Vancouver: Planning Trouble In Paradise?

Posted by: Chris Steins

24 October 2005 - 11:00am

Is Vancouver's housing bubble and density destroying what made the city so livable?

"The solutions to healthy and balanced downtown growth are certainly not to be found in the ideas of our current [Vancouver] director of central area planning, Larry Beasley, who recently hit [Seattle] in his extended roadshow of American colleges and city halls, selling his latest branding of "Vancouver-ism" to the land of his birth.

...Our restaurants are full, tourists pack the sidewalks, and the climax forest of condominium apartment towers is now nearing a complete buildout on our land-limited downtown peninsula, with False Creek on one side, Burrard Inlet on the other. Downtown Vancouver appears to pros-per, but in the complex world of city building, appearances can be deceiving.

...Well-intended but badly mismanaged downtown land-use policies ensure any future corporate successes, like a Vancouver-grown Starbucks or Amazon.com, will be obliged to leave our burg, because 90-plus percent of our best downtown sites went for condos, not offices."

Full Story: Trouble in paradise

Source: The Seattle Times, October 23, 2005

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Protected office zones

Submitted by paytonc on Fri, 10/28/2005 - 18:21.

This is why some cities have limited residential construction in some areas. In Chicago, the Central Area Plan designated the area west of the river for future office growth and protects certain near-downtown areas for light industrial services. Even still, though, office growth in the suburbs outpaces downtown office growth almost worldwide. I'm not sure why, as I sure prefer working downtown to the suburbs and since the costs are often somewhat equivalent, but that's the trend.

Significant vacant or underutilized land does exist east of downtown Vancouver, both in the downtown eastside and out towards Commercial Drive. This land is fairly well served by SkyTrain.

Vancouver: Planning Trouble in Paradise?

Submitted by Nathan landau on Tue, 10/25/2005 - 13:32.

The author raises an interesting problem, but the article cries out for some comparative perspective. All over the West Coast, housing is doing better than offices downtown. The same concern about housing displacing offices has been raised in San Francisco and San Diego. In Downtown Los Angeles, where market rate housing was once unthinkable, office buildings are being converted to housing. Perhaps this is happening across North America--certainly downtown New York and Chicago are seeing a great deal of housing construction, while New York has a continuing overhang of urented office space following 9/11.

There was a huge overhang of office space from the dotcom boom which has yet to be absorbed. At the same time, many companies are reducing their office space and sending functions around the world, further reducing their office needs.

There is also a market self-correction aspect to the phenomenon. One of the main attractions of living downtown is being close to work. If the workplaces really did disappear, fewer people would want to live there and the incentives to build housing would become much smaller. But I really don't expect to see major downtowns evaporating any time soon.