Ecodensity Forever?
The party’s over. The guests have all gone home, and after seven years of arranging the furniture and polishing the silverware, the hosts can finally sit back and breathe a sigh of relief. They liked us.
Sure, we deserve some down time, a few days off to shuffle around in our slippers and field the thank-you calls. But it won’t be long before Vancouverites have to slap some cold water on their faces and confront the reality of a new day. Our shiny new downtown impressed the visitors, but where do we go from here? How long can a city sustain itself building one “livable” community of high-rise condos after another?
Coal Harbour, Yaletown, False Creek: Vancouver has replicated its exemplary model of urban living over and over. But already cracks are appearing. Southeast False Creek, expected to be the crowning achievement of Ecodensity, required emergency life support to see completion, and its dreams of social diversity will be scaled back drastically, if not jettisoned altogether. We’ve busted our transportation budget with a shiny new subway line that whisks visitors downtown but does little for daily commuters, since downtown jobs are increasingly rare.
For the latest insights into possible futures for downtown Vancouver, BCBusiness gathered a panel including experts in real estate, demographic trends, architecture and design. Cameron Muir is chief economist with the B.C. Real Estate Association; Andrew Ramlo is a director with Urban Futures, a population research institute; and Trevor Boddy is an architecture critic and curator of “Vancouverism,” an exhibition that travelled to London and Paris before returning to Vancouver during the Olympics.
Vancouverites feel pretty smug about having one of the world’s most livable cities, but where do we go from here? Do we just keep building more condos and coffee shops?
MUIR: The trend toward higher density is not going to reverse itself. Vancouver is constrained by the ocean, the mountains, the border and the agricultural land reserve, with land in finite supply. The only place we’re going to house people is through high density and by going up rather than spreading out.
BODDY: Vancouver’s identity for a generation has been a place that has emphasized livability above all else. What we’re not doing well is the other half of the equation downtown, and that’s workspace. We have areas that used to house startups – software companies, architects – areas like Gastown, portions of Chinatown, Yaletown. Those have almost completely converted to housing, so we’ve lost our incubators. And we’ve built very little in terms of workspace over the last 10 to 15 years. In 1991 city council rezoned half of downtown to “residential optional.” Virtually none of that has gone as workspace. Our development and real estate industries are expert at providing housing, but we have to make some very serious public decisions about the nature of downtown and whether it will be a residential-only zone.
RAMLO: You guys are talking primarily about land use, but it’s the people who live on the land that are going to have an implication. Who is living downtown? Well, it’s predominantly 20-to-30-year-olds. A much higher proportion in that age group than in the region as a whole.
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