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The Density Game — Page 2
Most of our designer condo towers
sprouted from old industrial lands and brownfield sites,
which in development terms are low-hanging fruit: no
neighbourhood associations to impede progress. Such
pluckable brownfields are almost gone, and much remaining
square footage downtown is reserved for office space.
So as Vancouver proper adds over 4,000 new residents
each year, and the GVRD grows from 2.2 million to a
projected 3.3 million people in the next 25 years, enter
Mayor Sullivan and so-called EcoDensity.
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Brief History of Density Continued
July 2004
Mackenzie Heights goes to war with former MLA
Art Cowie over his application to build a three-unit
rowhouse. City planners receive over 100 messages
protesting the project; council rejects the application
on October 5.
July 2006
ALR commissioners reject a proposal to turn Barnston
Island into an industrial park.
August 2006
Concord Pacific purchases CBC’s staff parking
lot for $34 million and begins construction on
two highrises; studio suites start at a compact
466 sq. ft.
October
2006
NPA Councillor Kim Capri
suggests shrinking the size of
new SRO units to 100 sq. ft. “cruise ship
cabins.”
January
2007
A Vancouver city staff report reveals the growing
scarcity of affordable housing in the Downtown
Eastside, with rooms for rent declining from 900
in 1992 to under 600 in 2005.
January
2007
CMHC figures for Greater Vancouver indicate multi-family
units made up 70% of total housing starts in 2005-’06,
up from 40% in the 1980s.
February
2007
GVRD tables a report calling for residential “intensification”
in the region; only 11% of Vancouver land has
multi-family units.
February 2007
Suspicious fires damage newly built Dunbar townhouses.
The two units had been opposed by neighbours because
they were built on two 25-foot-wide subdivided
parcels.
February
2007
Vancouver begins a series of public workshops
on Mayor Sam Sullivan’s
EcoDensity initiative. The plan, approved by council
in July, adds a green dimension to the decades-old
density debate; Brent Toderian, the city’s
new director of planning, tells the media, “We
are not a sustainable city and we can no longer
pretend we are one.”
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Sullivan’s initiative
makes candid use of the ecological footprint model of
UBC community and regional planning professor William
Rees. “If all people on Earth lived the way we
do in Vancouver,” the brochure reads, “it
would take four planets, not one, to sustain the population.”
Half the world’s population lives in cities, Sullivan
points out, uses three-quarters of its resources and
kicks out three-quarters of the pollution. In this context,
Vancouver, like every other city, needs to do more to
be sustainable.
The EcoDensity plan, with its long list of please-everyone
goals—affordability, sustainability, economic
growth—could easily be laughed at as green-hued
political fluff. But Brent Toderian, the new director
of planning, is not laughing. Now that the old industrial
lands have been harvested, the mood of global climate
crisis and growing political will affords him a unique
opportunity: moral justification for pan-Vancouver densification.
Arterials and neighbourhood centres like the Kingsway-Knight
redevelopment have been on the radar for some time,
but Toderian hints that the whole city is due for a
wake-up call. “We’re looking in all contexts,”
he says. “Neighbourhood centres, arterials, yes,
but also single-family neighbourhoods. The ideas will
be different, but opportunities exist in all three.”
You can already see it happening: townhouses in West
Vancouver, infill housing in Shaughnessy, Dunbar’s
shrill but ultimately futile resistance before the steamroller
of densification. Toderian calls the new paradigm “resilient
livability.” The term defines livable density
not as the artful presence of view corridors but as
development that acknowledges global warming and peak
oil, and will, over the long-term, enable Vancouver
to, as he puts it, “weather the storms that are
coming, better than any other city.” Resilient
density also means that I can say goodbye to the idea
of a single-family home in the city, and so can all
those of my generation who do not have substantial wealth
or a fat inheritance headed their way.
My prodigious sense of entitlement, nurtured on that
property in Blaine, is being subjected not only to globalized
real estate markets but to a long-overdue ecological
calculus—the sort of ethical, responsible, full-context
planning I’ve spent years arguing for. True, the
mayor, the city planners and the development community
are using the global environmental crisis to lubricate
some profitable projects, but that’s fine with
me, because in principle they’re right.
Densification, particularly densification that encourages
green building practices, is a clear and present need.
My question has to do, once again, with soul. Character.
Individuality. Creating a living space that transcends
the cookie-cutter version we’re so adept at selling
to one another.
My rural upbringing depended on my father making a tedious
and expensive commute to Richmond and back five days
a week. If someone can offer my (as-yet-unborn) children
an urban alternative that’s anywhere near as rich
as my own childhood was, I’ll let go of the longing
for my own house, the huge yard, the treehouse for my
kids. And here’s the good news: Vancouver, as
you’ll discover on the following pages, is full
of people who think the same way and are inventing vibrant
ways of living distinctly, densely, and well.
READ MORE IN THE SMALL SPACES SERIES:
Inside
Out: Architect Arthur
Erickson's compact house in West Point Grey
Tighten
Up: A family of five's
659 sq. ft. downtown condo
Some
Assembly Required: An award-winning
1,700 sq ft. home that redefines condo living
All
Together Now: Remember the commune?
It's been updated and rechristened "cohousing."
We look inside a North Vancouver example
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