Vancouvwe has beened turned from a livable city to a two class city, the wealthy and the poor. One would not consider putting zoo animals in what passes for condos!

Vancouver has rejected proper transit and instead has hijacked Translink and regional taxpayers to fund prestigious transit projects. The result the transit system is used mainly by the poor, the elderly, and students.

The downtown is decidedly children unfriendly as it has mainly been designed for singles not famillies. Businesses are moving out of the city due to high rents and Vancouver has ceased to become a tourist destination. it's now a city to go through, not come to.

All in all, the retiring planners have made a politically correct city, where fun is considered getting drunk at 3 am and not getting stabbed or shot outside a club!

Where is the old Vancouver, we loved you. This abomination called Vancouver is nothing more than L.A. North, a city with no soul and little future.

Those who celebrate Vancouver planners pay too little attention to their failures, which are plenty. Beasley and McAffee don't hold a candle to Vancouver's former god of planning, Ray Spaxman. For example, under Beasley and McAfee - with a great deal of help from Larry Campbell - Vancouver ushered in the era of casinos, e.g. in Hastings Park. The public consultation for that project was, as Grdadolnik suggests, precisely a simple opportunity to vent. It brilliantly distracted the public from the planners' (and City Council's) real intention all along: to put in a casino in the park, no matter what the public and the neighbourhood thought about it. No vision there beyond a quick cash grab to stuff the City's coffers. No park, and thousands more gambling addicts.

What a literate analysis of a topic usually obscured by sound bites and rhetoric. I was pleased to be able to learn new details from Helen's article; a very important topic that impacts every single person in Vancouver. As more people become educated about this issue, the quality of debate will rise. A rare thing in today's political climate.

The problem with planners is that they are attempting to force their vision on human behaviour. But most of their attempts to achieve some kind of urban utopia have fallen flat or failed outright. Witness the False Creek North seawall: one of the most boring, sanitized places in the city. Why would I want to go there, besides having the opportunity of watching a seagull relieve itself in that swamp?

There is no place for families downtown. Not when a 3-bedroom condo costs $700k or even $1 million. Meanwhile, the most successful parts of downtown Vancouver (Stanley Park, Robson Street) were bestowed upon today's planners thanks to governments past or commercial forces.

Lord Stanley was not a government, but never mind that (Stanley Park had been military reserve, as with other parks in the city such as Vanier, Jericho, Pacific Spirit)...and in Robson's case, it wasn't commercial forces but community cohesion and "location, location, location".

While I agree that downtown's glass-and-concrete redesign isn't amenable to family life, or even human life, an important point goes beyond mere architectural planning: social and cultural policy.

Cultural policy I'm thinking of along the lines of the ridiculous anti-music bylaws limiting cafes to two live musicians, only so many amps, and NO sidewalk cafe music as is so common in the US, Europe and in fact nearly anywhere else. Instead there's a tyranny of recorded music, inside and out.

And large, empty plazas are kept clear of human activity, be it people hanging out (outside of business hours anyway, where if you're dressed appropriately it's OK to eat lunch) or restaurants or vendors who could use the big blank spaces the city insists the architects create for, um, "livability".

And I agree; the idea that "livability" in Vancouver boils down to the view and the waterfront is a travesty. One issue is the boring people who work as bureaucrats assume that what makes life woth living for them (pencils, whiteboards, flowcharts, concrete plazas with controlled views) is not what life is about for other people.

"Sure you can have fun in Vancouver - you can go hiking, mountainbiking, sailing, go to restaurants...." In other words, only the kind of fun the city, its marketing board, and the media have decided are appropriate kinds of fun. Actual street life like you'd get in New York or Chicago or SF is ''verboten'' and likely to get you a ticket from the same City Hall which brags about its achievements in "livability"....

Just wondering if the World Urban Forum saw fit to tour the international delegates through Guildford/Whalley, Middlegate, Coquitlam Centre-Lougheed Mall-sprawl, and gave them a tour of obliterated farmlands now turned into tract housing?

How pathetic it is to hear Bob Rennie speak of affordability while he is one of the agents of the densification Vancouver housing and the denuding of its wonderful and charming character. His business strategy was to subdivide and strata properties into small enough units to sell. Now he wants the government to do something? Like what? Subsidize zoning so he makes the same amount of money while offering more liveable units? He's trying to have it both ways.

The Vancouver all of us seem to long for exists only in the mists of our memory. Yes, a charming, but reasonably vibrant big, small town or big small city once existed. Yaletown feels like a bland, Hong Kong housing development- no wonder, it was built by soulless Hong Kong Chinese property developers who have no care for the society around them. But, then, if the Expo site went to a BC developer I doubt if it would have ended up much better. A vertical, dense downtown devoid of a vibrant culture is worthless.

The Vancouver of affordable housing in the city and uncrowded traffic ended after the 1980s. If you want to relive it move to Prince George. It'll never return to Vancouver unless you turn back the clock. Now we are left with tentative decision making by those who want to revive this lost past in the face of intractable growth problems. Vancouver is only one notch better than some American cities now because we don't have the handgun problem. But, if you haven't noticed, our drug problem is as bad as any US city. And maybe worse 'cause there's a grow op on almost every block.

Who are we kidding when we try to convince ourselves Vancouver is a gorgeous city? There are too many problems below and now above the surface to hide.

darcy mcgee:

Bc government(s) need to have SOMETHING visible to show ourselves and the world that we are no longer provincial hicks. The choice of venue for "sophisticated" people has long been cities -- Montreal, Paris, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, New York......

BC's choice is Vanvouver, into which we are dumping billions so that we might have a "real city". That this is (somewhat dubiously) being achieved, but at the cost of draining the rest of the province (so who wants to live in Hazelton anyway, huh? Hazelton? What's a Hazelton?) is irrelevant for now.

But wait until post-2010...........

There have been two, that I remember, mega-Vancouver visions fielded over the years; maybe it was only one, revived again later.

The idea was eight million in the Georgia Strait basin, with bridges connecting the Sunshine Coast and Island to the Mainland; the more elaborate of the two landscapes I remember seeing promoted in The Sun included passenger rail lines up the sides of Indian Arm, Howe Sound and Pitt Lake with "elevator cities" on funiculars up and down from the mainline. Pretty visionary, but none of it very geotechnically sound and more a technocratic wet dream than anything else. And an engineer's nightmare.

By comparison the proposed land connection from Squamish to the Sunshine Coast is a mere piffle, likewise the Coquihalla and Duffey Lake...

Mega-urbanization is happening without significant rail-based development - and the low density of the traffic-based developments that result instead is used as a reason NOT to build rail-based development, i.e. "we can't afford it".

In the limited terrain we inhabit this is ultimately the ony "livable" conclusion, however long it takes. I'm not saying eight million people - or four million people - here is a good idea, but what with world population it's bound to happen sooner or later. Excepting a Malthusian apocalypse of some kind, which isn't all that unlikely, unfortunate though that is if it were to come to pass.

Currently we are already a refugee city; and I don't mean from strife and famine, but from wealth in places beleaguered by poverty and violence. They are refugees from places already overwhelmed by human numbers and the problems that are inherent in that, as if by definition; and this includes the wealthy and jetset Americans and others who buy the condos no one lives in most of the time....

Because of our relative isolation our being a better-off refugee enclave as/if the world deteriorates into disorder is pretty much a given, although it's not as if we didn't have home-grown problems (so to speak...didn't mean to pun).

But it's the zeal to overpopulate the place ahead of schedule that's disturbing. It's all about the benjamins of course (OK OK the mackenzie kings...the loonies? what would be the appropriate canadianism anyway???), and the big boost on immigration has as much to do with capital as it has for any other reason (despite all the high-sounding talk about multilculturalism; that's just marketing). Economists openly state (baldy, on Global more than once in fact) that BC needs to import more immigrants with capital to keep housing prices high and the economy "stable".....

OK, we make video games and spin-off TV shows and there's a lot of software and other internet business here; and we still sell logs, though we don't bother to mill them anymore (just like the old days, in fact...well, at least back then they cut them into beams...). But we don't have a PRODUCING economy; we need capital and people from outside in order to flourish. And so we need somewhere to put them....

The new plan is to add only two more million - only two million, that is. But ultimately there's no such thing as build-out (except where regulated by municipal charter, as in Whistler) and the four million they're talking about won't take long to hit eight million if world population trends continue. Even if there's depopulation in Asia and elsewhere because of natural disaster, famine, strife or ?? the attractiveness of this place won't let up; for those who can afford to get here and buy in. Rain or not, that is.

My biggest nightmare is the spread of the mega-city past Whistler and Chilliwack, overtaking the Fraser Canyon and Bridge River-Lillooet with suburban/urban linear sprawl (because of the valleys); choked with traffic and other pollution and all that comes with that. Sure, that's fifty years down the line at least and I'll be long gone (theoretically, pending weird medical advances y'never know...).

The Gateway Project btw is the tip of an iceberg of freeways planned long ago by the DoH; the grid will include a diagonal from White Rock up the Serpentine and Nicomekl, presumably to the Golden Ears Bridge, and another from White Rock to Abbotsford along 16th/18th. The North Side Freeway from Poco to Mission across the northern slopes of Maple Ridge and Stave Falls still hasn't been entirely shelved, nor its extension to Chilliwack across Nicomen Island and all those sloughs (since you can't build a freeway along Lake Errock/Chehalis, geotechnically; not with any less hassle from delta sand, anyway...).

Every time I was in Europe or Japan or Korea I was blown away by the thoroughness of urban transportation. Even Sao Paulo's system was amazing, and it's not like Brazil is a rich country. That there's still no planning of a significant passenger-rail/LRT/metro system here is shameful by comparison....

About my comments about the Bridge River-Lillooet, as an aside: I DO support the improvement of roads into that area, which it's been asking for since long before Whistler needed its "back door" via the Duffey Lake. The Hurley needs to be paved to open up tourism development and recreation access to Bralorne, Gold Bridge, and the new park (which I don't like to call the South Chilcotin, since it's NOT in the Chilcotin, but that's another story...), and the High Line from D'Arcy to Seton needs doing; either that or rail ferries on the lakes, like used to be (talk about a tourist draw!). Similarly I can see Boston Bar and North Bend and Lytton and Spences Bridge becoming "sunbelt towns" with golf courses and nice living; but the idea of complete urbanization, a la Fraser Valley, is hard to take.

Just a bad dream right now; but given the penchant of our politicians and money crowd for development, development and more development, not so far in the future as even I might think....

Re Sao Paulo's metro: also Mexico City's, which is the same design as Montreal. Fare last time I was there: still 25 cents, in order to get people to ride it. And do they ever.....

Whatever happened to Vancouver's participation in the Cascadia MagLev anyway? It, or something like it, is already in the planning stages from Eugene to Bellingham; as I recall it had something to do with White Rock's opposition to having high-speed trains run through their municipality, whether on the waterfront or on a cut-and-cover down the middle of the freeway.

If achieved by passenger rail-based development, on the other hand, all the better; ie. with limitations on automotive-dependent communities in constricted valleys/airspaces.

Lillooet with Whistler's current population, for example, would have REALLY bad air because of the mountains and gorges there (despite some wind-funnelling to and from the Coast via the various valleys which converge there). Likewise, perhaps more relevantly, Pemberton-Mt Currie and the Gates Valley, or Keremeos-Princeton for that matter.

Suburbanization in Merritt has only just begun...ranchland, reserves, ALR or not. Political and population pressure on the landscape here is, sadly, inexorable. It's how much we allow ourselves to surrender to it that's the question.

And I don't like the way Vancouver is currently surrendering to it...

Skookum1
Are you having a dialogue with anyone?

Skookum1 wrote:

This is a problem. People will not allow restaurants and pubs to spill seats on the streets for fear of noise. But it is all about control of the local residents.

Now this may be a stretch, but look at the way the average "middle class" Canadian controls their lawn. No trees (or only topped ones), and if s/she lives in Burnaby, the lawn has been paved over to act as an overflow parking lot.

Liveable city? Who cares.... just as long as nature is under control of the every castle lord.

Yeah, a bit of a rant.... hope it makes some sense.

Control: the operative word in Canadian civic planning, and also in cultural engineering. "People" in this case (your quote) being Vancouver people, the NIMBY crowd, who don't have a life, and don't want other people to, either. People in other cities in the world are much better adjusted to the consequences of city life, including noise. That "noise" in Vancouver includes live music points to the nature of the problem; the sound of heavy construction, lawnmowers, leafblowers and traffic are OK; the sound of people enjoying themselves is NOT. Especially, ironically enough, downtown...

Not sure what part of Burnaby you're speaking about; must be Metrotown and South Burnaby because I live in North Burnaby and only rarely see what you're talking about; no more than in some parts of East Van, I'd say.

.
Yup, every man for himself, huh? And THAT's also the problem; what's outside your doors doesn't matter so long as inside you're in "control". But control is illusory, and typically also comes at the expense of other people's freedom to enjoy life (where "enjoy life" doesn't mean soaking in the peace and quiet, as if you were living out in the country somewhere. The irony for me, speaking as someone originally from the country, is that this attitude of country-style living within a city is completely at odds with what a city is, or should be.

Skookum 1:

Skookum 1:

"NorthAm, the continent-spanning city of the 41st century, is completely run by, and completely dependent on, robots......"

41st Century? ;-) One thing that always got me about science fiction and its bastard cousin futurism is its boundless optimism. We barely made it through the last thousand years. And I'd say the continent-spanning MegaCity is more like only a couple of centuries off, rather than twenty. If we get that far, that is, i.e. without a major population implosion and associated traumas....what's that bad scifi potboiler about world-dominating China - "Chung Kuo". Its cities were like that; whole continents of giant apartment buildings, with the rest dedicated to high-production agri-industry (and a white underclass, of course, who are gifted with special skills their Han rulers are going to need....like originality...this was the author's context, not mine BTW).

Which brings me back to Doxiadis, which I raised in another of the Tyee comments forums somewhere, also to do with regional planning; I'm not a fan of his mass-compression cities, beautiful though the drawings are, but he has a point. If the world wants to, say, double its current population, it can't do it by building more Orange Counties or Surreys....

I'm starting to lean towards James Blish's Cities in Flight[/I}, always an attractive image: all the cities of earth, loaded with industrial and service infrastructure, are enabled to leave earth in gravity bubbles created by devices called spindizzies and farm their work out to other economies in the galaxy. Eventually they run out of utility and all wind up circling some brown dwarf somewhere, a ghetto of orbital cities from a planet long depleted of its resources; totally consumed by resource extraction, as I remember the tale. Story ends with the collapse of the universe, so if you're going to go out with a bang (actually a squeeze in Blish's cosmogony). Not bad for a four-parter, though not as compelling nor anywhere near so well-written as [I]Dune (another space-messiah epic where Earth is so far in the past its location has been forgotten).

Dysfunctional megacities are common in science fiction, as well as overly well-run ones - the Star Trek model, in fact, of benignly-ruled technologically-sublime planets, all happy to suck up to Earth for having brought them all together etc. Much like Vancouver trying to propagate copies of its artfully-contrived blandness around the globe (sans mountains and beach).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Room%21_Make_Room%21

Skookum wrote:

Well, North Burnaby is a little different than East or South Burnaby. However, North Burnaby has the advantage of terrain, which gives an illusion of more trees. Well at least the terrain is more taken advantage of than say a Mary Hill.

However, we do not encourage people to "green" their neighborhoods. Imagine if each person got a tax credit, every 15 years for each mature tree they have on their propery. Well, at least the credit would need to work in relation to property size.

It would not need to be much of a credit, just enough to acknowledge and bring recognition to a greener landscape.

Eventually people would start to realize that the trees cut down on the noise and visual pollution that they rally against so hard.

Not that my solution to urban development problems is simply planting trees, however it is a start.

Holy misinformation. Do any of the above commenters actually live downtown?

My retort:
http://parveenkaler.com/?p=31

Gateway Timeout? Try again, PK.....

PK, wrote

Yep. I did. I enjoyed it. Your link is broken. So what is your retort?

Please, please Ms. Grdadolnik, come to Nanaimo and do a similar piece on us, where we are being taken to the cleaners, literally and figuratively, by a City Hall which only recognizes developer- and market-driven "urban planning"........

HELP !!!!

Planning is supposed to inmplement the vision of the people.

Planners may advocate for their own vision, but ultimately they are beholden to the citizens and the citizens' representatives.

MOre often than not though it is the developers who create the vision.

So expect more of the same!

As to the Sci Fi city thay always neglect to say what powers the city (perhaps they turn people into fuel a la soylent green!).

Affordable, ha! and developers complaining about affordinbility haha, haha, haha, Please!

Here's a 'connect the dots' item for consideration:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2006/07/04/bc-board-fired.html

It is a rarity when a City Council says no to development (further evidence in previous posting web link).

Municipalities and provinces and the fedral governmnet would be perplexed if there was not continuous physical growth.

I suppose then that the future for Canada is more towns/cities an ever larger cities, all designed around fossil fuels and motorized transport-primarily the car.

What visionaries!

I was down at Foreshore Park in Burnaby yesterday, beating myself up at how we can allow all that industrial development (the new stuff!) on all of that river soil. I am not an expert in soils, but I am sure it could be better used as arable land.

The kicker is that most of us know that it is unwise to use that land for warehouses, but we do it anyways.

Well maybe not all of us think that way, anyone read Pete McMartin's article in the Sun today? Does he really luv his suburbs?

Gotta cancel that paper one of these days.

To have a viable and extensive transit system there has to be density. (Vancouver has many areas of low density.) Or, high taxes to subsidise it. Too high taxes and the businesses move out, to the 'burbs or elsewhere. To have 'neighbourhood' shops and businesses you have to have reasonable property taxes that are fairly balanced with residential and business taxes - Vancouver doesn't. If Vancouver maintains high business property taxes the only way small business shopkeepers will stay is if there's loads of people and loads of custom.
It's a tough one. A friend has a relatively small 2 bedroom condo ($575,000) in Concord Pacific and his taxes are $4,800.00! Shift the up-front costs to the developers and the cost of the condos would go up, pricing them higher still.

I read it in the online version. He actually does have a point - not everyone wants to live in the "urban core", and a lot of people who live in the 'burbs want nothing to do with the much-touted "downtown lifestyle". So what if you can walk to sixteen different bars, get mugged in Stanley Park, and pay stupidly inflated prices for Capers produce? Oh, and let's not forget living in a closet while paying 3/4 of your salary to your rent or mortgage. The whole assumption that "everyone would just LOOOOOOVE to live in downtown" is arrogant crap. Pete McMartin is normally a self-important idiot, but in this case he's right - the emperor has no clothes.

I work downtown and live in Maple Ridge. I grew up on the North Shore, with easy access to downtown, and have spent a LOT of time here. I hate downtown, and would never, ever live here. I hate the crowds, the self-important and smug Yaletown yuppies, the 5 zillion tourists, the bar crawlers, the insane, uselessly politically correct city council and the endless noise. If I had to live here, I would very rapidly go insane. Plus I have 5 cats, a large dog and a horse. Where I live, I can bike to shopping and amenities, and I have easy access to transit (West Coast Express) for my job. I have incredible parks and the river at my doorstep that make Stanley Park look like a joke. I can have a huge garden for fruit and veggies, and I don't have to deal with the assholes on a strata council who think it's their right to tell everyone how to run their life. And most importantly to me, I have peace, quiet and privacy - something that's in extremely short supply downtown. Now tell me why I should bail on all this and pay 3x my current house mortgage for a 500sf condo in hell?

Please see my most recent post on Grdadolnik's recent article on the Whitecaps Stadium, as the subject of planning re the city's historic geography is the same.
http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/05/31/Whitecaps/
I'm posting this here as I hope to get Ms. Grdadolnik attention re my correction about her comment that "Gastown has no connection to the waterfront".

And why haven't the False Creek Flats been considered as a location for the stadium? More parking, better access, adjacent to the East End's soccer culture, and so on. You don't have to be on the waterfront to watch a soccer game, after all; and the view of the mountains from the bleachers is going to be the same. OK, OK, there's the stink from that remaindering plant at Commercial or Victoria and Powell, but that needs to be gotten out of the city anyway.

I'd assume that the Flats haven't come up because the Whitecaps owner actually owns the land in the proposed location, and it was easier to go ahead there than to go through all the red tape of buying a new parcel of land and starting up the whole song and dance with council again from scratch.

RE: "cutting Gastown off from the waterfront" is about...AFAIK, they're not getting rid of Crab Park, which is the only way to get down there right now anyway?

In Crab Park, there's a "monument" to the "original location" of Lucklucky; which is a demonstration of how shoddy the city's heritage/parks people are in their research. Lucklucky was the beach at what is now Maple Tree Square; the monument in question was a good hundred yards offshore...

Crab Park's been problematic since it opened because of the roundabout access from Main Street; if it remains, and as with my other ideas about Gastown reconnecting to the waterfront, overpasses as used to be at the foot of Cambie and Abbott should be reinstituted (along Alexander Street it was a level crossing: http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/cgi-bin/www2i/.visual/img_med/dir_83/g_06818.gif View of Alexander Street, Gastown c.1911 (caption says Water Street, but it is behind buildings at right)

Reah wrote:

I agree to an extent, and have even pondered living in Maple Ridge. However, the key is sustainability. We cannot all live on a hobby farm, and I do not quarrel with those that do. However, if more people desire the lifestyle you have, you will eventually lose it.

It appears that you agree with McMartin, and think about what you have written…

Rhea continued

The problem is short-sightedness. If more people “escape” to the ‘burbs, then they won’t really be the ‘burbs anymore. Just look at how Maple Ridge has changed. Homes and industrial areas are going up on farmland, and houses just keep creeping up the mountain and towards Golden Ears Park. Ten years ago, I used to think of Maple Ridge as being on the edge of wilderness, but not anymore. It is more like Surrey north. If you build attractive and affordable housing in Vancouver City, it will relieve growth pressures on the ‘burbs.

You say you have peace, quiet, and privacy…. But for how long? Is it just a matter of your lifetime, or do you want to preserve the experience for future generations?

It is the short-sightedness of McMartin and that style of thinking is what I take issue with. We all practice it, just some more than others.

Maple Ridge on the edge of wilderness? ;-) Well, it's all a matter of perspective. I remember driving my cousin from L.A. to my brother's wedding in Mission many year ago via the Dewdney Trunk; this would have been about 1981. He was terrified - thought we were going to get eaten right there on the pavement, by some horrific bear that would tear the car apart (in 50 years I've never seen a bear on the Dewdney Trunk itself, though there are lots around there).

Our old domicile was in the BC Hydro "camp" (so-called; more like an Edwardian village) adjacent to Ruskin Dam. We had woods out the back door which I roamed in at will - from scrub alder on unplanted old cuts to outright first-growth (the hillside on the west side of the dam was preserved by Hydro engineers to keep its soils stable). Never considered any of that "wilderness", nor any of the bush up behind the dam towards Stave. Wilderness didn't start until you were past the big clearcuts north of Mission, i.e north of Stave Lake; anywhere that had roads, clearcuts, the sound or relics of machinery; that's not wilderness.

But it's all a matter of perpsective. Lillooet, the other place I'm "from", strikes people from populated parts of the continent as being in the wilderness. No - there's wilderness NEAR Lillooet, but that country has been traversed by non-natives for over a century; and in years since there's clearcuts and logging roads into areas that were once as psychologically forbidding as the Yukon or Amazon. Also places where, if you lived there, your definition of "wilderness" would be different again.

Of course there's people in Vancouver for whom anything east of Cambie Street is wilderness...

"towards Stave" - local idiom; means "towards Stave Falls"; confusing because Ruskin is right on the Stave River also.

Well let's see, 150 years ago, hey did Cambie street even exist?

Hey, that's "progress".

Where did I say I lived on a hobby farm? I live in a 50+ year old house on a regular city lot near the downtown part of Maple Ridge. My horse lives on a working dairy farm 5 minutes down the road. As for sustainable lifestyle, I probably use my bike, transit and shank's pony more than a lot of people I know who live closer to Vancouver. Plus a lot of the food we eat is locally grown or raised in Maple Ridge (or in the backyard), which is a lot more than most people in the downtown can say.

As for this:

Yes, actually, I do work to preserve this for future generations. I'm active in the community, including working with the group fighting development on Thornhill and getting involved in the OCP planning process. It's one of the reasons I refuse to buy a new home in a new subivision - I will not support sprawl with my mortgage dollars. I've spoken out very strongly against the Genstar development in Mission, because I think it's an appalling example of poor urban planning. Unfortunately, it is going ahead. I also get in council's face on land getting removed from the ALR, and encourage others to do so. Oh, and I'm involved with the Haney Horsemen, who do a ton of park and trail maintenance, and who advocate for keeping park and green space in Maple Ridge. Care to put your money where your mouth is now?

The point I was trying to make in my original post was that not everyone wants to live in the urban core. The ivory tower method of telling everyone that they should live in the downtown because it's morally superior just doesn't fly in reality. Mind you, I'm sure many, many people would be equally appalled by my lifestyle, and I don't point fingers at them and tell them they should do as I do. I hate to admit it, but I suppose I agree with McMartin to the extent that the assumption that we'd all leap at a chance to move downtown is misplaced. It's not a one-size fits all solution, in large part because of the price of housing and the fact that many people no longer work in Vancouver.

No, it won't. First of all, there's currently nowhere to build so-called "attractive and affordable housing in Vancouver". Not when 490sf condos are selling for more than $200K and the idea of densification via secondary suites and narrow lots is being fought tooth and nail by various neighbourhoods intent on preserving *their* precious single family neighbourhoods. And the developers make far too much money off overprices condos to even consider letting densification happen at a price regular people could afford. Look at what happened to Woodwards, or to the affordable housing component in False Creek. Council caved to the developers' pressure to minimize it (so they could make more money), and will continue to do so. Secondly, a lot of people no longer work in the downtown. Taxes and land proces are forcing businesses and industry out of the city into Burnaby and surrounding areas. I know more people now who commute between the Ridge Meadows/Langley/Burnaby/Tri-Cities/Surrey areas than who commute to downtown. They have no reason to move to the city. There seems to be this fantasy that all these people work downtown, when in reality it's simply not true any longer. Vancouver is no longer the centre of the universe in the GVRD - we would probably do better to focus on better urban planning and densification in Surrey and the other areas where the real growth is happening, rather than complaining that everyone should move to Vancouver.

...TBC...

...continued...

The reality in this city is that housing and land prices are driving urban sprawl, which is in turn increasing congestion and pollution. Unless we all turn communist or there's a huge real estate crash, this trend is going to continue. A solution might be to encourage businesses with many commuting employees to relocate out in the suburbs, and to then encourage each suburb to develop in a more compact, sustainable and intelligent manner, conserving agricultural land around it. That way you return to a more sustainable model of a healthy mix of business and residential surrounded by agricultural land. I'd also love to see businesses get a tax cut for encouraging telecommuting and remote work, which could significantly drop congestion and pollution.

Meanwhile folks, back in Vancouver, something significant is actually happening.
On the very day this article was first posted, and the day before our co-directors of planning officially vacated their positions, City Council fired its entire Board of Variance in a closed door meeting. This move is unprecedented, and has shocked the planning community.
For those that don't know what this somewhat obscure board is, it is a layperson's board consisting of 5 members including their own choice of chair, chosen from interested applicants and appointed by the City for a fixed, yet renewable term. Among other things, it hears appeals to development permits that have been issued by the Department of Planning; as such it is the only mechanism in existence for citizens to oppose the decisions of the Department of Planning regarding development in their neighborhoods. Check here for more details http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/planning/landuse4.htm#bov
It is not just a place to vent, as so many public hearings are. It has teeth, and recent decisions (which are supposed to be incontestable) by this board, against developers and in favor of citizens groups, have drawn it into BC Supreme Court. Court costs have given Council the excuse it is using to remove this "last-vestiges-of-COPE" thorn in its side, even though in one case the City itself has been racking up its own costs to fight the Board of Variance, its lawyers arguing onside with the appellant developers. The members of the Board itself are in BC Supreme Court today, defending their positions on grounds that their mass dismissal is illegal.
A single replacement for Ms. McAfee and Mr. Beasley is being sought at the very same time as the replacements for the entire board: the people who will ostensibly keep this person, and their staff, in check, on behalf of the citizens of Vancouver. All replacements will be chosen by City Council. An inconvenient truth.

Yes, horribly enough. More automotive-based density with no social/commercial cores, just suburban tract housing. Gross. I went to school at Silverhill and Silverdale; both names that Genstar tried to wipe off the map, both rich in history and identity but erasable by planner's pen. The Silverhill development should be rail-based with a network of villages; its forests and beautiful hilltop pastures could therefore be preserved, and I submit if it were done that way it could become as attractive to live in as anything on the West Side or West Van; of course that's just playing into the hands of the realtors, who want everyone to pile all their capital into property values....

It's not just ivory tower; it's a media-corporate drive to jack realty prices and the viability of downtown retailers. It's also part of Vancouver's desire to be New York without having to be New York, i.e. all the city, none of the fun. But basically that line of cant boils down to hyping condo sales and little more. But advertising (otherwise known as news broadcasts and op-ed pages) works, and so people buy into the myth; and the over-inflated condo market.

Downtown lifestyle? Vancouver DOESN'T HAVE a downtown lifestyle, as anyone who's lived in Montreal, NYC or a major European city knows.

This would be the intelligent way to do it, which, of course, is why it won't happen.

On another note, I've posted in a number of threads on this site that the old interurban rail line from Chilliwack should be revived as a commuter service. It would have the benefit of serving all the areas on the south side of the Fraser that are currently lacking in transit options (Abbotsford, Langley, parts of Surrey). I know there was actually a citizen's group several years back that was pushing for this, but sadly it never happened. I'd be interested to see if they're still around, now that gas prices and congestion have become more politically acceptable issues.

And FWIW, I agree on the downtown lifestyle thing. Part of the reason European cities work is because they realize that not all people who live there are young/single/childless and/or wealthy.

One of my sayings about BC is "if it makes too much sense, they won't do it".

The revived interurban was blocked by rural residents along the line who didn't want the increased rail traffic. The tragedy is that the line skirts Surrey Centre, Guildford, Newton, Cloverdale, Langley City and Sevenoaks as well as downtown Abby; but because some farmers/rural retirees want their "peace and quiet" they get automotive-based suburbanization instead. Short-sightedness and NIMBYism triumph once again. Of course, it's a truism that if development in the valley were densified in urban cores, there wouldn't be as much of a hot market in converting all that peace-and-quiet farmland into subdivisions, would there?

Why there's not a WestCoast Express station at Albion, Whonnock/Ruskin or Silverdale points in the direction the line was built for; to service existing communities and feed their residents into Vancouver's employment complex. Downtown Vancouver's in specific. i.e. the WCE is built around a city-centre model of economic and social life. Which doesn't explain at all why there's no non-commuter trips (i.e. not during commuter hours, but for other users, such as mid-day or in the evenings).

BTW CP Rail has told TransLink that if the latter wants to run more trains, there wouldn't be any extra track-rental charges; but TransLink isn't interested because they'd have to buy more rolling stock and all their money is tagged for highway bridges and freeways. Duh.

There are plans to put a WCE station at Albion in 2008, and I know North Burnaby is getting one for 2009...so at least they're moving in the right direction, even if it's way too slowly. Now if they ran midday trains going east and west, and a couple of trains on weekends, they'd really be getting somewhere.

The lost opportunity story of the interurban is a real tragedy. Trains are WAY less disruptive than auto traffic. Hell, I should know...I live within earshot of the track, and it doesn't bother me as much as living next to Lougheed Hwy (like a friend of mine does, ugh) would.

Upon returning from my trip to New York City, I couldn't help but see the vast differences between NYC and Vancouver. Surely the vast amount of natural green (Pacific Spirit, Stanley Park, etc.) and the low-rise areas that make up the majority of Vancouver made the city seem a much less daunting city to take on, and one that invites living organisms that want a little bit of nature everywhere they go. But whatever NYC lacks with pollution, costs, crime and homelessness (which, to be honest, both seem much worse ratio wise in Vancouver) it makes up with lifestyles that cannot be found elsewhere. Our idea of fun, as so many here have already touted, is a healthy lifestyle revolving around our outside nature. But what does the majority of the city have to offer?

Downtown, and a lot of other sub-areas, are pitiful examples of "the good life" Vancouver boasts. That is, unless your idea of fun is weekend clubbing, drinking or shopping. The more I'm in Yaletown and Coal Harbour, the more I don't want to be there. Generalizations will hurt these two communities, but they are so goddamn sanitary and pristine, including their residents, that I feel it's a displayed life rather than a lived one. (I hope to God Main Street doesn't go the same route, though advertisements for new real estate point otherwise.) Denman, Davie and a few other areas boast real community for people that are social and interactive with each other, a reason worth choosing a neighbourhood. Other than that I find no attachment to any lifestyle downtown. I just feel like a customer/working commuter.

Point Grey has a nice quaint community, but much like Shaughnessy, it seems more elite than inviting. Fairview is all right, but a bit boring for anyone not interested in fashion or buying paintings. Cambie is still missing its sense of community, locked between two bigger neighbourhoods to the east and west. Most of South Vancouver is residential with not much to do off your own property (minus some areas around 49th). The same applies for Nanaimo eastward areas. Kitsilano, Mount Pleasant and Commercial Drive are probably the only places I feel have the right balance of being both resident friendly and being a thriving social/economic area.

Maybe my dream of a city that has everything I need makes me a bit bitter toward many aspects of Vancouver. I really don't know a lot of things to do past 8 PM that are fun and not revolving around alcohol. And even before 8 PM there still isn't a place I feel like going to every night, little alone every week. I really want something to happen to this city... wake it up to a thriving arts community or something. I don't know. But compared to other metropolitan cities something is still very undesireable about Vancouver living.

Rhea,

We really are not that far apart. However, I do still take issue with your support of McMartin, especially since you say that you have been actively against the Genstar and Thornhill developments.

I would go read his article again, but I do not think it is necessary to wander back to the recycling bin. If you read his article again, you will see that the mindset he supports drives the moves behind developments such as Thornhill.

If you do like your quality of life in Maple Ridge, then you should actively be supporting the densification of Vancouver City.

And this is where you lose me…

Rhea wrote..

In one breath you say not everyone wants to live downtown. However, it is also true that not everyone likes chocolate ice cream, yet there sure is a big demand for it. Here’s what you wrote earlier…

Rhea wrote (previous post)

I am not saying that you should abandon your current arrangement at all. However, there are people will to pay a ton o’ bucks to live in a 500sq. apartment. It can’t be all that bad down there then can it?

Are you telling me that the quality of living in Maple Ridge is that much better? I have chuckled many times when that Haney Place Mall parking lot is full and people are driving in circles just to get a spot so that they can pick up a $5.00 “Hot n’ Ready” Pizza from Little Caesar’s.

Rhea also wrote

Although you may not like Vancouver city, there is a demand to live there. We don’t have to “push” people to live in Vancouver, they are “pulled” there. And do you really think that Surrey can compete with Vancouver for densification? As much as Vancouver has been slagged in the last few posts, it is still an undeniably beautiful area as far as major North American cities go. Of course this is due to the physical geography. However, the restaurants are great, and the available cultural activities are also a bonus. Maple Ridge could also be wonderful, however, it just does not seem to be moving in a positive direction at the moment.

Ok, I agree somewhat…. But how is this going to happen without building up. The moment you plan for a tower is when the citizens start to rally against city council. I would love to see those crummy malls in the center of Maple Ridge fall, and a Newport village type development go in. However, most people fear tall buildings and would crush any similar plan.

I do challenge you to read McMartin’s article again, and then ask yourself if he would really be against the Thornhill and Genstar developments.

Keep up the fight though, and hold that council accountable to future generations.

Geez. Now if only they weren't also cancelling the Albion Ferry; it would make Fort Langley a nice commute; but NOOOOO, it's now the Walnut Grove bus from Guildford/Surrey Central, which takes ages; as I said before "if it makes too much sense, they won't do it"; therefore in the last years of the Albion Ferry there was no thought of a station at that location; until after the ferry is decommissioned.

North Burnaby, huh? Presumably at the foot/head of Willingdon, sorta; bends around down below Capitol Hill, but it's a LONG way down. No doubt all the Hastings buses will have to detour down there, the same way the buses divert to SkyTrain and WCE stations (thereby slowing them down). I imagine the whole point of the Burnaby station is a condo development on the water, i.e. bucks for the developers/council revenues.

Then there's the freight tunnel under 2nd Narrows which links Park & Tilford to Brentwood; roughly. Another great route, jointly owned by CN now no less; would connect both to New West and downtown if used; and if they'd ever thought about it, the Rocky Mountaineer (or the old Budd Car) could start (or have started) from "Central Station" instead of the foot of Pemberton St. Tracks all over the place, but no service.

You'd never know the most bustling years of growth in this city were rail-driven (1886-1911 or so, i.e. from 500 to 125,000 in 25 years).