tally ALL the numbers, not just those from a select list. The student body is not the only group that commutes. With a student body of 52,721, a staff and faculty body of 14,114, and another body of thousands in the public-private research campus, and a few more thousand whom live in the private residential there, you have around 75,000 people who exist on campus on an average day, the vast majority of whom commute from off-campus.
Taking Condon’s idea to its natural extent, UBC would ideally strive to become a self-contained city unto its own with all the necessities of life provided within its boundaries for everyone, not just unhoused students. And that extends to staff and faculty housing and shopping and entertainment opportunities. But that’s just an ideal. The reality is that ever since Bill Bennett cut deeply into post-secondary education funding in the early 80s, many campuses (not just UBC) have had to turn to developing their land assets for revenue. One can criticize them for how they are accomplishing that, but not why.
Mr. Condon’s low / mid-rise ideas for a campus have been standard practice on the SFU Burnaby Mountain campus for a generation now, some of it very innovative and energy efficient, yet not one word was mentioned of this local example. Look closely, and the quadrangle at SFU becomes apparent, but rendered in Canadian Modernism instead of Elizabethan architecture richly cladded in limestone and topped with steep slate roofs pierced by tall chimneys replete with black coal smoke exuding high into the air to descend on picturesque sheep pasture, rushing trout-stocked streams with narrow stone bridges, wooden rowing skulls on the old artificial lakes, and quaint ancient hamlets. There really are some fine Canadian campus examples out there. Instead, UBC was portrayed as some kind of patrician Oxford or Cambridge with a repeated millennia-old quadrangle vernacular in-the-making without a wisp of the ancient history or social and class divisions.
Read the abstracts and conclusions of the three studies on high-rises he cited, and discover in fact they were non-conclusive. The studies clearly annunciated that residential housing form DOES NOT dictate the effects of a multiplicity of living conditions, including poverty, accessibility, isolation (the low density suburbs arguably are the worst on that), walkability, family coherence, personal wellbeing, access to public services, etc. Saying low and mid-rise fosters ideal social conditions is like claiming form triumphs over function. The cart is placed before the horse. Healthy communities can attain many forms, including high rise (preferably a wide mix) but are usually somewhere above 30 dwelling units per acre, treat the ground as space dedicated to humans, have good access to local and regional services and amenities, have historical relevance, regional design references and generous public commons, contain extended families and other deeply meaningful social networks, and haven’t given everything over to private transport machines.
Transit:
Overcrowded transit is one reason why thousands drive to Point Grey and park near Blanca, then bus it or ride a bike to campus from there. Just ask anyone living west of Trimble how they like that. And note how their numbers skew the counters at the UBC gates. In many cases, a cyclist or bus rider is in fact a car commuter beyond the gates.
Condon also cited another report, which was written by KPMG for the city. He didn’t mention that that very report concludes a subway was the best long-term option for the entire 14 km Broadway-UBC corridor. Clearly, 65% of existing Broadway riders are going to Broadway, not UBC. And 50% of all riders already come from beyond Vancouver’s borders for various reasons, including the fact that living in Mom’s and Pop’s basement is cheaper than renting on or near the campus. Condon’s knock against the subway isn’t all about UBC; there is no deserving knock on serving the Broadway corridor first and foremost with the highest quality transit service available because it happens to contain the largest office floor space and number of jobs outside of downtown, and possesses a dense array of public health facilities with a constellation of private support businesses that require better access to the rest of the region.
Should a subway ever be completed to the campus one day, you can be sure a lot more of the current 75,000+ people working, living and learning on the campus today (and tomorrow’s 100,000+) will use it. So will the 10,000+ who will eventually be living on the Jericho Lands. Some day council will come to its senses and those highly wasteful and extraordinarily expensive residential lots near UBC will be subdivided into more affordable forms of housing, bringing thousands more families into the subway and UBC catchment area, and a lot more rental suites targeting students.
Living on campus is one aspect. But connecting the campus to the region and the satellite UBC facilities at VGH, Great Northern Way and downtown cannot be ignored. Being able to travel one day from UBC to New Westminster and Coquitlam Centre on frequent, separated rapid transit without one transfer has a great appeal, which is one way to illustrate how the Network Effect will surely kick ridership sky high only because it’s a superior and very well-connected service. Higher ridership means not only greater operating revenue for a hundred+ years, but lower operating cost and energy use per rider. Capital construction cost is not the only thing that matters, and I’d suggest it’s not as important as long-term operations. The subway is about building a regional city for the 21st Century, not just about one campus at the edge bordering the lowest density neighbourhoods in the city, and limiting transit options to slower and less frequent modes suitable only for far westsiders.
The misreading of federal budget sequencing is inexcusable. Clearly, the Trudeau government intends to provide the bulk of transit construction funding in their second term well after the engineering and design have been done (by the 2019 election), which puts the completion of the Broadway subway, Surrey LRT and a host of other regional and national projects within their second term, which will end in 2023. Some projects may not be completed by then, but they should be well underway. Just today the province re-confirmed its commitment of 33% to ‘lock in’ the fed’s promised 50%, and announced their support of a per unit area charge on development near transit stations. Politics will play a large role, of course. Why would Trudeau put his wide urban support at risk by promising to complete projects in the 2040s? That is ridiculous.
High Rises:
While true that concrete is responsible for 7% of the planet’s GHG emissions, it is far from the highest. Ninety-six per cent of liquid fossil fuels are directed toward transportation and present a far larger target. The emission from building operations over their lifespan is five times greater, no matter what material they are made of. The per capita emissions and energy use during construction is always offset by the long operational cycle. In those terms, the full life cycle per capita emissions and energy use is far lower in high density communities than low density. These are readily available stats, and for an urbanist to ignore them is also inexcusable. To suggest a complete change out in building materials presents once again a limited view that demonstrates a poor understanding of life cycle accounting, and that is annoying when climate change is used as an excuse to try to bring back little villages by the sea to a metropolis. I concluded in previous articles by Condon that this is deliberate in order to support a bias for low rise development, using wood construction as the nucleus to the argument.
Concrete is an extremely versatile material. Rather than substituting it outright, you can probably cut the Portland cement-related emissions by 2/3rds or more by utilizing electric induction kilns powered by clean renewables instead of gas or trash-fired kilns. [Now there’s a potential patent gold mine for Canadians with a knack for innovation. The same principle applies to steel making with electric arc furnaces. Where is our government industrial strategy to cut emissions? Well, that’s another story.] What a simple but effective solution, but it will be more expensive until the well-known process is standardized. That leaves the emissions from extraction of limestone and aggregates and transport, but these represent the minority of GHG emitting components and can be mitigated to a degree through location and policy.
Surprise! High rises can be made from wood too, and architect Michael Green has addressed this topic locally for a few years and has one or two such projects on his board. There are huge possibilities with cross-laminated timber or glue laminated posts and beams. With steel-reinforced joints and precision shop fabrication, building frames could be erected and bolted together on site very quickly with a crane and save on labour costs. But even these buildings would have reinforced concrete foundations.
I suggest in today’s world one has to counter the ivory tower ideals with ground-level practicality.
Lots of ideas here. Thanks for posting this.
Condon has an preference for a particular urban form.
He’s determined that people should live in his favorite architectural form. So he searches for evidence to support the conclusions he has already come to.
Actually most people do this, especially in emotional, ideological debates – we begin with our conclusions and then cook up post-hoc rationalizations.
What bugs me is that Condon is a Professor, and uses his academic credentials to condescend… hinting that his conclusions are almost “scientific”.
Smart ideologues don’t come to better conclusions… they just come up with more compelling rationalizations.