Picking out a couple of commentaries from the posts in another thread on the Rize, which is generating the most interesting conversation I’ve seen about development and planning in this city than I’ve seen in a long time.
The first from Cameron Gray, the former director of the city’s housing centre. The second from historian and city-history documentarian Michael Kluckner.
Cameron Gray
A central problem with the current community planning process is that it doesn’t go beyond good intentions and get to the nuts and bolts of future development. The Mt. Pleasant Community Plan reads like motherhood and apple pie. Unless the City and community develop a plan that actually spells out maximum densities, building heights, set backs, etc. and defines the massing and land use for the whole community, we will continue to see these battles fought site by site. The Mt. Pleasant Plan should have provided enough clarity e.g. the max height and density for the 3 sites identified for higher densities and taller buildings to avoid this kind of confrontation. To just identify the 3 sites as potential high rise sites is not good enough. What does that mean? Higher than 10 storeys or over 20? The City, and the community, effectively left the hard work to be done site by site; short term pain was avoided for long term agony. Council should send the planners and community back to the table to come up with a plan that provides everyone with clear direction for development that may take place anywhere in the neighbourhood. Ideally the City would prezone Mt. Pleasant; that would provide the maximum certainty for all involved, but that may be too much to hope for.
Michael Kluckner:
My comments to mayor & council (trying not to add to the length of the public hearing):
First, Watson Street is treated insensitively. Truck loading? Watson Street is a very unusual half-block street in gridiron Vancouver and should be cherished and celebrated. This DP treats it very poorly.
Second, a 19 storey tower would be overwhelming to the fine texture and scale of the existing community. There has been a battle over whose perspective drawings are telling the truth. I suggest that anybody wondering what 19 storeys would look like should go look at Kerrisdale, where there is a mix of 10-storey high-rises together with lower-rise buildings and houses. If you think those heights work, imagine them doubled.
Third, there are good designs recently added to Mount Pleasant which are effectively 3.0 FSR. The rental/mixed use building at 1 Kingsway, where my daughter recently lived, is an excellent example. Its apartments relate to the street rather than being aloof from it in a vertical gated community atop a podium.
Fourth, city residents including me are getting absolutely tired of the tower-on-podium model and see no reason why this design should escape from downtown and be rewarded here with extra density. How do these things get through the Urban Design Panel? If the panel is so stuck in its ways, perhaps it needs some new members? I’m sorry, but this building looks like Metrotown. As Witold Rybczynski asked his audience at a lecture in Vancouver last October, “Why did you want to make your city look like Singapore?”
Fifth, the city should look to an earlier building model to reward with extra density. I believe that Anchor Point, built at Burrard and Pacific by Daon in the late 1970s, shows the way. Its 6-8 storey brick buildings are set on the street line, similar to the historic Vancouver model in Mount Pleasant and the West End; it has 465 units with an urban park within the “U” formed by the buildings. This type of project, I suggest, would see wider support in the community, would allow the developer a decent return, would make good use of a significant site at a major transit crossroads, and would distinguish the architecture of a historic neighbourhood from that of the much-overdone Downtown South/Yaletown neighbourhoods.
I urge you to send the Rize development back to the drawing board.