I think the idea of building rental on the very western edge of the false creek flats industrial area could be a pretty good one, so long as the city restricts themselves to just building on the lots facing Main St. I wouldn’t want them to get carried away into severely impeding into the industrial area. As well rental here would be a good idea, as market condos would create pressure from owners to change the area so as to increase their property values.

Very soon we’ll have market condos on the west side of Main facing car repair spots and it would be a better transition to have both sides of Main have residential.

I was glad to see Recommendation 1 includes encouraging row houses/town houses in transition zones AND, more importantly, in low density residential areas. Single-family neighbourhoods need to give a little.

I think the income segment the task force focuses on makes sense.

Thought of The Day

“… so in conclusion, something needs to be done!”
– Task Force’s Housing Affordability Report

I’d say that for two dozen people involved and a six months chit-chat, this interim report is so eloquent, so clear, so cutting edge, so revolutionary, that you need several Martinis to wake you up after reading it!

Here’s my solution.
Look at how and what’s been done in Vancouver in the past decade and … Stop-Doing-It! 🙂

We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

Thanks for the chance to comment.

First, to the comment of Happy Returnee above. You would think the statement increased supply will moderate price increases is not controversial. But think again. Try listening to Stephen Quinn on CBC Radio about this, he can’t last minutes without pointing out that the “more supply=lower prices” idea is a scam (he thinks) because so many units have been built in the last decade and prices are still high. Stephen does not consider that hundreds of thousands of people have moved here and prices would be much higher without the added supply.

My other comment is that the report does not address the role of Government in keeping prices high. Our geography (surrounded by water and mountains) plays a big role, of course. But our limited land base is further limited by ALR and zoning considerations. Then the federal government adds GST on construction. The province taxes construction and has a transaction tax on real estate. Then the city piles on with DCCs and amenity charges and sprinkler standards at the highest level of the world and so on. Many of those things I support, but lets be honest about the main reason why prices are so high. People want to live here and our governments are both aggravating supply constraints and piling on multiple layers of costs.

after GR #5 comment what else needs to be said.

but perhaps the 3 storey walk up has some cost saving factors that are no longer allowed. no balcony. no amenity. no u/g parking. very little landscape. no elevators. feature stairs that double as exits. resulting in a simple rectangular form with very efficient suite layouts.

there is almost zero in this report.

I think Glissy has got something here:
“Here’s my solution.
Look at how and what’s been done in Vancouver in the past decade and … Stop-Doing-It!”
But who is going to ever learn from past mistakes?
Not Vancouver!

The report is kind of disappointing considering, that many important and interesting idea figuring in a preliminary report from Michael Geller are not surfacing in the city’s housing report.

I think more noticeably the ones aiming at reducing barrier to home ownership, aspect totally ignored by the city report…
but if you want attract professional, to Vancouver, I am afraid subsidized renting will not make the cut

What on earth do those ridiculous people thinq they have achieved?

The group photos concluding the report says it all: “vanity of vanity, all is vanity”

Not to digress: the late Professor Abe Rogatnick had an anecdote about Rome: “Listen on any given day and above the hubbub of cartwheel clatter and dysfunctional humanity you could hear the scraping, scrunching of a building collapsing“. Today in Vancouver we have reams of paper that sometimes prevent collapse but to the sentient observer dysfunction is apparent everywhere!

Excepting Glissie @ #5 the caviling meanderings, with few exceptions, (Paul T @ #2, Gordon @ #7, Bill Lee @ #10, Higgins @ #11, Voony @ #13) of the usual mob prevail: it always does!

Vancouver’s beautiful people will not meet their demise drinking from lead dinnerware or be vanquished by the Gauls or Visigoths!

No, they will suffer more ignominiously: the transparency of their sheer uselessness . . .

Epitaph: they just didn’t get it.

Here’s my solution.
Look at how and what’s been done in Vancouver in the past decade and … Stop-Doing-It! 🙂

We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

Well, Glissy makes a good point when it comes to the zoning of land, the determination of Community Amenity Contributions (CAC’s), the application of fire and safety requirements, and the role of some people (not all) in the planning department, the Urban Design Panel, the Development Permit Board and last but by no means least, the Sustainability Group.

That being said, as a contributor to the process, I am encouraged by many of the recommendations, although time will tell how many come to fruition.

There’s much I would add, but as I tried to say to Pete McMartin, one of the greatest benefits that is likely to come out of this exercise is an increased awareness of the importance of ‘affordability’ when it comes to the zoning of land and processing of applications.

My roundtable report determined that in recent years, ‘affordability’ has been trumped by building design/appearance, community aspirations, and sustainability….and sustainability. If you don’t believe me, just take a close look at many of the new social housing projects on City lands around the city.

If affordability for the taxpayer was the key consideration, those buildings would have looked very different. I point this out now because of the emphasis in the report on the City becoming more proactive in the development of social and rental housing on city lands. Let’s hope it will build ordinary buildings, not ‘award winning’ buildings like many of the most recent efforts.

On a related issue, I look forward to seeing a list of the city lands that might be made available to the Housing Authority for future development. I hope it will include the three one acre lots the city owns on Celtic Avenue just east of Blenheim Street. With wonderful views over the Fraser River and surrounding green space, I can’t think of a better opportunity for a low-rise apartment buildings offering affordable rental suites.

Of course there is a bit of a hike up to Marine Drive to get the bus, but it’s a lovely place to cycle…and if we can get bike racks at all bus stops…multi-model transportation could address this shortcoming 🙂

I wonder if what we are talking about is not a ‘New Vancouver Special’ at a higher density. 108 units per acre in four storey row houses instead of 20 u/ac in the 1970s Special?

Given that we have just approved what is essentially a ‘new’ building type in our jurisdiction—the complexity of which Michael has captured so well… Is this not a time to put together a project as a demonstration site.

It feels like one of those moments in history where we have an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and the city we build.

I remain hopeful, but my hope is tinged with cynicism.

There was a Vancouver Special competition in the 80s that resulted in a unique architectural form where a standard house remained situated in the standard location with a smaller house set back near the lane and joined to the larger house by a galleria. The galleria also defined a small courtyard. The small house was not unlike the lane houses of today.

The award winner was an attractive response to the negativity generated around the one-design-fits-all Special brought to us by small builders trained at the Home Depot School of Design. This was before then issue of affordability and land scarcity arose, and the development pressures were not as intense.

As I understand it, eleven were built in Vancouver before neighbourhood opposition kicked in along with the planner’s dismay at how some were executed. Perhaps three or four looked great, but the army of small builders out there soon realized they could apply their well-honed skills in turning good ideas into desolate blandness on steroids, and the city shut it down because some of the results had a reverse effect to what was intended.

Though they followed the exact same rules, one New Special in Point Grey is the anthithesis of another on Slocan St., tastefully executed by an architect sensitive to appropriate materials, facade articulation and landscape treatment versus overly large stucco boxes with tiny plastic windows joined by a plastic greenhouse taken to the maximum setback allowable.

The interpretation of the rules were night and day.

So, while I’m optimistic that there will be fine examples of row houses brought to us by competent designers and developers, I’m also worried that the legion of small builders will seize this idea and overwhelm entire streets with monotony and inappropriate intrusions into neighbourhoods that have developed their own regional character over a century.

I’m not a believer in design guidelines per se, but if they help tame the potential tsunami of dumbed down formulaic design waiting in the wings for more ground-oriented single family residential density, then so be it.

Before row housing is implemented widely, the city needs to think very carefully and pro-actively about how small builders will interpret the rules and therein how these potential New Specials will be executed.

Design competitions and demonstration projects are fine and should be encouraged, but in thjis case I feel there has to be a counterpoint to the lowest possible denominator attitude of small builders.

MB @ #20 There are row houses and there are row houses.

Check out . . .

http://www.arc-online.co.uk/retrieve/ff598ef4a551ceeb9ad3d33b560488bf

. . . and scroll down to the photos page 27.

My maternal grand parents lived at no 82 Coltman Street.

I was born just around the corner in one of Grandma’s properties.

Evidently they are treasured now. We had a different opinion in my time . . . early ’30’s.

Roger, those are some very charming row houses. My grandfather’s Chelsea row house (actually, his family of five shared a second floor flat in a four-storey structure) was one of seven terraces. Very cool mid-10th Century brown brick with white terracotta detailing. They are protected by Kensington council’s heritage rules.

What was the square footage of your ancestral home? The floor plate of my granfather’s flat wasn’t more than 700 ft2, with an overall house total of about 2,800.

Roger, my grandfather served in France for the British army in WWI. He left for Canada in 1922 after his father passed, a time when the post-war English economy was in the bin.

When he settled in Calgary he actually met a former German army sniper (who became a new immigrant neighbour) who, it turns out, tried to shoot him while he was delivering telegrams by bicycle between piles of rubble in some forgotten French village. My grandfther was a fast rider and ducked a lot. According to my mother, who was five at the time, they both wept uncontrolably when they discovered this fact after a couple of years of friendship in the 1930s.

Ironically, his eldest son (my uncle) sailed to the UK in late 1944 as part of the Canadian army to join the fight against Hitler, but the war ended while he was still in training. He still managed to take a souvenir home with him — a war bride.

I find it ironic that my grandfather’s entire family (and the majority of his generation) lived in a small row house flat in London, as did most of the city’s population then and now in the inner city and it’s immediate periphery. This is not an uncommon history in Vancouver where more large families were raised in modest two and three bedroom houses often on postage stamp lots than not back in the day.

Thanqu MB for indulging my familial digression . . . we are talking Vancouver affordable housing.

Sin embargo I appreciate you revealing some of your family history: you have given me a clearer understanding of who you are.

Cheers . . .

I just returned from abroad (working on affordable real estate solutions in East Africa) and read the interim report.

While I applaud the initiatives to encourage a diversification and expansion in the housing stock (read inventory), I am astounded that there is not a clearly articulated understanding of the economics of “social” and “affordable” housing. May I suggest that the term of “affordable” be changed to “affordable market” and further clarified to mean housing occupied by households paying less than 30% of their household income for occupancy expenses. Many of the initiatives identified in the report provide incentives and tools that (if maintained in public hands, in private hands it simply increases the profit to the developer) could reduce the occupancy costs and expand the universe of households that can afford the housing, thus moving a few households from “social” housing to “affordable market” housing. Somewhat like moving deck chairs around on the Titanic, but nonetheless there is benefit to be gained.

“Social” housing would then be restricted to housing that requires direct financial interventions to reduce the occupancy costs such that households that do not have adequate income for “affordable market ” housing can access the housing with 30% of their household income (or shelter portion of Gain). Direct civic investment should be targeted to “social” housing.

Housing those who cannot afford “affordable market” housing is not a housing problem but rather, a poverty problem, and our society would be better served in working on solving the “poverty” problem … the “housing” problem would be one of many problems solved as an unintended consequence of solving the poverty problem.