The Residents Association of Mount Pleasant, a non-profit group opposed to a rezoning application that would allow Rize Alliance Properties to build a 19-storey condo complex on the corner of Broadway and Kingsway, says there are other ways to meet the city's need for increased urban densification without simply building more and more highrise towers.
Urban design specialist Lewis Villegas, who addressed roughly 80 concerned local residents at a community forum on Monday night at nearby St. Patrick's Parish Hall, thinks the future of Vancouver isn't looking up. It's looking sideways. "I think that when we come to historic neighbourhoods, it's time to strike out in a new direction," said Villegas. "You can do the same density you can do with a tower at a neighbourhood level by spreading it out a little. Essentially you turn the tower on its side and you put more doors and windows on the street and that has positive benefits for everybody."
Villegas calls the common perception that building condo towers is the best solution for increased urban housing "the density fallacy" and said that Vancouver, with its absence of downtown freeways, is in a unique position to build compact housing units along main arterial roads that could replace some of the infamous and ubiquitous single-family houses known as "Vancouver Specials." "It is beyond me how these two-storey stucco boxes has garnered so much critical attention," said Villegas to appreciative laughs from the crowd. "If you start looking at our arterial streets and identify which ones have single-family cottages on them, it is all over the place. When we did a measurement to see how much density we could actually add, we calculated that we could double the city's population simply by impacting those single-family residential lots."
University of B.C. landscape architecture professor Patrick Condon also believes that such a move would be a way to make housing more affordable and to help lower greenhouse gases by building on public transit routes. Condon added that while building condo towers has been a success story for the downtown core, they aren't the solution for the entire city.
"We've been so enormously successful in the downtown with one style of development that is rightly admired all around the world, particularly in places where cities are becoming moribund, but our success has created an industry which is incapable, it appears, of responding to housing questions with anything but a one-size-fits-all response," said Condon at the forum. "[This is] a model that can allow Vancouver to continue to be the vanguard for North America in showing the world how sustainable neighbourhoods get done."
The ongoing public hearing into the rezoning application of the Rize tower project, which would create 241 new housing units and underground parking spaces for a total of 320 vehicles, will reconvene for a fourth day, beginning at 7 p.m. March 27 at city hall. So far 104 people out of a list of 220 registered speakers have spoken and the majority have come out against the rezoning proposal.
