Can San Francisco Learn From Vancouver?

"After a housing crisis hit Vancouver in the late 1980s, Price explained, the city decided that the only possibility of creating new housing without new sprawl and additional traffic was to place lots and lots of residents downtown. At about the same time, the city sold off a large plot of industrial waterfront land to developers and began a planning process that would radically expand inner-city Vancouver... According to Price, by adding housing for more than 15,000 people, the massive project helped stabilize real estate prices and in some cases lowered them -- and did so within about 10 years. Vancouver's urban renewal has a doppelgänger in our own Mission Bay, an even larger but less dense industrial-into-residential project that will cover 313 acres and house some 10,000 people. One big difference is that Concord Pacific Place is complete and its success has inspired the construction of other smaller mega-projects, whereas Mission Bay, stalled along with our local economy, may take another decade or more to complete."

Thanks to MTC Library News Headlines