Why don’t all the experts on this thread put a number on their opinion? What population density will you stomach for Vancouver? Then we could see who is being realistic and who isn’t.

In all seriousness, who knows what density the City could stomach. I just wonder how you’d ever actually stop people from entering. What I do know is that the vast majority of Vancouver is single family–we are a LONG way away from having to worry about running out of room.

The Regional Growth Strategy sets out targets for Vancouver for the next 30 years. These are useful in determining how much added capacity we need and how we are doing as a City in terms of meeting the Region’s goals.
In 2011 Vancouver had around 603,000 people in 286,000 dwelling units. The Regional Growth Strategy says by 2041 they want us to have 740,000 people in 339,500 dwelling units. So, if we decide that these numbers are valid targets, then we are looking at adding 53,000 dwelling units over 30 years.
The 2011 Census did not include anything on the Cambie corridor, not much in SouthEast False Creek, etc. as these were not finished units.
If we look at what the City has available, the Cambie corridor has capacity for 13,500 units. The various spot upzonings on the
West side such as Shannon Mews, Arbutus Mall, etc. provide capacity for about 1600 units. The SouthEast False Creek area (if we add up all the recent rezonings) will have 4000 units. This adds up to about recently added and yet to come capacity for 19,000 units.
The capacity in the Norquay neighbourhood upzonings needs to be added in. And then we can add in the new capacity for laneway housing units of about 60,000.
Making it easier and more attractive to add secondary rental suites to our existing houses is another way to increase density and, even better, in the form of dedicated rental units. This also has the potential to add thousands of new units.
We still are awaiting numbers from the City for already zoned capacity but this number is going to be pretty big.
Looking at these numbers, its hard to see the rush for increasing zoning capacity such as is being proposed in the report going to Council today.

Actually BooHoo…when you say
“What I do know is that the vast majority of Vancouver is single family–we are a LONG way away from having to worry about running out of room” you are incorrect. Most of Vancouver USED TO BE Single Family zoned, but now it is multifamily zoned but labelled single family.
See my previous post.

Lee L 98:

How do you KNOW when you are full? Do you ever get full? or do you continue jamming more and more people and their stuff and their waste into the same former paradise? or do you just keep densifying until the resemblence to a cesspool is no longer deniable by anyone?

That’s a little purple there, Lee.

Let’s see, London jammed people into the cesspool known as Chelsea a long time ago, like about 1875. It is so bad that today’s council applied modern day heritage restrictions on those absolutely horrid rows of four-level brick terrace houses (you know the ones, they have ugly white terracotta trim, visually assaulting bay windows, ostentatious front gates and piers, walled back yards and shops — heaven forbid! — just down at the end of the street) just to preserve the slum for all to learn from.

And learn they did! The stunningly beautiful alternatives were the result of the deep intellectual analysis of the terrace house ghettos of old — and there they are, proudly piercing the sky in their naked grey concrete glory.

Artists and muscians live there! They display their works-in-a-can in the stairwells and halls and give impromtu concerts at full volume into the night through open windows, the sound of several hundred banging heads keeping time.

Who needs the corporate graffiti of fluorescent back-lit signs when you’ve got Krylon?

The single family detached home is now relegated to the countryside and are so expensive even the Lords can’t aford them and turn to the National Trust to subsidize their remaining wealth.

London learned several lifetimes ago that a crisis of affordability was a natural progression or urbanization and land availibility, and stove to live more efficiently on a limited land base.

Affordability is a function of land value.

Just tried to send a tweet in response to comments made in Council Coverage and with respect to housing the homeless only to find that I have now been blocked by Vision Vancouver.

Oh, and all of Councillor Stevenson’s tweet history has been erased. Kind of like just after the election, resident (paid) pit-bull Jonathan Ross erased all of his tweet history……see a pattern here folks?

Democracy cubed!

This is interesting: Take from The Province – Oct. 2

…… Seniors’ Opportunity

Deputy city manager David McLellan said the city sees rezoning in areas like Dunbar as an opportunity for seniors to sell their old homes, so that they may downsize into new smaller homes or new seniors’ housing projects.

In an interview, Dunbar resident Liz O’Malley said she is concerned that one such proposal for a six-storey seniors’ home is already being pushed forward with little consultation.

Dunbar Backlash

“The response in Dunbar has been incredible in the last week,” O’Malley said. “People are upset about the whole density thing being done without consultation.”

On Tuesday, Vision Vancouver councillors sought to allay concerns that rezoning would be rammed through. Each and every proposal under the “interim rezoning” plan would go to public hearing, McLellan said, in response to council questions.

McLellan admitted outside council that the city can’t predict how providing certain numbers of new townhouses and row houses will impact the broad housing market.

“The market will decide what the price is,” McLellan said.

Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/news/Housing+task+force+Vancouver+council+braces+density+opposition/7334166/story.html#ixzz28C7U27io

MB:

This whole affordable housing through densification process is based on the FALSE assumption that Vancouver’s high property prices are due to a shortage of land. The main factor that has caused Vancouver prices to increase for the past 10 years has been speculative demand driven by federal monetary and immigration policies. That is why the federal government has recently:

a) returned the amortization of mortgages back to 25 years;
b) required the banks to adopt strict new lending standards by the end of this year, which will require, inter alia, all those seeking a mortgage in Canada to prove their ability to pay and their source of income through their CRA tax assessments;
c) effectively shut down the immigrant investor program;
d) started to use the CRA to go after the gains from property speculation, including the selling of “assignments” without claiming the income gains;
e) started to use the CRA to go after unclaimed offshore income, which is fully taxable under Canadian law;
f) started to implement a tracking system, to determine whether the immigrant investors are actually living in Canada or working tax-free offshore.

Vancouver’s huge property bubble is finally starting to pop – and prices will be heading on a downward trend for the forseeible future.

The 2011 Census apparently confirmed that Vancouver currently has 22,000 unoccupied residential housing units. As prices head south, the “investors” who speculated on the continued price appreciation of these units will be dumping them, as will those who find themselves underwater.

IF Vancouver had some businesses (other than real estate development and sales, and money laundering) that attracted people who wanted to come here and work to make this City an economic powerhouse, then densification to provide housing for more people would be justified. But densification to satisfy speculative investment driven by monetary policy is not necessary or justifiable.

Perhaps this is why Mark Carney has said that Canada needs people to invest in productive businesses, not to build more condos or houses.

@teririch. I live in Dunbar and am all over the neighbourhood. I can say with a great deal of certainty that very few people were talking about thin streets. For one, at least at this time, it is not being proposed for Dunbar.
As for density along Dunbar Street, Dunbar residents are the champions of nimbyism. It has been one area in the city that had no, I repeat, no social housing. Many locals attacked the housing for mentally ill seniors at 16th and Dunbar. It was shocking and while I am not overall a fan of Suzanne Anton’s, I admired her courage when she stood up to Dunbarites, called them out on their selfishness and told them they were getting some social housing. I was not proud of my neighbours in that incident.
The Province is good at riling up the seniors. The problem in Dunbar of course has long been that as seniors get old and not able to stay in their homes, they have had nowhere to go in their neighbourhood because there is no seniors housing or condominiums or other forms, beyond SFR in the area. In the last several years that is starting to change.
As for those who think off shore buyers are responsible for Vancouver’s high prices, well that is simply not the case. While it is annoying to have empty houses sit, and I fully support either banning non resident owners or taxing them at a higher rate, the fact is that even if every foreign owned empty house were filled, it would do little to put a dent in Vancouver affordability.
@MB. Thanks for taking apart the Maclean’s article. I found it amusing that the author saw no difference between kids in smart communities who played outdoors more and those in typical suburbs who played more indoors.
I guess they did not measure the effect on kids or parents between those parents who spend more time with their kids when they live closer to work and those parents spending an hour or more each way sucking up exhaust on the freeways our provincial government is fond of building to get people to and from the burbs.
Moreover Toronto and Calgary can sprawl away to their hearts content; we do have natural barriers like the ocean, the mountains. ALR and the border.

“I dont see density providing any of that.”

Where there is sprawl, you won’t find much of the beauty and pleasantness that makes for ‘Beautiful BC’. But with so many people reading this blog, what a great place to provide a workable, equitable solution rather than just complaints.

@waltyss #117:

Didn’t knew social housing units open at Dumbar and 17th…last fall? There had been somehwat recent coverage, a ribbon cutting where Harcourt attended.

I’ve run into residents on the bus.

As for NIBYism – I don’t blame people. Should this move forward, those homeowners are now looking at a loss in value of their property.

Funny, I was reading tweet feed put out by the mayor talking about the importance about protecting the trees and yet…depending on area, this would speak to the complete opposite.

And what is with the possibility of removing small green spaces in order to slap up row homes?

@Lee

I didn’t ask for MB’s opinion, I asked for yours. You seem unwilling to give it, and come across as just an angry person yelling at the wind.

@teririch: When you resort to quoting the professional wrestling mouth, you know you are running out of anything constructive to say.

Ha, ha teririch @122 thanks for that link!
Guess what, you’re right, Glissy … IS better! 🙂
To his defense Bruce Allen had only 1.42 min to express … how me and my neighbors here in Oakridge feel too.

@ Lee L 118:

What the f/&(/& to we care what London did, I mean really.

Hmmm.

Evidently you don’t seem to understand satire.

Chelsea is a very desireable place to live with, in my view, very respectful and high quality urbanism. There are few single family detached houses there, meaning you don’t need them to create viable and humanely scaled neighhbourhoods with amenities close by.

Obviously you missed the point. Terrace houses (or row houses) offer a deeply flexible middle alternative between detached houses saddled with an overly expensive chunk of land and condos.

It’s expensive, though, but then again there are similar communities a little further away with similar housing at half the price.

I won’t touch the rest of your invective.

@ gasp 115:

The 2011 Census apparently confirmed that Vancouver currently has 22,000 unoccupied residential housing units.

I suppose my 340 sf basement suite is one of them. It has a sloped floor and low ceilings. We stopped renting it after six years and it truly was a mortgage helper.

Dealing with tenants was not a pleasant experience. Now it’s a storage unit and a guest room. But it’s there if we need some supplemental income in retirement.

This is only to say that “22,000 unoccupied residential units” doesn’t exactly tally up to the empty foreign-owned houses you imply it does.

The ‘solution’, Chris, is to put these ideas whose implementation would effect extreme changes in the character of the city to a referendum and abide by the result. If most people who actually live here today WANT the character of the city to change in the direction of more and more crowding, then change it must and those of us who don’t want that to happen, just have to get used to it or move out. Those who DO want it to densify endlessly, need to be shown what they are asking for. In no community plan do you see a sustainable vision. There is no community plan that has written in it, the idea that ‘sustainable’ inevitably requires definition of a point where enough is enough, and the place is full. I may not be like yourself, who seems to believe that infinite growth in density ( or population) and a liveable city can coexist.

Vision Vancouver managed to win a mandate to govern for a few years. That isn’t a mandate to raze the place. For that you would need a referendum, and for this idea ( and lane housing too by the way) you should also need a referendum.
As for me, I don’t see the tenements of New York or London being a desireable recasting of my neighbourhood, nor, apparently, have they turned out to be affordable.

Lee,

Again you say ‘a point where enough is enough, and the place is full.’

Are you going to explore this or just throw it out there?

“Vision Vancouver managed to win a mandate to govern for a few years. That isn’t a mandate to raze the place.”

Can we get a mandate to stop overblown, ridiculous exaggerations to prove a point?

@Frank Ducote #136

Thank you.

Ok Boohoo.
It is kind of like Chris Keam might say when, arguing in favour of more and more bike infrastructure,he tells us that building more roads to reduce ‘congestion’ will not solve ‘the problem’ since it has been proven over and over again that roads only fill up again and we will be back where we started. Tell me, what is the difference between that and building more and more dwellings by densifying in response to projected growth in the region? Isn’t the whole purpose of building them to fill them up with people? And then, will not the expected growth in the region be even more likely to materialize and force us back again looking for ‘the solution’ which will be, of course, as we will have already proven in the past, be again to ‘ Densify! Densify! ‘.

My solution, since you asked, is to choose to STOP and not to continue round the infinite loop. If we dont do that, then the infinite loop will, over years, erase even the memory of the liveable neighbourhoods we once had. That’s ok with some people … it’s not ok with me.

It might not be this year or next year, but ultimately you have to STOP and recognize that if you don’t, it means you have endorsed an unsustainable ‘solution’ which can be described as planning for infinite growth. I believe that is what Vision Vancouver is doing. With a hat tip to Chris Keam, I think I will call their plan ‘DENSIFICATION SPRAWL’.
I support stopping sooner rather than later because that makes it nicer in the city for me.

I do not believe tent cities will arise due to multitudes of people still wanting to move to Metro Vancouver. I don’t believe we will see a huge increase in homeless families who, having moved here, are unable to find a place to live so they are camping in the streets. By the way, you WILL find this in New York and London no matter how their urban density ‘solution’ is touted by the urban Greenfolk.

I believe that left to itself, without interference from the government, the demand for existing housing will be factored in to where businesses and people who work in them locate and they will go to Surrey or Delta or further from downtown ( as they already have) and that is just fine. You can live near where you work in Surrey, or Delta or New Westminster or Langley. The lower mainland as a whole, DOES HAVE affordable housing in these areas, but you have to be willing to live in it. Don’t be surprised, in view of that, if I am not ok with it when my neighbourhood is a sacrificial puzzle piece in an unsustainable ‘solution’.

Lee,

I understand what you want to do, but how is the question.

How do you just stop people from moving in? Does the City shut down development? Build a moat? Fence?

What are the implications of that? Your rant is fun, but logistically swiss cheese.

Lee L. – as loath as I am to step into this endless and useless circle, even the most restrictive regimes in the world have not been able to control unwanted influx of population into cities where people want to go, most notably Moscow. In LA people live in garages if nothing else is available. Or nearby canyons , as in San Diego. So restricting supply, as you suggest, cannot alone stop an influx. Making a place so totally undesirable to live or work in, well, that might do it, like Detroit. I don’t know many people who would like that alternative. It does leave a lot of room for the remaining population, however.

Lee/Frank,

I’m not trying to spin this in circles, but he and Julia have both made this claim that we should just somehow stop people from moving here. I’m asking to back it up with some thought. Neither of them have. I guess that’s my answer.

@LeeL:

You said (to me):
“I may not be like yourself, who seems to believe that infinite growth in density ( or population) and a liveable city can coexist.”

Really? Where from my tiny contributions to this thread would you ever leap to such an erroneous conclusion? All I’m asking is that the pro-density and con-density advocates put a number on their ideal population density. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the numbers aren’t so terribly far apart once we put down the rhetorical blunt instruments, and then we might just have some room for compromise.

One thing is for sure. No city exists in stasis. We can optimize for what (or who) is coming, but pulling up the drawbridge isn’t a realistic or fair option. Of course people want to come here to live. Let’s deal with reality and find something resembling a workable solution.

Boohoo, go back and read what I said. I did not say stop letting people move here. I said, let the market sort out the supply and demand issue. As long as we create supply – it will be scooped up. As long as it is scooped up, we will be pressed to find more supply.

We can’t build a fence and we can satisfy the need. So, what do YOU suggest.