I try not to fall in sentimental rhapsodizing about mid-rise European cities, as some of my fellow urbanists do. I know that for every chic French or Spanish historic town, there’s a ring of appalling towers on the outskirts that the immigrants and poor have been relegated to.
But it is puzzling to me that Vancouver, a new city, an innovative city, seems to have invented only two distinctive types of housing: the podium-and-point-tower high-rise and the Vancouver Special single-family house in all its increasingly awful permutations. (The older ones are actually starting to look like Greek temples, with their clean and simple lines.)
As a result, they proliferate: cheap and easy and we think there must be a market for them because the dummies keep on buying them.
And we have a strange gap in our architectural ecology: the small mid-rise. There are the artifacts around, those three- and four-storey buildings that multiplied like rabbits when the federal government gave tax breaks to apartment investors in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s. (Discontinued because the housing activists of the day complained that rich investors were getting undeserved breaks to build housing that wasn’t even affordable — sound familiar?)
But there are few new versions of those being built. Some of you might remember that there was a time when Vancouver’s planning department and the odd councillor talked about how, when new development started moving out from downtown and into the traditional single-family neighbourhoods, the city would work with developers to come up with a new form. Not just a replica of the Yaletown podium and tower, but something that was both dense yet complemented the existing neighbourhood.
Somehow that initial idea disappeared. (I distinctly remember it being talked about in the first plan for a new building at Kingsway and Victoria on the El Dorado Hotel site.) Instead, now we have a city where weird rocket ships emerge here and there from a mostly two-storey landscape, buildings that won’t be fitting into their neighbourhoods any time soon — not until the entire neighbourhood has been rebuilt.
This story I did for Vancouver magazine took a look at what it might mean to have a city where mid-rise buildings had more of a place — and why they don’t right now.
64 responses so far ↓
1 Ralph Segal // Sep 18, 2014 at 11:32 am
Putting aside issues of undeserved developer profits, empty condos, etc. I would argue (agreeing with Roger K….yikes!) that there is a place for the hi-rise at specific locations outside the downtown where concentrations of neighbourhood shopping, institutions, transportation crossroads, etc. warrant that these focal points be “marked” with a notably more prominent building form. This view is reinforced every time I drive into Vancouver over Arthur Laing Bridge (sorry, I still drive sometimes) and observe the 70th & Granville (Safeway) development by Westbank/Henriquez. Further, I am not troubled by the prospect of flurry of future towers at Oakridge Centre nor the grouping of towers rising at SW Marine & Cambie at another Canada Line station. I would be disturbed if a plethora of towers was indiscriminantely making inroads into the hearts of low rise neighbourhoods but as Gord Price points out, that is not what is now happening. There probably are several projects we, in hindsight, might want to take back (Kingsway & Nanaimo -“El Dorado” ?). But provided sensitive, properly assessed, long term decisions with meaningful neighbourhood input on whether specific sites, in the overall urban design context,
warrant extra height/prominence are made, the critical challenge is then to intricately and creatively design the transition from higher to surrounding lower scale context. For an example, IMO, of how this has been well handled, you may want to visit Cornish St. between 69th & 70th, (backside of 70th & Granville project) where the carefully articulated and terraced 7-storey mid-rise just now being finished steps down to the 2-1/2 storey context across the street. Perhaps if this quality of design interface is demanded by the City and delivered by the developer wherever substantial transitions in scale occur, the degree of acrimony between residents and decision-makers would be far less.
2 Ron Polly // Sep 18, 2014 at 4:39 pm
I have lived in Vancouver all my life..
What has drastically changed…
You can no longer enjoy Vancouver’s views when your in Vancouver.
You have to be in a highrise to see the city.
Lost in the canyons of grey and glass.
All the openness is gone and the street views are gone.
The little new pocket parks and green strips have replaced real space .
They are always in conjuction with being in the shadow of some tower.
You now feel like your always in some ones space .
I finding going in to Vancouver now is like going under water..
You hold your breath till you resurface on the North Shore.
Problem is City of North Van is heading the same way…
3 Lewis N. Villegas // Sep 19, 2014 at 12:22 pm
It is a key question Frances, now that we are starting to see numbers coming in from cities around the world.
Gordon Price (5)
The question you pose is not the critical one. It is not whether there are more towers units built than any other, rahter as I suggest here
http://wp.me/p1yj4U-n3
it is whether the tower units have anything to do with anything else than the commodities market, whether here or elsewhere around the global economy.
Bill Lee
There are MANY metrics about the towers—including the fact that they are luxury-cost construction—to point us in anoher, more renewable-resource direction. But there is only ONE measurement that counts: Tower Proftis are just HUGE.
Mark Landmann 8
…So now I’m not sure what to think when my Vancouver urbanist gurus disagree.
Change gurus Mark, provided this is not going to threaten your income.
False Creep 9
…City living is far more enjoyable in a concrete tower.
We are not against towers downtown. Many like you enjoy that life style. We are against towers in the peripheral neighbourhoods.
Kirk 10
… affordability is a function of supply and demand,/i>
Whose demand and whose supply? The other point, Kirk, is that we have in Canada a regulated economy. House prices—municipal challengers for a seat on Council should not—are out of control. People who are working for a living cannot afford to buy a house anymore. That goes against our values of community and our value of place.
Silly season 11
Why towers indeed? We already have a huge supply. Frances is on cue on this one, why not other forms that have been tested to support social functioning at the neighbourhood level?
tedeastside 12
Ted brings up a good point… Why are the towers empty? Answer: because they are product in a property holdings portfolio.
Vancouver is not the worst planned city. We’ve just hit a bad stretch in the Expo ’86 to 2010 Winter Olympics. Time to change course.
Tiktaalik 15
“Thin Parisians”… Oh yes, but don’t forget they smoke a lot more than we do, too. Serioiusly, though, most French cities are walkable (most—they’ve built suburbs too). And France is reknown for having more cities per capita than most Western countries. The French got their urbanism from the Italians and both are far ahead of North America in creating livable places as functioning cells of their social organism.
Now, where are those travel brochures for the Veneto? Oh Michael Kluckner 18 must’ave borrowed ‘em.
Thredkiller 24
[feigning ignorance]: Your handle is a comment on the fashion industry, right Thread?
The answer to your question is this: bad urbanism. We don’t do urban design and we’ve gone way past the point where this can be tollerated without serious issues springing up in just about every neighbourhood.
However, just as we were getting this into the public eye comes the next problem: the global economy is trading in condos like they were penny stock—damen neighbourhood and social values, all they care is the price tag.
Warren 26
Dear Warren,
I started to write you a note at Winnipegs outstanding Warehouse District—turn of the 19th architecture par excellence, complete with a village square in the middle—but I had to rush off to a tea party at one of the ‘Peg’s lush and walkable streetcar communities.
I thought I’d get the postcard finished in Miami, home to some dreadful stuff to be sure, but blessed with the best high-rise district in North America—the protected Art Deco District. Careful where you tread, though. As soon as we crossed the north boundary of historic designation the towers shot up past the 15-storey deco limit and I just about snapped the top three vertebra in my neck!!
Now I’m sitting for a coffee on Charles Street just back from St. Louis Square where my friend chide me a bust of my likeness will NEVER be erected. It is just remarkable how the streets of Beacon Hill (built in the post Civil War years mostly) achieve that alchemy of high-density with human scale! Oh, Boston has had its bad times (and I’m just not talking post-Bobby Orr’s early departure). Boston City Hall district is a poster boy for why we should igonore EVERYTING Kevin Lynch every wrote. But the Quincy Market is still a throbbing hear of its community.
Anyway, a BIG cheerio! to Frances for giveing me the space for us to catch up. Oh, and Warren, do educate yourself further on the do’s and don’ts of ‘good urbanism’. Hate to keep correcting you!
Best,
Lewis
boohoo 29
No, they are created in one fell swoop—with form based codes and publicly vetted charrettes. But, as you point out, the just keep going over time. For centuries and centuries if you look at the Old World.
Jay 31
The stretch of Main St. from 17th to 19th is a good sampling of Vancouver low-rise, and it’s a dead zone in one of Vancouver’s most vibrant areas.
Neighbourhoods either side of Main are very vibrant, Jay. Main like all of Vancouver’s arterials sufferst from bad urban design.
Otis Krayola… would you give up 3 lanes of street space to have 2 dedicated trolley or streetcar lines running in the center of Main, separated from the car lanes by a 6-foot treed median? Something like that would begin to transform Main Street into what it should function like: as a human-scale neighbourhood spine.
Kenneth D 37
Vancouver vehemently oppose any sort of densification in their neighbourhoods…
I take a different view. I think the ‘neighbourhoods’ don’t want towers. And they would gladly accept the REVITALIZATION of their arterials, including the addition of density. Some years ago I showed how just this strategy would deliver enough housing at 3.5 storeys to support DOUBLING the city population. Of course, this is exactly the wrong product for the global condo markets.
teririch 39
The Guardian is doing a great job of staying on top of this story. My link at the top is my take on this story as it relates to us here in Vancouver.
Kirk 46
We’re quite a bit different than other cities. I don’t think it’s wrong — it’s just different.
Don’t fall asleep at the switch, Kirk. There is a serious cluster-*uck out there.
alan layton 48
A scissor stair can serve as both required exits. However, I don’t see the problem in our urban design as a ‘location of the stairs’ issue.
Ralph Segal 51
there is a place for the hi-rise at specific locations outside the downtown where concentrations of neighbourhood shopping, institutions, transportation crossroads, etc. warrant that these focal points be “marked” with a notably more prominent building form. This view is reinforced every time I drive into Vancouver…
No, totally NOT. You can’t show one place on this earth where this ‘concept’ works to support social functioning and good urbanism. A tower district downtown, yes. One in every ‘hood? Stop drinking the Koolaid—that dog won’t hunt! One suggestion: get out and walk. The view from the windshield returns car-values not people-values.
Cornish between 69th and 70th? I lived at Osler near 70th and the vision I developed walking in that neighbourhood was a return of 7oth as a people-scale high-street. Ron Polly gets it:
Ron Polly 52
I have lived in Vancouver all my life..
What has drastically changed…
You can no longer enjoy Vancouver’s views when your in Vancouver.
You have to be in a highrise to see the city.
Lost in the canyons of grey and glass.
All the openness is gone and the street views are gone.
The little new pocket parks and green strips have replaced real space.
They are always in conjuction with being in the shadow of some tower.
You now feel like your always in some ones space .
I finding going in to Vancouver now is like going under water..
You hold your breath till you resurface…
Thank you again Frances for giving us a place to air the views for an alternative urbanism to this foreign-driven tower mania that is litterally consuming our neighbourhoods and the possibility for sunny and productive future lives.
4 teririch // Sep 19, 2014 at 12:47 pm
Good read – Vancouver Courier/Op
Opinion: Development taken to new level by Vision Vancouver
http://www.vancourier.com/opinion
5 MB // Sep 19, 2014 at 2:53 pm
Reading Lewis N. Villegas’s narcissism-saturated piece above (#53) boosts my appreciation of the work of Ken Greenberg and Jan Gehl to new heights.
Either one of them has had orders of magnitude more experience working out urban design challenges through public processs based on listening, not preaching, and on the absence of urban design preconceptions and formulaic architectural “solutions” largely devoid of any sense of Vancouver’s rich regionalism and the specific architectural responses required in our climate.
Moreover, they have never published anything I have read that offends the administrations and citizens of the cities they have worked in, and both have a deeper understanding of the macro urban economy. Even Paris has gargantuan towers, but they continue to be placed at the periphery and took a tremendous economic and developmental pressure off the historic, protected core. But they also protected the stratospheric prices of the core.
Further, I await Lewis’s stab at conducting even a low-level enginering feasibility study — let alone a professional transportation analysis (including commercial trucking which supports businesses on arterials) — of replacing Main Street’s perfectly good articulated trolleys with oh-so-cute trams, and his justification for spending the better part of a billion bucks to do so with no proven gains in ridership beyond the marginal.
Oh, it’s the urbanism, stupid! Well, once 6 km of the street are ripped asunder for years (just ask the people of Edinburgh how that’s going), and the 35 years of amortized debt kicks in, I doubt there will be much interest or resources left to recreate the 7th Arrondissement in Riley Park, either on or off the arterials.
Perhaps shops that issue Ibuprofen will prosper after all that.
6 MB // Sep 19, 2014 at 3:02 pm
Moreover, they have never published anything I have read that offends the administrations … of the cities they have worked in …
I will have to make an exception for Ken Greenberg’s stinging criticism of Ontario’s Harris government in his book “Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder” that forced Greater Toronto to amalgamate into one big administration, and of Ontario’s Municipal Board which reviews and has the power to revise all development, usually in the developer’s favour. Lawyers there have more power than any city official.
Be thankful we have none of these situations in Vancouver.
7 Jay // Sep 19, 2014 at 5:02 pm
@Lewis – “Neighbourhoods either side of Main are very vibrant, Jay. Main like all of Vancouver’s arterials suffers from bad urban design.”
I don’t suppose you could expand on this. Why do you think Main st suffers from bad urban design? For the most part, Main street is lined with smaller scale retail/residential buildings that give each block a variety of colour, texture, and shape. Throw in some heritage buildings and I think you have the makings of a pretty decent urban design. No, it’s not Paris, but it functions pretty well. The only parts that don’t function well are the sections where we have these blockbusting low-rise buildings, like the ones that I mentioned, and I’ll add the west side of Main, between 15th and 16th.
You skirted around the point I was trying to make by trying to generalize the whole of Main street as bad urban design. But the only bad urban design I see are these “towers on its side”, to use your words. I’m just an armchair urban planner, so explain to me how the tower on its side is better urban planning, because the examples I’ve seen are just as blighting as any tower.
8 Lewis N. Villegas // Sep 19, 2014 at 7:21 pm
Hi Jay — OK, you sent me digging for this one.
There is an ‘explanation’ couched in my question @53 about whether you would give up 3 lanes to get 2 lanes of BRT/Tram and two tree medians… Nudge, nudge. Hint, hint.
But if you still need more info, try this one that we wrote for the study in Vancouver’s Historic Quartiers:
http://wp.me/p1mj4z-A2
9 Everyman // Sep 20, 2014 at 1:06 pm
@Ron Polly 52
Amen to that. I was driving downtown last weekend on a beautiful late summer’s eve and something suddenly seemed off when I crossed the bridge. It took me a minute, and then I realized how dark it was. The sunlight was completely shut out from the streets downtown, whereas the rest of the city had been bathed in that wonderful late summer glow.
10 Jon Petrie // Sep 24, 2014 at 1:26 am
Frances Bula writes in her generally thoughtful Vancouver Magazine piece: “Mid-rise, done with wood construction, is typically built for about $200 a square foot … Concrete high-rises cost $600 a square foot to build … ”
Seems to me that per square foot, concrete high rise construction is likely to be at most 100% more expensive than mid rise wood construction and not 300% more expensive as Bula claims.
Maybe someone with knowledge could weigh in … (A quick search on the web turned up this statement from a 2012 source “If the Marselle complex [in Seattle, five stories plus a mezzanine] had been built using concrete, the engineer estimates that the cost would have been about 30 percent higher.”)
11 gman // Sep 24, 2014 at 11:25 am
Jon Petrie #60
You can try this link for a rough estimate,not sure if these numbers are up to date but they show $247 pf. for a 12 to 20 story with underground parking downtown.
http://www.bdconsultants.com/tools/costindex
12 Jon Petrie // Sep 27, 2014 at 10:26 pm
Gman #61
Thanks for the website reference which rather supports my questioning of Frances’s construction cost numbers. Per the BDC website, Vancouver East Side, wood frame construction, medium quality, underground parking, units under 1000 sq ft, $170 sq. ft. — the same in concrete, 12 to 20 stories high, $236 a square foot — i.e. about a 30% higher cost.
Frances’s numbers: “about $200” and “$600” — see above #60
13 Frances Bula // Sep 29, 2014 at 3:55 pm
Jon
Thanks for your information on the numbers. Michael Geller also said in an email and a dinner party that he thought they were too high. I was repeating what I got from a couple of mid-rise developers, but, as I see your comments, I wonder if I misunderstood and assumed it was hard costs only when other costs (soft, land) were in there. It should have been scrutinized more carefully. However, I do think the essential point stands, though not as strongly, which is that wood, low-rise does cost less than concrete
14 Frances Bula // Sep 29, 2014 at 4:04 pm
Back to Gord Price’s point about how many mid-rises Vancouver is building. While I don’t doubt that’s true, it doesn’t address two central concerns I hear repeatedly.
1. There is a lot of mid-rise built but it is big (not tall, but wide) mid-rise. The city loses a lot of opportunities because the rules and system are not geared to smaller projects. So lots of small lots in many places that could accommodate new mid-rise buildings end up not being developed, because the landowner just can’t take the brain damage that results when trying to go through all the hoops (and cost) without a massive return on investment to make it worthwhile.
2. The number of high rise projects, compared to mid-rise and low-rise, is actually low, as you say. But it doesn’t address the reality that developers are increasingly pushing for high-rise in places that never saw them before. As Andy Yan’s maps on rezonings has shown, there were no essentially almost no high-rises built outside the downtown zone until a few years ago. Collingwood was one exception, but off in a corner. Also Langara Gardens, a long time ago, and Knight and Clark more recently. Yet now, there are plans for extremely dense clusters of towers in a number of places. And a few projects that have gone in at “landmark” intersections, with the ominous sense among some that there will be more, unless the community throws a fit.
So the anxiety comes from the feeling that this form that is eventually going to take over the whole city, because it’s what developers and the city are geared to.