Quote:
Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut
(1) Downtown Vancouver has also been a downtown for a hundred years, and has only now filled out the whole peninsula. Metrotown wasn't even officially a town centre until the SkyTrain came in - it's currently the size of Gastown, and will not fill out to Marine Drive or Moscrop until 2050 at the earliest.
(2) I'm saying nothing much happened anywhere outside of the city centres. How many towers got built in Burnaby between Y2K and the Olympics? About as many as all of downtown Vancouver did.
(3) 65% over the last two decades means that two-thirds of Vancouver had been demovicted for condos and would've moved elsewhere. It's probably best that that idea is confined to an internet forum and not somewhere important.
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(1) That's what I'm saying. Vancouver would never expand that far out if more areas within Vancouver were developed better and denser in the first place. We would probably already see a line serving all the way to UBC with major transit stations at Granville/Broadway, 4th Ave/Burrard, Kerrisdale, etc, way before the Canada Line was even conceived. West Broadway with all its development restrictions looks pretty much the same in the 90s as it is now, which is unheard of in a place with such high commercial and residential demand.
(2) What about between 2010 till now? Does your claim still hold true? Don't think so. The suburbs have seen unprecedented growths across the board in almost every municipality, when at the same time Vancouver area outside downtown only see tumble weeds rolling through the streets. Suburb municipalities are seeing many of their previous industrial and low-density neighbourhoods emerging as new town centres that did not exist previously. Examples are Sea Island Way neighbourhood in Richmond, Brentwood Town Centre, Burquitlam neighbourhood, Kingsgate/Edmonds neighbourhood, Brewery district in New West, UBC's Westbrook Village, etc etc..
(3) That, my friend, is again the failure of the local and provincial governments for not ensuring that enough affordable housing is built: the rush to put in higher condos resulted in sidelining the middle class when it comes to housing provision. Large scale rental and market lower-cost housing could've been built along and near major commercial streets like West Broadway, West 4th, Commercial/Broadway, etc. all these decades, but nothing seemed to be happening. Zoning restrictions and all the redtape only serve to drive developers further away. Slow gentrification measures and loose attitudes towards drug and crime in the DTES also stagnate the growth of downtown eastwards.