Once again from Jen St. Denis with Metro News housing experts weigh in on the “gentle density ” proposals put forward by the Mayor of Vancouver at the Urban Land Institute chat on March 1. And those experts are “cautiously optimistic” that the City will meaningfully engage with discussions with single family neighbourhood home owners about density. That is going to require a process that Director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program calls “not top down”.
There is also hopefulness that the Mayor is committed to allowing staff to do this work. In a sobering look at what is happening in the west side neighbourhoods Andy Yan provided a map showing that hundreds of residents have been lost from those areas in the last five years, contributing to what the Mayor referenced as a “failing city”.
Andy Yan stated “The city’s facing this blue screen of death and if it’s not careful they won’t be able to engage this issue of housing for local incomes.” In simple terms, the Mayor must commit to an active engaged process with the existing single family residents before they too are displaced or move. As Andy Yan astutely noted “Planning and engagement in Vancouver needs to move away from being the sell job to the teaching moment”.
It’s interesting to me that Strathcona is one of the neighbourhoods that is losing residents. While there was a lot of infill in the past, there hasn’t been many new projects to add people. There is the new building going up on Gore st. off Hastings, but little else.
If you look at the census data for Strathcona at block level, you’ll find that there have been both increases and decreases across the area. Many of the decreases are on blocks where old SRO apartments were (and in some cases still are) being renovated.
As an example, one block accounts for nearly 100 fewer residents, but there’s been no development on that block at all. However, it does have the First United Church on the corner of Hastings and Gore which was operated as very overcrowded shelter for a number of years, and now has far fewer overnight residents. It also has the Hazelwood Hotel, which had a comprehensive restoration which was completed in fall 2016 (after the census was completed)
Overall, it looks as if the City’s ‘local area’ of Strathcona had a net increase in population, and presumably that will continue into the future as more renovated buildings are re-occupied, and other new projects (like the new Library with non-market housing above) are occupied.
This is true. The census tracker at the block scale does tell a more accurate story. If a large development was underway in a half block when the census was taken, it would read as a radical decrease in the at block, and a marginal decrease in the average for the neighbourhood. Next census, a significant increase will be recorded as people have moved in at probably a much higher density than what was there before.
The census is like a poll, it’s a snapshot of a moving, changing environment. Too many people read into a snapshot what is better confirmed as a trend over several censuses over more than a few select neighbourhoods, hopefully at the detailed block scale. It’s a mystery why some pundits lament a decrease in population in some very low density (and therefore more expensive) west side neighbourhoods shown in blue — some to the point of calling it a “hollowing out of the city” — while ignoring the larger increase in pink (population and density gain) almost everywhere else.
If the city is failing Gregor has nobody himself to blame, having been in power for almost a decade. It will be interesting to see who his challengers are next year, the sense I get is people want change.
Didn’t they want change the last election? And the one before that? That’s what I kept hearing.
The City of North Vancouver just approved a Bylaw to allow single family properties to add both a coach house and a secondary suite.
The primary concern as always was parking, with some residential streets already becoming battle zones between owners – some of whom place orange construction cones to “reserve” the parking space in front of their house – and retail and office workers who park in the streets adjacent to Lonsdale.
There are a lot of ways that this kind of infill is appealing to me, but I wonder about the owner who suddenly finds that he has three families on each side of his house.
The battle of the cones is common where ever retail and residential coincide, especially in older inner city neighbourhoods that predate suburban car-oriented zoning bylaws by a half century. I’ll bet the majority of residents living in old houses there would gladly pay to have a designated spot on the street in limited numbers, especially if they are aged and cannot easily schlepp groceries more than 50m because of arthritis, or if some are contractors with expensive tools in a van. The city would have another revenue stream too.
An alternative, of course, would be permit or restricted residential parking zones. But the city needs to update its archaic policy on that and be proactive and not rely on a one-time vote of residents on a block-by-block basis where disparate results are often enacted. One block voting for restrictions in one vote leads to a permanent increased flow of cars concentrating in the next block that voted down permit parking, even with extraordinarily cheap permit fees.
Transit and car share should be promoted more in retail areas and employment hubs.
Another point. A free-for-all regarding parking in inner city neighbourhoods rewards those with multiple vehicles and penalizes those with only one car, or those with mobility challenges and a reliance on car share for hauling groceries and home goods a couple times a week.
Should road pricing be promoted, then that should also apply to street parking too and enforced with a registry and numbered stalls everywhere. One spot per household limits, and maybe a half-block reserved for tenants and visitors.
I know that ideally a car-free society is the most admirable goal, but that isn’t going to happen very quickly until the transit system is built up and an appropriate urban design response toward walkable neighbourhoods is in place. Road pricing by the parking stall with defined limits will no doubt work wonders on removing the neighbour’s unneeded and seldom used third car currently stored for free by the curb, and promote more efficient use of roads by favouring those who really require access.
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