I lived on Cambie in 3 storey 1950 walk up coop. No elevator, no outdoor space, huge 2 bedroom. Fantastic starter with min 25% down. Close to neighbourhood shops and transit. But car pollution. Why do we always suggest density should be on busy traffic arterials? Leave the arterial to two storey businesses and create zoning away from arterials. Oh that’s where the single family district is.

Suburbia will make sense again when companies realize how silly it it to make white collar workers drive across town to sit at a desk and work on a computer that’s probably older and slower than the one they have at home. It’s too bad we don’t have the visionary business leaders we need. Life would be so much better for so many people. Looking at the stressed and depressed faces of the people in their vehicles and on transit in the morning makes you wonder how far we are going to stretch people before they start to snap in significant numbers.

CORRECTION: Cambie-Street-Style speculation… one arterial over.

However, there are plenty of lots for subdivision along Oak. And the street conditions on Oak have been made un-livable due to High Traffic Volume.

Lots of chatter, lots of professional advice, lots of unsubstantiated opinions. Too bad the Vision propaganda bureau do not read other people’s advice. They have their own ideas, right?

Quite true Lewis #59, I too agree with you. And after re-reading gasp #47 again I have also agree with Glissando #9 (task Force Agenda 1,2,3) We cannot deal with actions of the ones presented by gasp #47 and not have to think of what’s the root of the problem for that 🙁

Mira, anecdotal evidence is so important to understanding urban problems. We are all looking at the same concrete facts, but we all see them just a little bit differently.

Brilliant, when that bubble pops, we could be looking at an even worse problem. Florida mortgages are over-valued by 60% if I recall correctly.

I agree with you in the sense we are in an overheated market. Prefer a soft landing. However, there are also some opportunities. If you already own the land, then the cost of borrowing and the cost of construction are pretty cheap. Good time to build social housing for example.

The other thing that touches on what Mira and gasp are touching on is the idea of targeting growth as the engine of change.

Aside from affordability, what is the other problem afflicting our city?

For me, it is the toxic arterials. Now, if we can wrap public investment in transit with private investment in residential intensification, and rebuild the arterials as greener, cleaner and quieter places that deliver maybe 3x more trip capacity (on transit vs. private cars) why not go there first?

Why mess around as gasp and others have said in the neighbourhood streets that were working just fine, thank you very much.

Not every solution “merely looks to help homeowners”. Some of us are working on urbanism as a multi-pronged problem requiring a more sophisticated solution than a Rise Tower.

@ Lewis #62: “Why mess around as gasp and others have said in the neighbourhood streets that were working just fine, thank you very much.”

Many, many residential streets still contain row after row of 66-foot lots where the vast acreage in mown | potable water consuming | drugged up lawns offers a spectacular opportunity to address our urban challenges.

Many of these low density neighbourhoods are cheek-to-jowl with arterials and town centres (e.g. Oakridge), which neatly illuminates one of the major inadequacies of our planning today. Towers to single family with only a thin invisible plane between them.

This is not to say I disagree with the development of our arterials, and living close to one I appreciate the new services and amenities (and find the new low rise projects in my neighbourhood quite pleasing), especially when supported by a high-frequency, clean, high-capacity articulated electric trolley bus service.

A $2.5 million 66-foot lot on the west side with one 3,000 sf house could otherwise support four $750,000 row houses at 2,000 sf if allowed to attain 0.9 to 1.0 FSR. If higher FSR could be allowed, some of the row houses could also have lane-oriented granny flats above a garage, or if designed similarly to a London terrace house, a generous secondary suite in the basement. All would still have garden space, albeit small.

There are much cheaper 50 or 66-foot lots on the east side and in nearby suburbs, which should bring the per-dwelling price down.

There is no physical reason why a string of 10 33-foot lots couldn’t be subdivided into a string of, say, 16 20-footer or 20 16-footer row houses, all much less expensive than a 33-footer, and still have 10 feet left over for a pedestrian walkway piercing through.

Currently, this level of FSR is not allowed for single-family, nor is freehold attached row houses because of some archaic legal glitch. Surely the fire, privacy and management concerns can be addressed through design and having a simple contract with the neighbours.

Moreover, we currently have heritage protection, and an architect worth his salt could incorporate existing houses with heritage value into the row housing mix, arguably adding interest. In addition, materials from the demolished houses (with, presumably, little architectural or heritage value — there are thousands!) could be recycled | resused in the new houses, though this step will increase the cost.

Instead, and as the result of the existing situation, we get the 6,000 sf Max Monster displacing the original often charming smaller house without regard to the potential of the lot, save for additional laneway houses and secondary suites, many within 200 metres of high density towers.

We can do better.

It may be possible to selectively abolish entire classes of immigrants, but I doubt it can be done without building the Great Wall of Vancouver or violating our core constitutional values.

… one of the major inadequacies of our planning today. Towers to single family with only a thin invisible plane between them.

MB 64

Last I checked lots on the west side were 50-foot. Most of Vancouver is 33-foot. But, the earliest areas, what we have termed the Historic Quartiers were platted with 25-foot wide lots.

All three—25, 33 and 50 widths—can be subdivided to yield two houses on two (new) lots.

The typology has been in place for centuries. I pick up the scent in 1600 Paris, when Henri IV develops Place Royale (des Vosges), Place Dauphin (alongside his his Pont Neuf—an incredible place to see the sun set into the Seine), and a set of town houses around a circular open space that was never built (Mansard built Place Victoires a few centuries later, no doubt with the projects of Henri IV in mind).

However, what resonates with me most about your post is the notion of looking for places in our city where things are awry, including streets and arterials where the noise & pollution are too high to support redevelopment.

Can we create a synergy there between triggering redevelopment and implementing transit? Does everyone understand that if transit goes on the ground, it removes cars from the road? But, that if it is Skytrain in the air, then it will be creating space from more cars?

These are some of the ways in which urban design principles combine that are not immediately obvious to the common understanding.

@ Frances. Calculating existing zoned capacity is a standard part of the planning process. It is necessary to know what the total is and from there they estimate how much of that total is likely to be built over set periods of time. Assumptions are made about what will be eventually built to their highest and best economic use which is generally to the maximum allowed under outright zoning.

It has been shown that whenever a property is redeveloped it is usually built to the full FSR allowed under that zoning bylaw. For instance if you look at older areas that were previously upzoned such as Fairview slopes (which was upzoned in the 1960’s-1970’s) it has been almost totally built to the maximum allowed under the zoning. There are very few of the original houses left in the area. The West End was on its way to complete build-out until the city brought in tower separation guidelines in the 1970’s to limit the number of towers.

The commercial C2 zones are being developed incrementally, and when properties are redeveloped it is generally to the maximum allowed under the zoning bylaw. In C3A zones of Central Broadway it is allowed to land density from the Heritage Density Bank so those areas may be developed much higher than allowed outright. Downtown Districts can also add 10% to the FSR and height without the requirement to rezone if they buy the density from the Heritage Density Bank. And of course there are many CD1 rezonings that go far above what is allowed outright. Very seldom would a property be redeveloped to below the maximum allowed.

It is true that some owners do not want to develop, but at some point in the future, say in 10 or 20 years they may want to sell and the new owner may want to develop it since the market value of the property would reflect. the highest and best use at the time which would be the outright zoning or higher. The farther into the future the planning process is projected, the higher the percentage of build-out of existing zoned capacity would be assumed.

So basically existing zoned capacity is important when considering long term planning such as neighbourhood Community Plans or the Regional Context Statement. It is not intended for everything to be developed at once, but incrementally over time. It gives an overall picture to know what potential is available.

I appreciate this discussion of housing capacity in areas of the city where we will be doing community planning over the next couple of years – the West End, Grandview-Woodland, the Downtown-Eastside and Marpole.

My earlier comments were informed by a study that I supervised by a masters planning student who is interning with us that focused on mixed use buildings. Also, my thinking about this issue of the redevelopment of older commercial buildings on shopping streets began to change when I noticed that two good sized parcels on West 4th Avenue were developed a couple of years ago with one storey commercial buildings by a local commercial developer whose family holds the property and rents out the retail spaces. So I asked him, why did they not build housing above and benefit from selling residential condo’s on the upper floors. He told me that rents on West 4th Avenue made the numbers work and his family were more interested in the long term income and they looked at the properties as ‘long term holds.’ I am also intrigued that the owner of the development site being developed at Nelson and Denman chose to not develop the residential above the commercial even though they had originally obtained approval in a rezoning to develop a mixed use building. I had assumed that of course the housing would be developed because selling condo’s can be quite profitable for developers. But now my thinking has changed.

So my student intern and I interviewed many people involved with commercial and mixed use developments on our shopping streets. It became apparent to me that different types of developers look at these sites quite differently:
-some just are interested in building only commercial if it is a successful shopping district, and
-some developers are primarily interested in building mixed use buildings and their primary interest is in selling strata units – commercial CRU’s on the ground floor and strata residential above.

I anticipate that some commercial districts and sites will indeed over time site by site build out as mixed use and others, I believe, will remain primarily commercial. Also, commercial streets where there will be night life, restaurants with busy patios, and of course retail, may develop as solely commercial or if as mixed use, we must take care that the ground floors work as homes for businesses, that they are flexible well designed commercial spaces and can work for a variety of businesses and of course, that we look at ways to design the buildings to ensure that homes above can be designed to minimize noise and odour impacts (in the case of restaurants or bars).

Bill@75 – the uptake in arterial mixed use development you’ve noticed in recent years is due largely to C2 zoning changes in 1989 that made it more attractive to include residential in such zones, usually in 4-story forms. Prior to then, the residential portion was severely limited.

The political motivation for this and other changes during that critical and booming period was to help protect older rental housing stock in areas zoned for high rise development, like Kerrisdale.