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Use some of our road space for housing — one of the winners in Vancouver’s design competition

July 30th, 2012 · 42 Comments

Take a close look at this idea. It could be a reality.

Many design competition entries are fanciful exercises that don’t go anywhere. But this one has a high-powered team, if you’ll notice,  and I have heard this idea being talked of favourably around city hall at various points.

 

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  • Oakridge

    I can already picture Dunbar residents tying themselves to the street trees when city workers arrive to cut them down.

  • Tessa

    This is good to hear. You’re right that a lot of the ideas there were fanciful to say the least, but this one has a lot of potential to densify while keeping the neighbourhood character and also reducing long-term costs for the city (a smaller road allowance means less maintenance costs). Bigger tax base + lower ongoing maintenance costs = better deal for residents.

    I also hope this will result in more housing choice, that is smaller units that aren’t regular single family homes. Townhouses, row houses, duplexes would all fit great into this spot.

  • Nicole

    Close the housing market to foreign buyers. I will continue to be unimpressed by Vancouver’s efforts towards sustainable & affordable housing until a Canadian landed immigrant / Refugee / Natural citizen status is REQUIRED documentation for private land ownership for residential purposes. I am sick and tired of watching China purchase my Country from out beneath my feet. (Literally, people – there are more rich people / geniuses / uncounted citizens in China than there are people in Canada.) I have travelled and lived all over Europe and I have thus far failed to see (insert Canadian city here) show any proof of having learned from the European model. Until students, seniors & the poor can live in mixed subsidized public housing I will not be satisfied. Private ownership (while perhaps a nice idea) is not the answer, and the market benchmark rent rates will never decrease significantly enough so long as disinterested (foreign) owners wield the upper hand.

  • Piker

    I see, when Snowmageddon II hits, we can lower productivity even more by trapping everybody at home!

  • Michael Geller

    I attended last night’s announcement and agree that this is an idea that is worthy of further consideration. However, to be successful, some form of compensation may be necessary for those corner lot owners who are no longer corner lot owners!

    One should not get too excited about the new lots being used to create affordable housing, (unless two or three units are developed on the new lots) since there will be substantial costs associated with the realignment of roads, power poles, etc. Nonetheless. The idea, from former GVRD planner Chris de Marco is simple, creative and worth trying.

    Other submissions are also worthy of further investigation, especially those that coincide with the ‘recommendations’ in my Roundtable report 🙂

  • Michael Kluckner

    Our 66′ foot street is in fact only about 12′ wide because of all the parked cars. Why so many? All the houses have suites, the garages are stuffed with the junk from the houses, and the backyards are growing the vegetables Vision says we need to become the greenest city on the planet. The typical 33′ lot generates about 25 linear feet of cars. So I can’t see how the streets can be made any narrower, at least not in East Van.

  • Julia

    under the current system of a fixed share tax rate, the tax base would increase ZERO.

  • Joe Just Joe

    Julia is spot on, not to mention that each household consumes more in services then the city collects. There are reasons for looking at some of the proposals but increased tax base is not one of them.

  • waltyss

    @Oakridge. Bring this one to Dunbar and you will see what trench warfare looks like.
    If the city were to proceed with this, how do they choose which side of the street to destroy a corner lot.
    If they are to go this route and take away the amenities that cause people to purchase corner lots (yes, I admit, like me), then purchase those lot and maybe convert them to row houses over 83feet. However, you cannot simply do that to existing owners.
    And frankly, the expensive neighbourhoods should not be the first place that you build affordable housing (it being less affordable).

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    Cris DeMarco has proposed the adding lots to the flanking streets before. It is fab to see her idea finally getting the light of day and deserved recognition. This is thinking out of the box in “urbanism”.

    [… Hang on. I’m just taking off the corsage, here, and stepping off the porch…]

    As one of the entries to ‘Building Bold on Private Land’ I must protest that no winner was selected among the entries by the jury. From the website:

    “No winner was selected in Building Bold – Private”

    When I ran tennis tournaments we would specify that if a minimum number of entrants was not achieved, then we would cancel the event. We would announce it ahead of time. But we also went out of our way to run events with a very ‘weak field’—if this is what we are to take away from the this competition organizer’s decision.

    Or perhaps we should intuit that given the current conditions it is not possible to “build bold” on private land.

    Is our idea of what constitutes “building bold” undergoing fundamental re-evaluation and society hasn’t caught up with the vanguard?

    Design competitions after all are a kind of mirror that we hold up to ourselves that show us the state of thinking in our moment.

    What I found interesting about this competition is that it allowed entrants to chose their own sites to present. I entered a scheme I had developed with RAMP for the contentious Rize site on Broadway & Kingsway.

    And, I explored with the help of Jacobs & Simpson a row house-based approach to redeveloping Vancouver’s first social housing site at Little Mountain.

    The number of entries to the past 3 Vancouver competitions are:

    2009 Form Shift (83 entries)
    2011 Viaducts-FCE (103 entries)
    2012 [Affordable] Housing (67 entries)

    All around a worthwhile exercise.

  • brilliant

    @Nicole 3-Absolutely. Imagine the glee is some circles if Gregor the Green said he was going to increase the housing stock in the city by 5% virtually overnight. That’s the (very conservative) estimate of real estate tied up by foreign nationals (thpugh judging by the dark windows in Coal Harbour some areas are closer to 50%).

    @Waltsyss 9-Funny, I don’t recall you being outraged for the residents of Shannon Station or Little Mountain when Vision decided to dump highrises across from their homes. Or is density only peachy when it doesn’t effect your property?

  • waltyss

    @brilliant not. Depends what the form of density is. If I live in or near an area (which I don’t) which is close to a public transit line or areas zoned for densification, then I should expect it. That is qualitatively different from plopping down multi unit social housing in the middle of single family residential far away from areas that are being densified.
    That said, I have always expected that my neighbourhood will densify. I do not envisage however that it would happen in the way proposed.
    And by the way, briliant not, it is nice to see you, who considers renters to be a lower form of humanity, climbing into bed with Nicole who seems to be opposed to private property at all.
    Sorry to say, facts and logic have never been your strong points.

  • brilliant

    @Waltsyss 12 said:
    “I do not envisage however that it (density)would happen in the way proposed”.

    Well well the classic NIMBY lament. And I don’t suppose the residents of Adera street envisaged the Vision would rollover to developer-donors and allow perfectly good Arthur Erickson designed townhomes to be replaced by a towering monstrosity across the street. Of coursr, that neighbourhood is so wonderfully served by a grand total of one bus route.

    And since you freely admit your neighbourhood is tragically unsustainable, the keast you can do is offer up some street space ifor the cause of Gregor’s Green Revolution. Or did you think recycling your frappacino cups was enough?

  • Anne

    This doesn’t seem remotely realistic to me, so I guess I am missing something.

    I live in the West End, so I have no dog in this fight, but it is hard for me to believe that anyone would accept this in their neighbourhood.

  • mike0123

    If this change is applied as widely as possible and 10000 new dwellings are built across the city, it will still amount to less than the number of new dwellings in the city between the 2006 census and the 2011 census. Compared to allowing secondary suites or rowhouses in single-family zones, this change would bring an insignificant number of new units to market. If this change is made, it should not be done with any pretense of making housing affordable in Vancouver. It won’t do that.

    The city owns a lot of underused land throughout the city in the form of wide street rights-of-way. But once sold, this land will be difficult and expensive to acquire for any future project that has not yet been conceived.

    Streets can be narrowed without selling them. Still, even these narrow streets will fall far short of a 1:1 ratio of distance between buildings to their height.

  • mike0123

    I don’t know exactly what affordable housing means. Maybe the city’s published a definition?

    First, on what area-basis should affordability be measured: per square foot, per bedroom, per unit or per lot? The city could make it so that, for example, the purchasers of one-bedroom units subsidize the purchasers of multi-bedroom units (i.e. families, households with more wealth) within a development.

    Second, should affordability be measured as the ability to rent or buy property? The city has no control over interest rate policies, mortgage term limits, credit supply, typical wages, etc.

    Third, should affordability be measured as the cost to rent or buy property? The city could subsidize rental housing with tax money from all property owners (i.e. including rental owners, of course). The city could try to reduce property values by allowing for a rapid and very large increase in supply.

    Fourth, should affordability apply to existing property owners or future property owners? The city could make it more expensive to own property by raising property taxes, thereby reducing their value. The city could make it less expensive to build new units by reducing taxes on new construction (i.e. CACs, DCLs and the like), but the land value would likely rise.

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    Affordable housing means you can rent it, early in life, and buy it, within 5 to 10 years, on a working wage.

    It’s not a new concept, it’s the property ladderbeing distorted when too few interests dominate too big a share of the pie.

    There is another kind of ‘affordability’, typically referred to as ‘non-market’ housing. That one implies some level of government intervention & subsidy.

    The means need to be fluid to the actual conditions.

  • Bill Lee

    “Affordable housing means you can rent it, early in life, and buy it, within 5 to 10 years, on a working wage.”
    A definition of the history of northern (of Broadway) Kitsilano from the 1950s to today.

    IF they really wanted affordable housing they would have created council flats across the city, and made Point Grey single family housing (SFH) area into a park with artistic “ruins”

    ( And I see they still haven’t rented out the bottom floor of the 16th and Dunbar building they put up for hard-to-house people. It has been a year, why not give up and turn the bottom floor into affordable housing too? )

  • Tessa

    @Joe + Joe and Julie

    Hypothetically (I have no idea what the numbers really are), let’s say residents pay 50 per cent of the total tax share of the city. That’s basically how the system works – council chooses a percentage, they take so much from commercial, residential, etc.) So more people means my share of that 50 per cent is less. That’s what I mean.

  • waltyss

    @Bill Lee #18. The building at 16th and Dunbar has not been completed a year and you might want to consider whether the business plan for that location included revenue from commercial tenants.
    That said, that is a difficult corner for commercial tenants. The Starbucks closed but I understand they will not surrender their lease. A convenience store across the street closed after only being open a short while. So maybe you have a point to make all of it social housing.
    The rest of your comments are either tongue in cheek or pathetic.

  • waltyss

    @Tessa #!(
    Your taxes are a function of the city budget and your assessed value. The City determines its budget and then residents and businesses pay their portion based on their assessed value. Assuming that the budget stays the same (nver happens), then your taxes would go down if the assessed value of your property decreases in relation to the total assessed value. Adding new houses will usually add to total assessed value but maybe not.

  • Guest

    One issue (on some streets) would be whether the street right-of-way contains any infrastructure – electrical cables, sewer pipes, water mains, etc. that would have to be relocated in order to build a house on the site.

    If there are no utilities under the street, and the side street is little used – why not close it up completely and built two slightly narrow houses with a pedestrian path between them?
    Traffic calming does practically the same thing (restrict access) in many areas (i.e. West End), as do turn restrictions.

  • Frank Ducote

    Affordability is a ratio between cost and income. The usual measure is that no more than 30% of household income should go to shelter. Obviously many, many people here – and elsewhere – exceed this ratio.

    Yes, the cost of housing here is high, but not nearly as high as in other world capitals. Try a search for an apartment in Manhattan, or the centres of Hong Kobg, Tokyo, London or Paris.

    What makes a real difference here is that incomes are not generally and correspondingly as high as those other expensive cities. Ask teachers and plumbers, for example.

    So, Raising salaries alone, i,e., increasing general prosperity, would increase affordability as much if not more than reducing cost. Not gonna happen soon, I admit, but the rapid shrinking of the middle class in North America is certainly not helping matters at all.

  • mike0123

    Vancouver does not have an affordability problem by the 30% rent-to-income definition. A room in a shared basement suite costs about $500/month or $6000/year in Vancouver. A person needs to make $20000/year, less than the salary of a full-time minimum-wage worker, for this rent to be 30% of his income.

    If we agree that Vancouver does in fact have an affordability problem, a better measure of affordability is needed, likely one that takes into account cultural norms instead of merely the cost to rent shelter in the market.

    The 30% rent-to-income measure may be useful in aggregate for all renters, but some like to pay extra for granite and hardwood and in-suite laundry, which arguably shouldn’t factor into housing affordability.

    Vancouver does not have an affordability problem by Lewis’ interesting metric either. Lewis defines housing as affordable if, with some margin for error, a typical wage earner can afford a 5% down payment on a small unit if he saves 20% of his salary for 5-10 years after paying rent. The median family in Metro Vancouver earned $67000 in 2010 (nearly the lowest in Canada), enough to save $13000/year. After 5 years, this family has $65000, enough to buy a house on the west side for $1.3m.

    I think there’s an affordability problem, but it might just fix itself before we come up with a reasonable definition of it.

  • Elizabeth Murphy

    Reducing the street in half and building on it is a flawed idea that comes up every few decades, then it is determined to be unworkable and the idea dies again…
    First of all, not much affordable housing can be built on a 33 ft. lot and it would not be worth the many other costs and problems that this would create.
    By reducing the street right of way they are reducing the opportunities for bike lanes, reducing street parking just as they are reducing onsite parking with laneway housing, and reducing street space for future utilities such as district energy or other options or for transit.
    If they build on that half of the road space it will eliminate mature trees currently on the boulevard and would block entry to many houses and laneway houses that face onto side streets and interfere with utility poles and underground services. Many houses were built close to the lot line because they were on a corner and then the city goes and builds up against them?
    What about existing driveways that come out the side street?
    To do row housing it requires a lane and there would not be room for an end T lane.
    When they actually evaluate the practicality of this they will find it is too disruptive, expensive and unworkable, just as they have in the past.

  • Jonathan Baker

    With ideas like this parody is dead!

  • West End Gal

    One kiss for Jonathan #26 ! 🙂
    I’m also missing Glissando’s opinion on this new re-Thing…

  • F.H.Leghorn

    @mike0123: Median income $67K means top bracket for income tax, say 40% (actually slightly higher). That’s around $27K leaving $40K disposable. Save 20% of that ($8K) for 5 years and you have $40K for a down. If you qualify for an $800K mortgage at 3.5% with 30-yr amortization that means a monthly payment of a little over $4K if you throw in property taxes and insurance. That’s $48K/yr, more than your disposable. That’s unaffordable.

  • MB

    This idea was built on nice graphics, cursory urban design skills, and no understanding of simple economics. It’s really too bad they forgot about the third dimension.

    Building on Michael Geller’s comments (#5), as soon as you understand that roads have extensive underground profiles, and that the cost of relocating sewers, water lines, gas mains, communications conduits etc. etc., some of which are major regional services, then the numbers immediately kill the idea.

    I’d guess shifting one typical 60cm sewer line buried 2.4m down into a parallel trench 5m away will cost upwards of $5,000 per linear metre ($1,500+ per foot). Add in all the other services to be shifted / relocated / upgraded and that additional 33-foot end lot ends up being $150,000 more expensive than its neighbours.

    Then there are the other considerations, like how many blocks of 80-year old mature trees will you be willing to cut down in older neighbourhoods to accommodate a few extra lots?

    This is the stuff of elementary site planning and it is a discredit to the authors who presented it as even remotely realistic.

    It’s also an excuse to avoid the hard work of rezoning existing single family lots, which collectively cover several tens of square kilometres of Vancouver’s increasingly precious land, for more efficient uses.

  • Gil

    It sounds like an exercise in optics. Lets come up with all these utopian ideas for Vancouver and let others shot them down.
    I’m glad others are seeing what would be involved.
    Most people are not moving into single family dwellings and not having at least one car. The roads are certainly not less crowded each year.

  • Bill Lee

    @MB // Aug 2, 2012 at 12:38 pm #29

    If one has looked at some of the layers on Vanmap [ vancouver.ca/vanmap ] they can see that sewers and such are mapped.
    The beauty of GIS, if the data is correct and geocoded, is that you can ask ‘questions’
    >Show all streets that have small sewers that are recent/old, and are off the centre line, and water lines that are shallow.

    I am sure the realtors and land speculators have already done such questions and have the sites already marked.
    The indiscriminate digitization of society carries on!

    “VanMap is a Web-based map system that lets you have Vancouver at your fingertips. VanMap pulls together information and data from a variety of sources, and puts it into maps you can view, save or print out. It’s not your average road map either. There are dozens of features you can turn on and off with the click of a button. VanMap doesn’t just offer street names and intersections, for example it can show you:
    property lines
    zoning information
    sewer mains
    water mains
    addresses
    public places”

    I still say Clearcut Dunbar and Point Grey! Create parkland and clear out wasteful 1.3 person homes.

  • JJ

    MB @29
    Right on!

  • Mira

    I don’t even know how these ideas passed the litmus test! Then I read a few tweets re. this idiocy, back and front between K Quinlan and other Robertson kisser-uppers, just mind boggling when you realize how these absolute jokers think. needles to say, Vancouver got the leadership they deserve… that’s what happens when people don’t pay attention and do not exercise their god damn right… voting!
    Just sick.

  • Terry m

    City hall’s driven re-think competition????
    I still wonder myself… Why are we paying this guys?

  • Glissando Remmy

    🙂
    West End Girl # 27,
    FWIW… I left a message here July 31st… would have been #10… strange, hmmm, let’s say that maybe the Spam Fairy got it.
    Anyway, it was more like in the line with MB’s comment #29, only funnier… 🙂
    Nothing more to add to the project file, where not only One, but Many… Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest!
    GR

  • Tessa

    @Waltyss #21
    Assuming the city budget stays the same, and assuming my assessment stays the same as a relation to the average (something that also never happens) then if we simply add a new property that is now paying taxes that wasn’t before then my taxes will also drop.

    Also, if we reduce infrastructure maintenance costs by reducing the overall roadspace in the city, then that will help keep city costs in line. All in all this is a sound financial move as well as one that can help create new housing types in existing neighbourhoods that retain the character of that community, i.e. rowhouses, duplexes, etc.

  • Joe Just Joe

    Tessa the budget can’t keep the same, households consume more in services then they pay, they are subsidized by businesses. Increasing housing stock won’t lower anyone’s taxes in fact it could increase them. (making up the numbers but the point stands) Each new household might pay $2000yr in property tax but it costs the city $2800 to service, that $800 shortfall is going to have to come from somewhere.

  • Frances Raderecht

    In the original article, the architects of this scheme specifically mentioned Marpole as being a suitable neighbourhood for implementation because of the current planning process. We already have a bus transit station and a Safeway highrise complex and we were wondering what more the city could dump on us in the new plan! Now we know!!!!

  • laura-leah shaw – re/max

    firstly realtors have not stalked VanMap to plan for future sales – i’m a 24 year veteran and it wouldn’t even cross my mind to do so – nor have any of my colleagues even mentioned it

    as for affordability – one contributor that doesn’t get much attention – our Residential Tenancy Office rules (provincial) favour tenants rather than those who take the financial risk – the landlords. I’m not saying to be unkind or unfeeling to tenants, but a more level playing field for landlords may encourage more investment and affordable housing development. As someone who manages properties, as well as having a couple of investment properties myself, I can tell you first hand that tenants have the upper hand in BC – if i don’t pay the mortgage and the bank closes in on the tenant then I’m the bad guy – if the tenant fails to pay rent on time, or not pay at all, i can give notice (3+ days to take effect), wait 3 weeks for a hearing, and then it is at the discretion of the person from RTO as to whether the tenant has to move out or not .

    if you get an order for them to move, then you can pay additional to get an order of possession (plus cost of baliff) should they fail to move out

    the system needs work – with fairness for all – tenants and landlords alike

  • West End Gal

    laura-leah shaw – re/max #39
    Sorry, but you cannot be further from the truth…
    Your Gordo Liberals friends made sure that tenants have to go to Langley to dispute anything…
    Stop crying wolf, when you… are one!

  • Frank Ducote

    Folks -Road space consumes over 25% of Vancouver’s 44 square mile land mass, maybe even up to a third of it. Reclaiming even a tiny percentage of this huge endowment for infill housing at lower densities in quiet family- friendly neighbourhoods certainly makes good sense to me.

    Maybe buying the existing adjacent corner lot for inclusion into a larger site for, say, smaller detached, cottage style cluster housing would obviate some of the concerns noted by other commentators above.

    OTOH, it seems that nothing that even modestly changes the character of single family neighbourhoods will please some people.

  • Don

    Jonathan Baker #26: Amen.

    But following on the heels of replacing the Viaducts with a tubular bikaduct and laying down a park on the Granville Bridge, this is just confirmation.