NIMBYism. I would rather have 6x more houses that people can AFFORD to live than 1/6th the homes owned by the richest people in the city who _really love it._
You can design beautiful neighbourhoods that are much much denser than they are now.
Single family zoning should be abolished in this city if we have any intention of solving the housing crisis.
Not to mention the huge positive impacts this would have on walkability, transit, climate change, etc.
NIMBYism.
Name calling as an argument technique.
You can design beautiful neighbourhoods that are much much denser than they are now.
In theory. Sometimes it actually happens in reality, too.
Most of the time though, when developers and their paid servants (aka your elected representatives) get together, something rather different from this glossy vision you seem to have ends up happening. In most cases the end reuslt is not at all beautiful, and (when you actually crunch the numbers) not all that affordable, either.
Not too infrequently it devolves into outright shenanigans, with profound betrayals of trust, and huge swaths of development opportunity more or less handed out to connected donors and/or other political kingpins (in exchange for who knows what votes or other favors they have to offer).
That's how it goes, and like the Leonard Cohen song -- everybody knows.
I agree that zoning has its pros and cons. And just because we did things a certain way 50 year ago, doesn't mean we have to keep doing it that way.
But the attitude you're presented sounds (to these jaded ears) well - saccharine. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be fundamentally circumspect about the promised benefits of many (if not most) proposed zoning changes. There's no need to assume that anyone who doesn't share your own enthusiasm for such changes is (as you imply) just fundamentally self-centered - or filthy rich.
What about people that want to have a party on a Friday, but NIMBYs in an apartment complex throw the book at anybody that has fun past 10PM?
A lot of construction and transportation seems like it’s needlessly bad due to underinvestment and old equipment. I think we can make almost noiseless EV cars like Teslas today, no-compromises high density housing, quieter construction equipment and so much more.
As an avid biker in Vancouver, I can unfortunately not confirm that. There's a few strategic ones, but it's far from everywhere. https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/map-cycling-vancouver.pdf has the overview. It unfortunately doesn't cover the extended area, but already shows that outside of downtown only a small amount of fully protected lanes exists - like Arbutus Greenway.
Also it gets a bit worse in suburbs like North/West Van, New Westminster, etc.
Vancouver is consistently ranked among the most bike friendly cities in the world: - https://www.archdaily.com/920413/the-20-most-bike-friendly-c... - https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-cycling-ranking-20... - https://www.momentum-biking.com/us/9-of-the-world%E2%80%99s-...
This is such an odd statement; it's "not even wrong."
Vancouver zones most of its land for low-density suburban houses that accommodate very few people. It also has many examples of zoning districts that accommodate a lot of people in urban neighbourhoods that people love to live in. You can just change one zoning district to another proven one!
Well, avoiding changing zoning has created areas that nobody can afford to live in, so they don't really have a choice at this point. Vancouver's affordability crisis is generally considered by economists to be the worst in North America.
Not really. If you don't build more homes, you have to limit how many people can live there. The latter is currently accomplished by money, but could be shifted to lotteries and waitlists if there was strict rent control or all housing was public. Both of those are significantly worse than just building more.
By owning homes, they don't care about the iniquity caused by wait lists, lotteries, or rising prices. In fact, they benefit greatly from rising prices. And if they can keep people out, they don't have to worry about change causing any discomfort to what they currently enjoy.
Maybe. If they are able to sell at the peak. A house isn't a share of stock you can sell when the market is up. Typically you hold until the kids move out and you retire and then sell, so the timing is handed to you by life. If housing market is down the year you retire, bad luck.
Meanwhile all those years they are living the house instead of selling, rising prices hurt the homeowner because it means taxes go up.
As a homeowner I sure wish the estimated value never went up. I'd rather be paying the same taxes as when I bought it instead of a lot more.
The rise in prices is the predictable (and desired) form of demand-side management thay results in market-based pricing of homes.
In another comment you express the desire that people should live places other than Vancouver. That rise in prices gives you both financial power and the displacement of others that you desire. I think it's wrong.
Again: maybe. If I'd sold in 2006 I could have made a gain. But if I'd retired in 2008 after the housing crash and had to sell while the mortgage was underwater, there would have been no gain at all.
If I sold today I could make a profit but I can't sell today because I'm not at that stage in life so it's meaningless.
I'm still relatively far from retirement so there may or may not be another large housing crash between now and then (I think there will be but I don't have a crystal ball). So nobody can predict whether the paper gains I have on home value today will exist when I retire and sell. Personally I don't care because I don't keep a house as an investment, it's a home to live in and a stable place for my child to grow up in.
> You are also immensely better off than anybody who was born later
False equivalence. I'm better off than most 25 year olds, yes. I'm also far better off than my own 25 year old self who had a net worth deep in the red. This has nothing to do with year of birth. It's about stage in life. At 25 I'd just finished school and owned nothing but debt. Now a couple decades later I have the benefit of a couple decades of savings from my career.
> In another comment you express the desire that people should live places other than Vancouver.
I have not expressed such desire. I didn't desire to not be able to live in Manhattan. Giving up that dream hurt. But pragmatically it was a wise choice. I'm better off having moved to a cheaper place and built a life here instead of staying tilting at the windmills of the Manhattan real estate market that I could never crack.
Same strategy might work for someone tilting at windmills in Vancouver today. That's not a desire, just pragmatism.
> That rise in prices gives you both financial power and the displacement of others that you desire.
I desire no such thing. You keep putting words in my mouth that I never wrote, so I won't be responding tit for tat.
Good luck explaining that nuance to everybody in the neighborhood who thinks their home value is the most important thing.
> rising prices hurt the homeowner because it means taxes go up.
That depends. Idk how other places do it, but where I live there's a fixed amount of total tax for the year and it's distributed to each home based on its value. So if all the homes in the city go up equally you're paying the same tax every year, but if your neighborhood goes up faster than others, then you're paying more.
It certainly is and should be a fundamental human right.
However, living in Vancouver specifically isn't a necessity. There are more affortable places.
In my 20s my dream was to live in Manhattan, I wanted it so bad. Never made it, way too expensive. Had to give up that dream. A couple decades later I still occasionally wish it could've been, but never was. I have a nice house and built a nice life elsewhere.
Not to take away from efforts to build more and affordable housing in the big cities, which is good and necessary. But want to point out that the idea that everyone can get to live in NYC/SF/Vancouver on the cheap isn't quite a realistic position to take either. Often the most pragmatic solution is to find a different city to live in.
This is a common NIMBY trope: "everyone" wants to live here and that's impossible, so we shouldn't try.
It's false in that not everyone wants to live in Vancouver/NYC/SF, far from it. But, it's easy to allow everyone who wants to to live in these places. In another comment you expressed the desire to keep your place in the city, without the burden of rising property taxes that go with your massive financial gains. Why should you get that, but not somebody else? On what basis do you privilege your own basic needs over others? That's no way to run a society, saying "got mine, forget all the rest of you."
I clearly did not say that. I said that as a homeowner, I'd prefer that the value didn't go up at all. I don't want massive paper gains.
> But, it's easy to allow everyone who wants to to live in these places.
History is showing us it isn't very easy, so I'm curious what is the plan to make it easy?
Interestingly the 1st image result of view cones is how they could be a bad thing for Vancouver: https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-view-cones-economi...
Personally I can't understand the hate for the viewcones that I sometimes see. Talk with any newcomer to the city and they absolutely love the mountains. The mountain views are one of the selling points of this city. It would be utterly mad to block them.
I live near one in East Van that is utterly useless; it's defined as starting in the middle of a road, and the view is blocked by tree foliage most of the year anyway. And yet because of it, multiple proposed apartment buildings have been cut short.
The one from the top of Queen E Park is also weirdly low. Like you could almost double the height of the towers downtown and you still wouldn't be blocking the view of the mountain from this viewpoint, so the view is really damn odd.
This implies that the current zoning was implemented for good reason. That's basically never the case. Most existing zoning was done either to increase property values or to keep out people that the elites don't want to be around.
In a nutshell, it was intentionally designed to keep apartment buildings and stores out of most of the city.
Is there a compromise that you’d be okay with? Maybe sprinkle in some high-density apartments around to supplement the single-family housing? Maybe wipe away rental properties so that you don’t have effectively vacant units for portions of the year?
I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as that.
https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/what-un...
Looking at where people live and where they want to live is a better source of their actual preferences than looking at housing prices in a handful of expensive neighborhoods and guessing what the average person wants.
Not even a little bit. Go read about exclusionary zoning in general or see your sibling comment's link for some reading on Vancouver specifically.
> Is it fair to say that the suburb layout is generally considered ideal to live in?
Is it considered ideal? Maybe. Is it actually ideal? No.
Aside from the huge negative impacts on pricing and equality that we've already discussed there's the environmental impact, isolation, car dependence, etc, etc.
> I would argue that most people would move to a suburb rather than a dense city all other things equal.
This is unfortunately true for Americans and I'd guess Canadians as well. I think this is due to some combination of:
- The absurd "American dream" vision that's been pushed by car manufacturers and other companies for many decades.
- Most American cities aren't actually very good, so most Americans have never experienced the alternative.
- Fox News and other conservative media pushing the narrative that cities are infested with criminals, terrorists, etc.
> Maybe sprinkle in some high-density apartments around to supplement the single-family housing?
Great. This is what would happen if there wasn't zoning.
> Is it considered ideal? Maybe. Is it actually ideal? No.
Ideal in what? Ideal has to be measured by some metric, so which one or which ones?
What makes these discussions interminable is that some of the metrics are objective but some are subjective so there can't be any one ideal answer.
An objective measure is housing units per square km. Easy to measure, it's just math. Obviously high-rise apartment buildings maximize that metric. So is that the only metric that should ever be considered? Or the most important one?
Then there are also the subjective metrics of niceness. While many people might be happy living in those high-rises, many people won't do it.
Should the density maximizers be the only people who get a vote in these matters? If so, why is that? Why are they more special citizens than others? That sure doesn't sound fair.
Or should they get no vote? Well that's not fair either.
So clearly there can't be one ideal answer, it's compromises all the way.
Many people will have legitimate preferences that differ from yours, that in no way makes them "absurd".
If your preference means that teachers can't afford homes within city limits, emissions won't improve, infrastructure can't be sustained [1], cars are the only viable transportation, etc, etc, then your opinion should really be discarded by decision makers.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-10-04/how-subur...
Not really, no. It's the choice a lot of people make in north american metros from what they are offered, but that's not what ideal means.
Who is saying that? The zoning bureau that is forcing this lifestyle upon you against your will?
From my experience, many of its neighborhoods/dining districts feel really cold/loud/unwalkable due to the high speed 4 lane roads everywhere. Traffic noise still seems like a huge issue, trying to parallel park when cars are buzzing by at 50 mph isn’t fun, and the unprotected left turns are pretty gnarly.
Yeah, this is an unfortunate aspect of Vancouver's city planning; our zoning forces nearly all shops and restaurants onto busy, loud, polluted arterial roads. Changing this isn't really on the political landscape right now, and I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.
Great. Driving should not be convenient in cities.
Ask yourself if you would like to spend 45 minutes aboard the bus system as opposed to 15 min. in a car
Ask yourself how the options would be different if cities weren't so focused on cars.
Edit: To be less vague - my choices to get to work are 20 minutes on bike basically for free, 25 minutes via metro for ~$100 a month, or 40 minutes by car for about $500 a month in tolls and parking plus thousands a year for the car itself and maintenance. There's no reason this can't be the norm in the US aside from local politicians deciding they don't want it.
You are a very lucky person then, and your situation is by far not the norm, regardless of which city (or country, for that matter) you live in.
Yes I acknowledged this in my previous comment. But it could be normal for every city with some pretty simple changes that no mayor is willing to make.
edit: compare to a city like Seattle, which has similar weather, hills, density, etc. A notable feature of the transit centers there is a Park & Ride: a place where folks can park their cars (for free, when I lived there) and get into transit. Vancouver does not have anything of the sort. If you want to park somewhere and take transit into the downtown core, there are extremely limited options. So you get too many drivers. Disincentivizing cars usage is great when there is a viable alternative -- in the absence of such an alternative, it's just flagellation for its own sake.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northgate_station_(Sound_Tra...
Not if you give sufficient priority to buses.
Cleveland has an excellent center-running BRT line: https://nacto.org/case-study/euclid-avenue-brt-cleveland-oh/
And NYC is starting to implement busways: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/brt/html/routes/14th-street.shtml
If the situation is crappy for cars, it will impact the buses at some point.
That's an interesting one to me, because I'm generally bothered by how wide Vancouver streets are. IIRC most Vancouver residential streets are 33 feet wide, waaaaaaaay wider than in many European and Asian cities.
Like the fact that there's a term, "transit oriented development" used in North America. Here it's just common sense, nobody calls it anything.
I moved to Vancouver from the UK last year and it is significantly nicer/more liveable than most UK cities I've seen.
And i didn't say those are better than Vancouver, just that OP's list about why Vancouver is better than most NA cities is common sense which can be said about most cities in Europe.
- Quite a few stroads[0]: Granville around 70th, Granville around Broadway, Cambie around Broadway, 4th West of Burrard, most of Broadway, many sections of Kingsway, the section of W 41st Ave under the Kerrisdale label, and others.
- In general, getting East-West by vehicle is notably worse than North-South. While I 90% agree with your highway comment, this does make the situation frustrating at times.
- Vancouver is less bad than most of the cities that surround it, but it still has job areas a little too clustered in a few spots.
- Most land is low density in a city that has a huge housing shortage.
- Skytrain doesn't cover the majority of this map.
- Residential neighbourhoods have so much street parking that kids can't play street hockey these days. In general, there are too many cars in residential areas that kids can't play outside with the minimal supervision I had as a child.
I will add one more good:
- Grid designs tend to have a problem where local roads don't remain local roads and instead become side streets for cars. Vancouver has done a good job of using tools to keep these local roads serving just local traffic: narrow streets, tight visibility, forced turns, etc. Besides the benefit this provides to locals, it also helps with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
[0] - Stroad is a portmanteau of street and road. By trying to be both, if fails to do either. Stroads suck no matter what type of user you are:
Car perspective:
- For thru traffic they suck since they are "too busy", traffic usual goes slower than the speed limit.
- For traffic stoping at a local destination they suck because getting to your destination is difficult: the road is busy so you need to focus 110% on driving, but you also gotta find parking, places to turn around, etc. A lot of people put pressure on themselves if they block traffic while parking and that is a necessary aspect of driving to a business that is on a stroad.
- Unprotected left turns usually only allow 1 vehicle per cycle of the lights. There will be a lot of unprotected lefts happening in these areas.
- For locals they suck because your community has congested traffic all the time.
For pedestrians:
- The area is loud due to all the cars. God forbid if people start honking. And this is Vancouver. I've seen people honk at parked cars a few dozen times in the last 5 years.
- If you have to cross the street, it can be a real bother as you will have to wait for a crossing signal that may take a few minutes. When you finally get your turn, you have to deal with drivers who are desperate to make their left turn.
- Walking distances are higher than they'd otherwise be on a proper street.
For cyclists:
- Commuting: Prepare to Die Edition
For business owners:
- While the traffic does get you some amount of visibility, a lot of that traffic will simply never stop at your business. There is also a portion who won't go due to the difficulty in driving in the area.
- You probably get way more business from random people walking by than from random people driving by. The artificially high walking distances mean fewer walkers.
- You have to soundproof your facade to deal with the noise.
- Prior to the lockdown, Vancouver city council was quite against patios and balconies at businesses. These days, they are allowing more of them. These will necessarily be loud and there is nothing you can do. Customers will complain.
Why doesn't this result in cars simply traveling on regular streets and creating noise and danger in the exact same space as pedestrians, cyclists, and residents?
The Grandview Highway cuts through half of Vancouver.
If you're thinking of the Georgia Viaduct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Viaduct), it is slated for removal and is only about <1km
Vancouver's not a particularly well-designed city; its lack of a fully through highway is more a circumstance of indecision than design. It's still a city hampered by office districts and bedroom communities, linked with stroads, like many North American cities.
Glad I left.
The 400 series highways don't go anywhere near Toronto's downtown either. The 401 skirts around Toronto's suburbs, far to the north of what anyone would consider the city.
The urban Toronto road you're probably thinking of is the Gardiner Expressway, which is owned and managed by the city itself, not the provincial government.
For decades, there have been calls to remove the elevated downtown section which cuts Toronto off from its waterfront. Something that would not only remove a source of blight and open up the development potential of some significant tracts of prime land, it would also save the city a fortune in maintenance costs!
There's only so much money that (is politically viable) to spend on this stuff at any given moment. As soon as the line to Langley is done we're gonna see a pivot to building out to UBC or North Shore.
Zoning decides so much of the vibe of a city/neighbourhood. Changing zoning is pretty short sited if you have the goal of having an area that people love to love in.
Having lived in 6 other cities, other things Vancouver does well that aren't obvious on this map:
- Narrow streets (avoids traffic in side streets)
- No highways in the city (loud, dangerous, take up lots of space)
- Grass on both sides of sidewalk and trees on every street.
- Extremely high park density.
- Protected bike lanes everywhere.
- Side streets with random dead ends.
- Commercial streets every ~4-6 blocks that allow more traffic + bus routes.
- Rectangle structured blocks with numbers 1 direction and names the other.