@ Everyman, I should add that Vancouver wiped out its salmon-bearing streams and their huge riparian habitats long ago, and therein there is not much left to protect away from the waterfront edges of the city, save the habitat in existing parks. This offers fewer restrictions to creating better urbanism, and to ventilating it with open park space.

Moreover, there is a lot to be said about small urban parks, which are underrated when considered in the same breath as the large legacy parks (QE Park, Stanley Park, some of the larger sports-oriented spaces ….). If they are well placed, fairly generously-sized, numerous and accommodate a variety of uses and a significant tree canopy, they are very effective.

Bravo Richard! I agree with you wholeheartedly! A Metrotown for every arterial intersection! A Brentwood Mall every kilometre along Broadway and up Cambie! A Rize Tower (or two or three or four) for every low-rise, heritage village! 5 towers in the National Historic Site of Chinatown? I say 10, or maybe 20!

Let cold, shadowy streets prevail, where the ground details are invisible due to the darkness during the day. Let the nasty wind tunnels wreak havoc with umbrellas, and carry off small children and teacup poodles in their swirls.

Let 100+ car garages gum up the traffic nodes! Let the grid flicker and wane as we expend megawatts to heat the dark side of every glass and steel tower, and cool the blazing sunny side! Let the coal plants burn as we pump water and heavy loads up and down the length skyscrapers!

Let’s dredge up every ounce of Fraser River’s spawning sands to make enough concrete to pave the Vancouver skyline!

I love you, Richard, for proving that such a benign concept as “sustainability” could be construed as a license to create isolating, unforbidding wastelands in our own back yard. The “Greenest City” never sounded wonderful and appealing to me until you came along to show me what a monster we can make of it!

I prescribe a pat on the back, old chum! I am suddenly feeling very upbeat about the future direction of our city.

Dr.Frankantower #53,your re-education is complete and your manager position awaits you.

…. lOl

I thought someone was pulling my chain. But, it turns out it may be the chains of laboratory aberrations broken free of their shackles that I’m hearing instead.

Okay, on to more mundane things. 1800 units at 75 units per acre (the urban house density) is 24 acres.

http://wp.me/p1mj4z-oJ

We need a 3216-feet-long strip along an 80-foot arterial with 122.5-foot lots fronting either side (end-grain platting) to collect 24 acres of urban land.

Say 3300 feet, or 50-chain of arterial = 24 acres.

One city block plus one street measure 5-chain (122.5+20+122.5+66-feet). Thus, every block, or every 5 chains we will need to make up land lost to the flanking street.

So, 12 blocks of arterial—rather than 10—will suffice to yield 24 acres of buildable frontage, where we can erect 1800 units, and house some 4,000 people.

From Burrard Inlet to the Fraser River, our north-south arterials measure about 5 miles long, or 400-chain. That returns 80 city blocks. But, we only need 12 to meet Richard’s intensification target.

Of course, these are 12 end-grain blocks. Most Vancouver lots are greater than a 2 : 1 in proportion (length : width). Thus, if the intensification takes place along the long side of a typical Vancouver neighbourhood’s blocks, we may only need 4, 5 or 6 blocks to make it work.

If the intensification were to follow what I have termed “The Donut Principle”, clustering around a central open space, village square, urban room, park, parking lot, shopping plaza, etc., then we may only need to identify one or two “sites” to carry the bulk of the residential intensification.

It all rests on the factual realities of platting in any given location, and must be tested one site at a time—transparently, as part of a consultation process, or Morven et al are likely to loosen more mosters.

Add to that the issue that we already have zoned capacity that is not building out, and we get to the more important underlying problem.

On the one hand, the arterials are toxic and dangerous. Attracting private investment to re-develop single family residential lots fronting an arterial, in my view, will require having a revitalization strategy in place. We must form consensus around the need for redesigning ‘new’ arterial in terms of traffic volume, pollution, crossing safety, walkability, bikes, livability, and transportation. I call those ‘urban spines’.

On the other hand, we know from places like Portland that transit implementation is a trigger for private sector investment along the transit corridor.

Time for more math…

Does that two-plus-two work for you Richard?

JJJ @ #58

“ . . . Clusters at large sites + upzoning . . . ” Ummmmmm, right idea wrong wording . . .

Here’s my latest take . . .

http://www.theyorkshirelad.ca/1yorkshirelad/vancouver.re-boot/Vancouver.re-boot.html

First, a correction to my post 57…

Most Vancouver urban blocks are greater than a 2 : 1 in proportion (length : width).

The typical Vancouver urban block is 4-chain wide and 5, 6 & 7 chain long. We find square blocks (4 x 4 chain) very rarely, and blocks longer than 7-chain can feel a bit mean downtown, or too suburban in the cottage lot districts.

On to Joe’s clusters (I’m assuming he means building towers outside the tower district)…

What we don’t really see in Vancovuer’s urbanism is what I would term “an even build out”. We see it in the cottage districts, but those are properly suburban lands.

I don’t see the one-storey commercial strips as “even build out”. Although places like Kerrisdale, Commercial Drive, Fraser Street, 4th Avenue, etc., clearly present a better experience of place because they present continuity at the streetwall.

In fact, the Planning Department some years ago, under a different DoP, made a virtue out of the sow’s ear of a see-sawing skyline with buildings popping up here in there, higher than their neighbours. As urbanism, I read those sites as either hubris, or a sign of a special deal hatched behind closed doors with the regulating authority. Probably, with an injection of a cash contributed to one or another political campaign past.

I think we want to avoid both possibilities. We are really flirting with political corruption. The longer we insist on parcel-by-parcel rezoning as the best way to transition from suburban to urban districts and quartiers the more we expose our system to abuse.

The clusters, if by that we mean Gateway at the foot of Cambie, for example, are just another form of a spot-rezoning application.

Of course, weakening our democracy is only one of the negatives that can ensue from avoiding the advantages of the spreadable urbanism, or an even build out.

Only by laying the tower on its side can we hope to achieve street revitalization along the full corridor of the transit implementation. The cluster concentrates all the benefits of development on a compressed, and often private site. The Cambie Gateway is envisioning a private, internal street, not the revitalization of Marine Drive.

Only by designating a building product that can build out incrementally, on a site by site basis, can we offer the promise of correcting urban problems through re-development to the city, and the region as a whole.

We are once again in an era of high stakes urbanism. Clinging to the old promise of the gleaming modern tower as the solution to all our problems is long in the rear view mirror.

I have every confidence that the development industry is capable of re-tooling, and providing any competitive product that the neighbourhoods ask for.

The real challenge seems to be with our regulating bodies. Getting provincial legislatures and local councils, and their staffs, to re-tool—and respond with a more critical reassessment of our urbanism past and future—is more likely to be the sticky wicket.

You’re right Everyman, it’s called supply AND demand. Development goes in cycles like a lot of things. When there is pent up demand developers develop new product. And then, usually there is a bit of over building at the end of a cycle, so the creation of new product slows and waits for the demand to build again.

In a normal marketplace land prices, and construction and soft costs are more or less givens, so where are the savings going to come from to produce more ‘affordable’ housing? IMO there are answers to this, but they will not result in the creation of 38,000 new units in the next 8 to 10 years, assuming of course this is done in a responsible way in cooperation with the affected neighbourhoods.

Another cost here in Vancouver is the DLC and CAC charges. If these are lowered or eliminated, as the STIR programme did, then taxpayers are going to have to pay for the needed services and parks to serve those new residents. The present system uses a combination of taxpayer, DLC and CAC dollars to do so.

Cutting red tape at City Hall could save maybe 1% or 2%, so it’s not a big potential cost saving. Having said that there are some aspects of the approval process that can be improved, and this should help a bit. Process such as this one need to be reviewed periodically because they tend to become ‘bureaucratized’ (read serving the bureaucrats not the end product).