Downtown Vancouver’s condo ghetto increases car use

As office spaces gets pushed out of Vancouver's downtown core by more-profitable condo development, car trips and commutes only get longer

Much attention is paid to the success of Vancouver's downtown, but most of Vancouver does not look like that, nor will it. Even so, in most people's perception, density means high-rise towers. In fact, similar density can be achieved with a much wider variety of structures. And if you look at the area as whole, there’s enough open green space and parks to make the place tolerable.

But from the point of view of function, downtown is not really that successful—because it still generates huge numbers of motorized trips. Not that you would know it from the transit system, but downtown's role as the key destination for morning peak period trips (the journey to work) has in fact been declining steadily. That is because offices are being overtaken by condos: office developers could not compete with the profits made from condo developments. The West Coast Energy building was actually converted to residential condos. And many of the residents of downtown now travel to suburban office parks to work. That's because we did not build complete communities. And our regional town centres are just about shopping.


 

Mixed land use is also an idea that seems foreign to North American planners.

The theory was always that residential, commercial and industrial uses needed to be physically separate—which is understandable given that was back in the days of heavy industrial pollution. But with modern technologies and much better regulation, it is no longer necessary. And separating out land uses creates the need for longer trips.

For most of human history, we lived and worked in the same place. We either walked out to the fields or downstairs to the shop. Now we drive from where we sleep and spend time in front of one video screen to where we work—in front of another video screen. And the places where we live have been, since 1950 or so, designed to be driven to and from. The suburbs are actually designed to make drives within subdivisions longer, to deter through-traffic from residential streets. This has the effect of also deterring walking and cycling, as routes are too long and indirect.

So even if you can see Wal-Mart from your back garden, you can't walk there. Not easily anyway.

That has been the other big change in how we live. We used to shop locally; now we drive out to a big box, lured by lower prices. Of course, for many things, by the time you add the real cost of driving, the big remote store may not actually be that much of a bargain, but if your local store has closed because it could not compete, that is academic. Essentially the big retailers have downloaded the cost of delivery onto their customers. Now you have to make the trip to get the goods.

Actually while a lot of the City of Vancouver is not dense, it is also not exactly like the post-war suburbs either. That is because the growth of the city started in the streetcar era. The electric streetcars had a lot of impact in the first part of the 20th century—before Detroit hit its stride.

And you can still see what Gordon Price calls “the urban DNA” of the streetcar villages—the commercial, retail centres than grew up along the streetcars' routes and which now are often the most desirable communities. Kitsilano or Kerrisdale for example. When people first moved there they did not own cars and they travelled to work on the streetcars. And the front yard of the house next to the streetcar stop became a store.

Along streets like Broadway or 4th Avenue, you can see how development is now recognizing the greater accessibility of a street with frequent transit service. For example, the low-rise, walk-up apartments over the stores at street level—a pattern of building seen on main streets in cities all over the world. Most of Central Paris was rebuilt that way in the late 19th century—with streetcars and the Metro to get around on.

In real estate, there is an old saw that the three most important things are location, location and location. And what changes our perception of location is its accessibility. They ain't making any more waterfront, but it’s not hard to make a place easier to get to and from. The one thing you want to avoid though is making it only about transportation. No one wants to live along the El tracks—or where trucks thunder through every day. And there are usually much better views than that of a parking lot.