Development of Heritage Neighborhoods (Granville, Yaletown, Chinatown, etc.)
 

Now that Vancouver is taking a look again at the maximum density and heights for Granville Entertainment District and Chinatown, I think we should move the discussion for those to a new thread.

I've also decided to make a poll to ask what heritage sites should be opened for development, since the debate seems to be dividing people here.

Note that façade preservation may be allowed for heritage site redevelopment.


These areas are:
- West End 'Villages' (Robson Village, Denman Village, Davie Village)
(not officially heritage, but treated similarly)
- Gastown
- Chinatown
- DTES/Japantown/Strathcona (development is allowed in the DTES 'core' corridor, but not in the fringe areas.)
- Yaletown Historic District
- False Creek South (not a historic district, but there's a push to preserve it)
- Granville Entertainment District
- Shaughnessy (lol)

Done.


Do realize that 4 FSR is ~12 Stories on Broadway...

For context:
Townhouses are 1.2 FSR (max), while single-family homes are around 0.75 FSR.
The 'removal' of the SFH zoning across BC allows for 1 FSR (max).

https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/housi...s-brochure.pdf
https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/norqu...house-zone.pdf

Also,
Olympic Village is 2.7 FSR.
Concord Pacific Place is 3.7 FSR.
Sen̓áḵw is 11 FSR.


To be fair, most of those areas are in the 'town centers'.
Burnaby's bus network is kind of iffy as well. Not as much as say, Langley or Maple Ridge, but not the best in terms of design either.
Some route choices are pretty questionable.

Why not now, though?
I pointed out that it's extremely high-quality land (in theory), in terms of access, and if you're going to develop it eventually, why are you going to wait another decade or two?


The problem with that is that you're never going to have 100% 'densification' in any 1 neigborhood.
There's going to be lots that owners stubbornly refuse to develop densely (eg. SAP warehouse) or delay development, or developments that get stuck in limbo (eg. Concord NEFC).

Metro Vancouver points this out, stating that we need a certain level of 'excess' vacant land because not all the vacant land will ever be used at any given time, so even with infinite demand, the actual amount of vacant land will eventually plateau out.
Warehouses are not condos, as the former are less flexible in terms of land size, but still:




There's a couple remaining parkades and surface parking lots (though ironically, the largest are in the 'historic districts' (mainly Yaletown and Chinatown)), yes, but this isn't the 80s or 90s, when the CBD was surrounded by a sea of old former industrial lands and low-density commercial buildings- ie. where Surrey is today.

Also remember that it takes a while for these sites to get full approval and be developed.


Vancouver Downtown growth is slowing down due to being relatively built out:
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/down...res-statistics
Assuming 1.5 people per unit, you'd be consuming that entire 'reserve' of units in roughly 15 years at Toronto downtown 'growth' rates. (TBH, ~30,000 units, as you state, seems high, considering that's 5 Senakws- and that's super dense.)

This doesn't include Broadway (as stated above), but still.
It's not a race, but it does indicate the opposite of what you're saying.

FSR: Floor/Space Ratio; in order to get twelve floors on Broadway, you need to reduce the first four through setbacks, greenspace or other means. Yaletown’s warehouses apparently take up the entire site, and are four floors on average, so 4 FSR.

Royal Oak isn’t a town centre, but is starting to get redeveloped en masse; Imperial’s got one of the city’s busiest, most frequent buses, but isn’t. Compared with Broadway and Cambie - where everything within a 700-900m radius of SkyTrain was bulk-rezoned no matter what it was - Metrotown, Brentwood, Royal Oak, Edmonds et al have grabbed all the lowrise apartments and warehouses within 500-600m of the station/malls... and stopped. So Burnaby’s growth is less about density and affordability, and more about redevelopment money while protecting NIMBY homeowners. That's not a model Vancouver should follow.

Is there a rush? There’s no shortage of glass towers in the CoV, but if you gut a indie/hipster business district and the buildings and workspaces that attracted them there, you’re probably not getting them back - ditto Gastown.

Gastown is a National Historic Site. Chinatown is also a National Historic Site. (That's the same as Fort Langley)

Senakw’s FSR is 8.75 (4m sq ft on 10.5 acres).

That's a lower density than most current Vancouver and West End projects. The Landmark is 9.5 FSR, Burrard Place 2 is 15.3 FSR (and Burrard Place 1 was 18.4). The social housing Ismaili Centre on Richards is 13.9 FSR. Bosa's 1040 and 1080 Barclay rental towers will be 15.4 FSR, and the Kengo Kuma tower on Alberni is 14.2 FSR. Curv, next to The Butterfly is approved at 24.7 FSR.

Comparing Vancouver's Downtown to others is irrelevent to how much will be built in Vancouver. Toronto's downtown is much bigger. Edmonton's is hardly growing at all.

The development capacity I listed are all current projects, or where developers have acquired the site and indicated an intention to develop. There are many others beyond that - The Bay Parkade - the parking lots on either side of The Penthouse Club - the notorious vacant site on Robson for example.

As Migrant says, you don't need to mess with the heritage areas, the character areas, or the shopping villages yet. There's many years capacity in Downtown and the West End, and we're seeing higher density nodes now around the city at Marine, Oakridge, Joyce, along Broadway , etc. etc. so decisions to preserve the heritage areas (or not) can be revisited in decades to come.

Shouldn't Strathcona be on this list? It is literally adjacent to downtown and is largely small woodframe buildings. It's funny how so many think developing highrises in Shaughnessy is a great idea but never mention Strathcona. :rolleyes:

The lot assembly required in Strathcona would be bonkers.

It IS.
Look at the poll again.

DTES (Hastings) is technically already zoned 30-story buildings.

It's on the list - you voted for it.

The 770 dwellings in Shaughnessey have an average FSR of 0.32, and lots are on average over 18,000 sq ft, so they could be developed with townhouses on a single lot, and quadruple the density. A stand-alone 25 storey tower on the lot could have only 25% lot coverage, huge setbacks, fabulous landscaping and in most cases 100 times the number of units that currently occupy the site. You could move the heritage house to one side, put the tower next to it, and still have lots of space. Here's a 33,000 sq ft lot, and only asking $10,880,000.

Strathcona is only 20% of the Shaughnessey area, and has over 1,500 units, and an average FSR of 0.72, so over double that of Shaughnessey already (and over ten times the units per hectare). The average lot size is 3,700 sq ft, and many are now stratas with separate ownership of laneway homes, so assembling a site big enough to develop would be tough, as GenWhy notes. There area also 4-storey SROs throughout the neighbourhood which would have to be replaced, which would make redevelopment more complicated. More expensive too - here's a 1901 opportunity but it's only a 3,050 sq ft lot, (standard for the area) so you'd need 11 of them to reach the size of the Shaughnessey lot, and at $1,489,900 it would be a 50% higher land cost (if you could ever get enough in a row to make up a site).

There are already new projects on the edge of the area, and redevelopment may come one day to some parts like Prior Street, but in the meantime the obvious opportunities are in the 1950s estates where 'slum clearance' built non-market housing with surface parking lots that are still in place.

Do all of these areas have historic district status or is this list somewhat arbitrary? There are other areas with strong character housing stock such as around City Hall, Grandview Woodlands, parts of Kitsilano and others.

Personally I would like to see some of the areas listed in this post get official Heritage Conservation Area protection. A neighbourhood like Strathcona has significant historic importance and provides a wonderful low density "escape" from the surrounding higher density. I think this will become increasingly appreciated as the surrounding area increasingly develops into towers. The core of the neighbouhood isn't that large and there's still plenty of development possible on the western edge.

The DTES needs development, so I would be open to heritage retention developments.

They are either officially 'historic' or are treated the same way for the same reasons in their zoning plans.

Is there anything in Stathcona that's not replicated in other lower-density neighborhoods (say south of Broadway, or Granville-Woodlands?)

You may notice all those towers you mentioned are West End towers, which has fewer restraints on viewcones.
As a result, they're abnormally dense vs most of the rest of Downtown.

And TBF, Senkaw is 11 when you remove the space taken up by the Burrard Bridge... :P

Yes- about 10-20 years on the Peninsula itself, especially as growth rates slow down as you develop more and more of the remaining 'easy' lots.

That's comparable to the amount of vacant land available for industrial purposes remaining in Metro Vancouver (discounting the massive industrial lots in Maple Ridge, which currently are of limited usefulness without a freeway to the area.) And that's a 'crisis'.

Unless you're going to push all future development near downtown onto the Broadway area (which DOES allow spot rezonings above the existing zoned density, unlike the West End Plan, thankfully) or change the West End Plan, you're still limiting the growth of Downtown.

I know. I'm using the Broadway Plan's FSR guidelines as a baseline. They add extra setbacks, but I don't think it's that big.

OK, fair enough. I would argue that the Flats and other industrial areas near town centers play that role to an extent, but I guess Yaletown is still 'working', unlike the Gastown, Granville, and Chinatown.

It kind of bothers me still that you have a completely artificial 'wall' of towers surrounding a bunch of old warehouses.
It's a very strange and surreal place in some ways walking around there.

Also, eventually, the hipsters/artists will end up being priced out (if they haven't already). A lot have been moving to Railtown for that reason (though, not sure if it's still the case with the increase in crime in the area.)


Well, that's because there was a lot of short-sighted cost-cutting with the original Expo and Millennium Lines- especially to avoid putting stations on curved areas or avoid demolishing properties (I'm glad to say this is less of an issue with the newer line segments.)

Two of those places where putting Royal Oak where it is today (Imperial Station would be on a curved site, and would be more expensive to place a station at) and Edmonds (same thing- it was originally placed closer to Middlegate.)

And I don't think Royal Oak's getting redeveloped that much. The zoning is mostly just medium density residential and commercial (and don't worry, the FARs for the different plans are similar:)
https://burnaby.widen.net/s/6j8kqqjwdc/lum---royal-oak

This is comparable to the Lochdale Plan (Burnaby East Hastings) (TBF, it's also a very new plan):
https://burnaby.widen.net/s/7cgdbdxr...d-use-map-2022

They're updating Royal Oak now, but I doubt they'll add much extra density (the industrial zoning kind of makes that impossible.)


The main place I think you can make the criticism that "Burnaby’s growth is less about density and affordability, and more about redevelopment money while protecting NIMBY homeowners" is Edmonds, which is now little more than a bunch of condo towers spaced around a SkyTrain Station with little nearby services.

But then again, that 'Town Centre' was probably doomed the day it was designated...it has a very poor location due to the aforementioned cost-cutting.

Is it any more unusual than Greenwich or East Village? Not all of downtown has to be uniformly tall all at once. Playing devil’s advocate, one could argue that all the Ctrl-V’ed Nineties condos are the anomaly, and that density should’ve been spread out around the downtown core instead of just handing Concord a blank cheque, making the “warehouse district” less of a sore thumb.

Maybe they’ll be priced out, maybe they won’t – either way, the housing crisis isn’t so serious that we need to evict them right this decade.

Point is that pretty much every one of Burnaby’s plans have Grand Bargain written all over them. You’ll want to look at the Royal Oak map again and see where the townhomes are going: all the places that’re already zoned for multifamily, while most of the SFHs around them are left as-is... despite Gray and Oakland Streets being closer to the SkyTrain than Gilley. If the end goal is affordability and supply, Burnaby Council’s got a real funny way of showing it.

Bringing the analogy back to the CoV, there's still plenty of low density in the surrounding neighbourhoods like Strathcona, Chinatown and the Flats (which aren't doing so well) that can be built out before we need to reconsider Yaletown (which is).

In London?

They did with the buildings between Pacific and Cambie and the Historic district, which are lower-density than the Concord lots.

Also, the City did interfere a lot with the Concord developments- as Concord originally wanted to completely redesign the False Creek Waterfront into a set of islands.

The CoV actually went out of its way to prevent a the towers from having a lower standard height from:
(Concord's original 'lagoons' plan):
https://spacing.ca/vancouver/wp-cont...bert-group.jpg

I don't think it would have been better for Yaletown to have been Olympic Village North with islands.

Next decade?

Royal Oak is also an older plan, hence why it's being redone. Lochdale is more representative of the way they think nowadays.

NYC. At last check, Greenwich and East are considered two of the most vibrant parts of the city.

Horrible planning, but the islands actually look somewhat cool. But no, I'm talking about north of Homer and Nelson: take out all the condos, and what you have left is pretty much what Vancouver used to look like. The downtown core effectively jumped from four floors to forty overnight.

Whichever decade is when it becomes too expensive for a craft brewery or an art studio, the developers can move in, no problem. That decade is not this one.

That seems to be an exception rather than a rule - you look at Sperling-Burnaby Lake (which actually has a SkyTrain), and it's the Grand Bargain again.

No I deliberately mentioned towers Downtown too. Burrard Place isn't in the West End, neither is Richards Street. There will be a 14 FSR tower once the Granville Loops. Several NEFC towers will be over 11 FSR.

I don't get it. Do you think Downtown shouldn't have expanded into Yaletown?

Ok, fair enough.

https://burnaby.widen.net/s/k6vxp6fx...community-plan
Has 5-10 story apartments on the SFHs between Ellersliie and Buffallo.
Sure, you probably should have moved the density from the industrial areas around the intersection of Winston and Bainbridge to Broadway, but TBF, Broadway's also on top of a hill.

The areas fronting Lougheed from the north are also multiplexes, not multi-family dwellings.

But seriously, why?

Why should all of the places that have a particular "character" have the thing that gives them character removed?

Think of your first (architectural) mental picture of many cities around the world - London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Mexico City, Taipei, Dubai, Cairo, Brisbane...if the excuse is "we need to add more people to these cities", would you pick the exact places that came into your mind just now and rip them up to make taller towers? Wouldn't you instead pick places that had NO character - the boring, soulless, low-interest and low-historical value areas, and build better buildings there? There are swathes of SFH 2 storey Vancouver Special rental homes lining arterials and near transit that are scattered all over the city; those neighbourhoods could be bulldozed overnight and replaced with towers and nobody would miss the rental homes. Start there.

I think for Vancouver, there are lots of areas that are not that special, that could do with their density increased to 25 floors, way before we start ripping up the neighbourhoods that already are interesting, just so we can add more people to them. Adding density is not idea for every spot on the map, as it 100% changes the - yes, character - of a place, in good and bad ways. So the thing that you liked about an area will definitely change, quite possibly lost.

On that list above,

We should be instead exporting versions of Gastown, Yaletown, Chinatown.

To a degree we have done this at Commercial St by Trout Lake, Kerrisdale, Kingsway and Joyce Station, to a degree, and Olympic Village

You realise that these are two of the least affordable parts of the city too, right?

I think there's a lot of post hoc rationalisation happening in this thread, after all, why destroy existing "perfectly good" SFD character when we could build on ALR land? Why replace "perfectly good" ALR land when we could build in the forests instead? Why replace "perfectly good" land when we should just be building on the ocean? Why ruin the earth when space is right there. Etc. etc. etc. You'd never use this argument for anything else.

This is the argument for NIMBY suburban sprawl, and I would have expected that to be a denounced idea around these parts. I hate to see a clearly bad argument being repurposed by people that would normally reject the argument.

It really bothers me when people appreciate what previous generations built but are completely unwilling to make the same sacrifices or look to the future. Why do you think the buildings you currently love and appreciate so much were able to be built? Do you think nothing was there before? Yes, there are certainly other areas of the city that are clearly due for development far before Yaletown, but if you admit that eventually Yaletown would be on the chopping block, why are we being so conservative and saying "we need to keep things the way they are right now as long as possible"?

Translation: a more gradual change (e.g. 4 floors to 10-20, then 30-40, over several decades) may have resulted in a reduced historic district, or none at all. Rapid progress led to equally-rapid kneejerk preservationism - something the entire metro may want to consider, going forward.

Some, not many. Note again that the Sperling Elementary area is a bit more SkyTrain-adjacent than Station Creek, but none of that’s up for rezoning.

Let's be real, all of NYC is unaffordable; East Village is actually cheaper than Brooklyn.

We’re talking past each other. Far as I’m concerned, you want to cross that bridge sooner, NIMBYs want it crossed later; I want it crossed when we get there, no sooner, no later. Again, it's like the viewcones - rezoning six and a half blocks is hardly going to make the same dent in overall supply that rezoning two-thirds of the city would (and is very likely going to splinter the urbanist base).

Also bear in mind that unless efforts are made to keep the types of commercial/retail units that attract hipster/indie venues - in which case you’re basically keeping most of the building - there’s a 90% chance the breweries, butchers and art studios turn into Starbucks and Lululemon with a few sushi places thrown in; I'd consider that a net loss for every generation.