Some correspondence between Chinatown advocate Melody Ma and past-planning director Ray Spaxman is worth sharing:
Hi Ray,
I’m Melody Ma who does a lot of advocacy for Chinatown. As you may know, the Northeast False Creek plans are going to city council. There are three buildings by Concord and Pavco that will be penetrating the Cambie/10th view cone in exchange for CACs and other public amenities. The renderings here.
I’m shocked that there is very little public fuss about this since we’re selling off an irreplaceable public asset that you worked so hard to preserve for us.
Melody
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Hello Melody,
I fear that one of my long-felt fears is coming to significance in today’s zoning and development processes. The attractiveness of income to the city coffers from CACs have become so important to current city budgets that Councillors must feel the conflict between the goal of what I have long called “neighbourliness” and the city’s income goals.
We must also work on a better understanding of what is involved in “selling zoning”. The significance of view corridors ( which policies should also be revisited) will lose out to the bigger and more easily understood desire for density and income.
Ray
Why is the cambie-street windshield view the one we see the most of when it comes to view cones?
I don’t think it’s a big deal.
The traffic lights block about as much of the view as the proposed buildings.
Why not get rid of the traffic lights? Or do what Portland does – place them only at the sides of the intersections (where they are easy to miss!)
Also note how the “view” is not centred on the street?
It is conveniently skewed to the right to avoid the City of Vancouver-owned former VanCity building on the left (which will probably be redeveloped at some point).
Meanwhile, the A&W and other buildings on Broadway will be limited to what looks like 2 storeys under that view cone – That’s a crime because those sites will soon to be opposite one of the biggest transit hubs in the region when the Broadway Subway is built.
Any other city would better rationalize its development around rapid transit stations.
And so it begins. Chip away at them one bit at a time and hope nobody notices.
Why is the city so reliant on CACs when there are thousands more taxable dwellings than there were a few years ago? One house paying $6,000 a year becomes 25 units paying $1,500 a year, at little cost to the city, Where is all that tax money going?
As Rax Spaxman correctly tells us, the City of Vancouver is addicted to massive CACs. Another article today explains that the City of Vancouver gets over 70% of the Value Lift when rezoning land.
This massive windfall for the City is wonderful, for the City Hall. Loads of cash but this also means that the cost of whatever is built goes up proportionally. ie: Very much more expensive than what was there before.
These is one reason that Vancouver is so expensive.
Another reason is that in most cities the old buildings are where younger people find less expensive housing. These older buildings are often found close to the city centre. In Vancouver this older building stock is found in Gastown and immediately east. This entire area has been gradually populated by incoming transients with a substantial proportion of recipients receiving, or needing, social assistance. Block after block is quite unattractive to anyone except the most needy, so young people have a far smaller area in which to find a cheap home.
I’d also suggest that our pattern housing demolitions means that a lot of the older medium-dense housing stock is cannibalised rather than having single family areas upzoned.
Burnaby is a prime example of this. Loads of 66′ lots with houses available, but the areas seeing the most redevelopment are fairly dense clusters of walk-ups.
In this case we have significant increase in density which is also good.
I don’t follow the argument that CAC’s drive up the price of housing, nor does Coriolis who studied this.
The price of a unit is market driven. Whether you pay 0 in CAC’s or 10 million, you charge the same amount for the unit, assuming you’re charging as much as the market dictates which is a given. I know it’s not that simple, but it also kinda is.
I also don’t really get the view cone argument–as mentioned by others here it always seems to be from the middle of a busy road. Who’s enjoying that view? That doesn’t mean I think we need 100 storey towers, but view cones seems like an odd argument against them.
Because a view cone is the same as neighbourliness? I like my neighbours to be animate more than I do to be the view of the horizon … not that I don’t like mountains, and creating the equivalent to Trump’s wall isn’t the solution either, but there is so much middleground between allowing some taller things, and not allowing any.
As pointed out above, it really doesn’t make sense if the A+W is kept at 2 story just to maintain a view that nobody not standing illegally on a median ever gets anyway.
This thread has always been one of my favorites about Vancouver … superimpose Toronto over top and see what you get. What you get is still a nice view of mountains. Shocking.
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=214398
I also like to go into the mountains, and look back just to see how bad all those towers look.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/pierreleclerc/12128977265
Yes. The Horror.
Why is it that cities in boring places usually seem to have better looking buildings than those in pretty locations? Sydney vs Melbourne? Toronto vs Vancouver?
There are plenty of reasons to build or not build tall buildings, the view from the median of a Stroad isn’t one of them.
While an interesting exercise, are you sure that view of Toronto’s skyline is compressed to fit Vancouver’s smaller core? IE would the buildings have the same spacing or would they be compressed together to form more of a wall? It would make quite a difference. And that view from the top of Grouse is nice, how much does it cost to get up there again?
I’m kind of tired about whining over the viewcones. I find they tend to come from people who don’t really appreciate Vancouver’s setting or come from drabber places where it doesn’t really matter what view you block.
Its pretty close … i considered doing one with an actual 3d model once to address/anticipate that specific comment but I never had time to play with it (I’ve got the Vancouver model, but never bothered sourcing the Toronto one. If anyone wants to shoot me Toronto data, I’m happy to overlay analytically.
Perhaps just a couple more kinks in these precious view cones and we can see them as the waste of time and human effort that they are.
I’d love to see a study as to how much the distribution of economic activity has been affected by these sacred-cow postcard views. It certainly moves economic activity away from the CBD by making prime lots less versatile.
Why are people living in one of North America’s denser cities so offended by large buildings? I’d love to have a Columbia Centre or similar sized building downtown in the CBD. Instead, a similar sized building is more likely to be built in Burnaby as a condo.
I don’t have a preference on the view cones, but my fear is that this seems so financially unsustainable. In a time where you’d think Vancouver would be flush with money, we’re having to scrounge for more. If times were tough, I could understand that we’d start having to bend our own rules to make ends meet. But, things are booming. This is the best of times, and we can’t even keep afloat now? Imagine if we hit any sort of slowdown.
Depending where you are, it really doesn’t necessarily mean one needs to go that high to hit viewcone … few large cities would consider 20 stories tall, but thats all it often takes (if that) to hit them, and while yes, a 20 story tower is a tiny bit more costly per sf to construct than a 12 story one, its not really that much.
Plus, it seems kind of weird that deals can me made for some projects and not for others (Vancouver House comes to mind … and the extra 8-10 stories allowed there) … where on other projects, a gerbil has to take a bite randomly out of a corner to get it to miss a viewcone.
If the views are so precious that we can’t give up 20′, we should give up the viewcones and just have a blanket prohibition on tall buildings Paris style (I guess Surrey would then be our Montparnasse, and Metrotown our La Defense? [except they’re the same direction]).
I find it odd that there is no general right to light or right to view codified except for these viewcones and apparently some sites on Fairview Slopes. If we wanted these things to benefit people where they live, other cities have rules which would do so. What we have are rules for imagined views where people typically aren’t.
I always found it odd, for instance, that if views are a thing, then why were the towers adjacent to Olympic village not required to misalign to allow views on second and third row towers? It could have been achieved easily by swapping the position of the tower on the podium.
Or shouldn’t solar access be codified? Now, you have things like the RS1 envelope which sorta – kinda promotes light to a neighbour, but there is no actual language for how much, for how long, so you could achieve the same thing in a host of other ways if only there was actual quantification of things. One doesn’t even have protection of solar access if you put up solar panels: http://theprovince.com/news/local-news/solar-power-seller-fears-vancouver-development-will-blot-out-the-sun … so basically, instead of well considered rules to make sure we have light and view where they are actually needed, we have a set of viewcones which curate a view where people generally aren’t … and that’s it.
If we’re going to have rules, make them good rules, with actual specific goals, not just hand-me-down notions of tall=bad and unneighbourly. It honestly rings little different than the stereotypical Dunbar-ite ranting against the 4 story building blotting out the sun forever from their sidewalk.
If what is wanted is a real right to light, right to view, right to solar access, etc … then we should discuss these things, not things which sorta provide them accidentally to some.
Prioritising Solar in the city is a waste of useful space in a city. In Vancouver, we also get pretty marginal solar production, and have some of the cleanest grid power in the world. Solar in general produces more carbon due to manufacturing requirements that hydro. Not much more, but a bit. So why would you go out of your way to build it?
We shouldn’t prioritise a little bit of solar power when you can have more efficient use of land. Dense parts of the city will never produce as much power with solar as they consume. It’s ridiculous to try to do so.
That being said, this is a constant theme of the city and it’s spot zoning. It’s a terrible policy for everything except the city’s budget. This fellow should have had some certainty that his production wouldn’t be unduly affected, and he could easily claim that the city’s policy is causing him undue hardship.
There are a few brutal examples where view cones screw up a project immensely.
The first is the Main Post Office redevelopment. There are view cones over the site – so what we get is short and squat and closely spaced blocky towers instead of a couple of taller towers.
http://urbanyvr.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Vancouver-post-office-redevelopment-model-Library-1024×768.jpg
From UrbanYVR.com
The next area of concern is the Waterfront Station Hub area.
Regardless of the specifics of the “Ice Pick” project, the heights in the vicinity of the biggest transit hub in the region (to the north of the station over the railway tracks) will be limited by the same City Hall / 12th Ave. view cone noted above.
i.e. note the view cone line next to the Harbour Centre observation deck in the pic above.
The next example is the site of the current Hudson’s Bay parkade (owned by Holborn). The site is adjacent to the Granville Station (whose ticketing hall is directly under Seymour St. next to the parkade, allowing a direct connection akin to the Bentall Centre and Royal Centre connections to Burrard Station). But the Bay Parkade site is limited by view cones to about 300 ft.
What you’ll end up seeing built on that site is a short squat project probably similar to the Main Post Office massing – probably with little to no open space.
While the view cones may protect the distant view from a few miles away at Cambie & 12th – the LOCAL immediate impact on the streets adjacent to the actual building site is to create a windy, pedestrian unfriendly canyon.
Thank you … I’d been trying to think of some good examples of projects cut by cones but such good examples didn’t come to mind.