The push back against the towers appears to be growing and there is no reason anyone can point to—except profit to developers—for building this ever larger, ever more monstrous, horrible architecture.

I’ve written about it here:

http://wp.me/p1yj4U-m0

It is a follow up to a Pat Condon – Gordon Price email exchange on the Tyee on just this subject (I link the Tyee story on the post).

Since then I’ve heard from City of North Vancouver and Nanaimo groups—to name two not exactly similar communities in our region—plus some of our Vancouver neighbourhoods. Burnaby is an interesting addition. But I hear there is some unrest all the way up the Fraser Valley.

Why not? It is hard to imagine how we are going to shrink our carbon footprint if we continue to build in a manner that only profits the developer.

Towers are left as the only option to create homes that are anywhere near affordable given high land prices and limited land to develop on.

Richard

In my experience, the towers drove the houses out of the market. That’s not just here, but everywhere. Not just this decade, but since the 1900s.

There is no opposition to building in single family areas. It’s just that there is no support to opening the flood gates to build in single family areas anywhere you please. The option of using the redevelopment of single house lots to revitalize all of Vancouver’s arterials, for example, has never been looked at seriously at City Hall as far as I have been able to establish. Maybe you’ve heard something different.

As far as Brentwood “all that is being lost” is… well, the subject of this post:

http://wp.me/p1yj4U-5h

Running Skytrain down the middle of the Laughed Highway—pay attention Broadway corridor—just killed the place. I’m there very often. The pedestrian count is virtually non-existent.

Giving up ugly old parking, gas stations and car lots is fine, provided that what we get is ‘good’ urbanism not more ‘Towers and Skytrain’.

We need to create a new paradigm for the next 50 years of urban development. NOTHING in demographics or economic forecasting predict that we need towers. Period.

@Lewis # 3:
“Running Skytrain down the middle of the Laughed Highway—pay attention Broadway corridor—just killed the place. I’m there very often. The pedestrian count is virtually non-existent. ”

Surely you’re not trying to claim that it was a beehive of pedestrian activity BEFORE Skytrain?

@6

Maybe with a strong buffer between traffic and the sidewalk and smaller retail units (no big box) and better architecture to offset the blighting nature of all that asphalt and concrete, it might have been possible to make Lougheed work. Anyways, Dawson is going to be Brentwood’s main retail street. A better choice than Lougheed.

Burnaby’s Brentwood area takes me back to Le Corbusier, the Plan Voisin and cityscapes I’ve seen in pictures of new Chinese cities. Ugh.

On another matter, is it true that Burnaby isn’t developing any social housing itself because it doesn’t see it as its role? If it’s true, that’s a great way for a municipality to stay solvent — intensive highrise development for a new generation of highly subsidized commuters and little give-back to aid affordability.

@Lewis why don’t you live far far away like in Maple Ridge then?

@ boohoo — Haha back! Good to hear from ya!

@ Sean Nelson

Please, don’t call me Surely!😉

The intersection of Lougheed and Willingdon could and should be something more. This is a 1930s highway built before we could really know how to handle large volumes of traffic, or indeed, before knowing just how big the volumes were going to get.

Now we konw. 10,000 vehicles per lane per day is a safe bet, whether on Hastings, Kingsway, Lougheed or Broadway.

The second question is: What happens to the highway when the highway enters a ‘center’?

Not a shopping centre, mind you, but an urban core. Brentwood in general, and Willingdon & Lougheed in this particular case, was a contender. So, the decision could have been to change the traffic pattern and the design of the street to make it much more people friendly on those blocks where it crossed the urban core. Pedestrian oriented, a livable street, all the things I am thinking about when I mention that we can double the density along Vancouver’s arterials by implementing surface rail and prioritizing the pedestrian.

@Tiktaalik

So, picking up from where I left of with Sean, we would be looking at a different Lougheed today if the decisions in critical areas would have been different:

(a) The design of the street
(b) The choice of transit technology
(c) The fronting buidlings
(d) Human-scale platting instead of super (unwalkable) blocks.

Make those changes in Metrotown and it converts into a hip and human-scaled neighbourhood like the best the world over. One would not have to move out one square foot of shopping. But the balance between pedestrian space and black top for vehicles would have been revolutionized in comparison to the current (horrible) condition.

Let’s hope the Revolt takes hold in Burnaby too. Their neighbourhoods have been all but left abandoned, including the parks, in the obsession to bend to the tower developers.

@Chris Keam

Joyce Station? That’s When TOD is not TOD! (Transit Oriented Development). Dealt with that one here:

http://wp.me/p1yj4U-cQ

@Jay & Tiktaalik

On Dawson… I wonder if a better place to start the pedestrian revolution is not Douglas Road. I’ve not done due dilligence yet, but the way it cuts from Lougheed just east of Willingdon and then follows a more or less level path makes me think this may be the last remnant of the pioneer road built by the Royal Engineers and named after the Colonial governor Douglas (we also have to understand the origins of Canada Way built for the centenary). The history of Kingsway is another bone of contention for me. Yet, being next door to the colonial capital of New Westminster, history in Burnaby is there en mass. Of course it is studiously avoided.

The Official Plan for Burnaby was a Corbusian dream. If you ever go upstairs for a building permit (or look out of Council Chambers) you are served a vista north with nary a blemish on an almost pristine view of nature (Deer Lake and the like). So the preservation of a swath of landscape and the construction of the City Hall are coordinated to serve up a vista and a vision of the Burbanby They Wanted.

Of course the Burnaby They Built is a mess o’cars.

This is suburbanism all the way. There just wasn’t much in Burnaby besides farms that developed before the Lougheed highway was cut through. By then it was all over for urbanism in North America. We were building suburbs, towers and Skytrain!

@Lewis:

I found the self-link you provided unhelpful. Your images didn’t reflect the very busy streetscape a block over, the locally-owned businesses surrounding the station, or the well-used parks and amenities that I see when riding through, or over (on Skytrain) this area. So, again, is Joyce Station an exception, or proof that towers and transit isn’t the boogeyman many claim? Because in my experience, it seems like a reasonably well functioning neighbourhood.

@ Sean, Chris & Jay

We seem to have a continuum in the discussion, let’s see where we can find some common references that work to suss out our positions more clearly.

Skytrian (or grade separated rapid transity): High frequencies, volume—attracts the businesses such environments need to thrive. It is commuter rail (Jay).

The problem with the train-in-the-sky is that it blights urban sites. Examples include Expo Line from Main Street to Surrey; Millennium Line from the point it surfaces near (what’s left of) Begbie Square in New West to VCC-Clark Drive; and the new Green Line in its above grade sections, Lougheed Mall to Burquitlam Plaza; Port Moody to Coquitlam Town Centre. I see no thriving there, which is very strange given the lob-sided nature of the investment made to put the train up in the sky.

Sean’s assertion that surface rail is ‘slow’ is a bit of a con. Surface rail can trip the traffic lights and move much faster than cars. And the trip time comparison has to include the obstacles put in the way of going to the Skytrain. The stops are always far apart. Climbing to platform level before boarding adds significant amounts of time.

On surface rail we can walk onto the fare-paid platform and simply step onto the train like we did during the Olympics at the Bombardier demonstration. That train was fast and efficient and could have tripped traffic lights in its favour to compensate for not being on a separated track like the one between Granville Island and Cambie.

The point that Jay makes, that Skytrain is commuter service, I see as a problem. Why can’t I jump on the train and ride it for a short distance if it happens to service my area, like VCC-Clark does?

Like the Broadway line will? Do I have to go to UBC to use the future Broadway line? Or can I hop off at London Drugs to buy sun block and come back home completely oblivious to the fact that I have a transfer to either the airport or downtown at the Canada Line on Cambie? The problem with Skytrain is that along Terminal Avenue, for example, it has not worked as a catalyst triggering redevelopment.

Malls Build Neighbourhoods … And pigs fly.

If what we mean by neighbourhoods is a common postal code, then sure, I agree. However, if what we mean by neighbourhoods is a walkable footprint that supports social functioning and mixing, then no! Shopping malls—the islands of parking, space colonies from another urban paradigm, places like Willowbrook, Landsdowne, Lougheed Mall, Oakridge, Park Royal—kill, destroy and make very difficult to regenerate neighbourhoods. But they build suburbs. Hard to imaging the growth of Coquitlam 1965 – 1980 without Lougheed Mall as a catalyst; hard to imagine the growth of Coquitlam north 1980 – 2000 without the trigger of the Coquitlam Centre.

We can have big box in a neighbourhood centre provided it is wrapped on the periphery with shops fronting the street. There is an excellent example of this at San Luis Obispo in California. We can have all kinds of mix—uses, transit, and social—at the neighbourhood core or heart. However, that’s not in the cards with the regional centre. It wants to isolate its customers and not let them outside until their pockets have been drained of all disposable cash. Between the centre and the rest of the neighbourhood lie the seas of parking and the moat of encircling 6-lane arterials. Cross that on foot! Go-ahead, I dear you!

Malls, Towers, Skytrain and High Volume of Traffic Nirvana or urban blight?

Let’s use No. 3 Road from Bridgeport to Westminster Highway as the case study. I believe all the features itemized in the previous paragraphs apply. But No. 3 Road—this the third design iteration—is not walkable. It does not have what Chris claims for Joyce Station Not-TOD. Nobody walks there. I go to the mall—that is not a generator or shaper of a neighbourhood, as Jay would have it—I got to the family restaurants, I’ve attended one children’s birthday party in a laser tag venue. But No. 3 Road, and the neighbourhood(s) it encompasses (or should encompass) all make the ‘Big Sucking Sound’ when it comes to pedestrain realm. Nothing more offensive than the sidewalk, complete with public art and benches, that stretches under the elevated rail (the Canada Line is not Skytrain—linear induction—technology). Oh, and No. 3 Road has been filling with towers, along with the rest of Richmond as well as with shopping strips and Malls. Problem is, they are not—and cannot be, by design—within short walking distances of each other. What characterizes the walking experience of place on No. 3 Road is just that—there is nothing within short walking distance of anything else. My conclusion, therefore, No. 3 is just the latest iteration of old paradigm suburbanism. It won’t hunt.

It’s the density, stupid! I specifically take a different view on density than that expressed by Jay:

You can’t build a vibrant neighbourhood around a shopping mall unles you have very high densities to support other business, which is what Metrotown is trying to achieve.

I’d stop at: “You can’t build a vibrant neighbourhood around a shopping mall.” Period. Full Stop.

The Gallaratese in Milano works. But it is not a modern shopping mall. It doesn’t have parking, and it is a layered cake of uses pilled four floors high. Toronto’s Eatons Galleria, modeled on the Galleratese in Milano, doesn’t feel or function in any analogous manner. Milano is a Renaissance city with a stupendous turn-of-the-last century streetcars (still running on the old stock). It is by far easier to walk and tram inside the transit loop—a belt around the old historic core—than drive. That was my experience.

So, no, gentlemen. It is to enough to call it “A Neighbourhood”… It has to walk, and talk, feel and smell like a neighbourhood too.

Lewis…. you are one hell of a clueless man!

You have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? Wait and see, by the time Brentwood TC’s redevelopment is completed, you will get what you have always wanted = increased pedestrian traffic. I can guarantee you that!

@ Jay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1o3cbLYoIY

Look, Jay, you just can’t ‘Twist’ numbers. They are concrete and verifiable data that correlates—in this case—with our experience of place.

If you can’t top the examples I’ve provided, then let’s drill down on the experiences of place you and I—and others—have most likely had in places like No. 3 Road in Richmond.

It is hard to imagine a place that has had so much investment poured into it with so little to show in pedestrian or human scale terms.

My concern with Brentwood is massive expansion of people with no plan for north/south transportation. Seems to me the commuting link to UBC should come from this area via BCIT to 41st ave and on to UBC from there.