Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeCee
There's no real reason to put anything down this corridor. Arbutus is high value residential whose residents will never allow LRT. I also believe that it still belongs to CP Rail. There are also far more important projects, such as the line to UBC.
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Never say never. The high value on the property in the area along the Arbutus corridor is going to put a lot of pressure on owners to sell to developers. Who else is going to buy them? There just aren't that many millionaires who want to live in a regular sized home in the world.
There are some great streets in the area, but many of the houses are old style CPR tract housing. They are very narrow lots so that they could be close to the station (or streetcar stop). These are NOT multi-million dollar homes. You can't build any kind of nice house on these properties. But the land is worth a million. So you get to this point where the property is too crappy for a rich person to buy, too expensive for a normal person to buy, so the only person who can buy it are developers.
They buy a few adjoining properties and mush them together and put in tiny town homes or condo blocks. Look at what is happening in certain areas of Oak and Victoria, even on Granville. Areas that are considered by us to be "rich" but the properties (individually) are so overvalued. But they are so highly valued, that even in these "rich" areas you are starting to see density, because it is the only way to bring prices to levels the market can bare (by selling the same lot to 30 different people via strata).
These are the homes right now that are not selling at all. The market has dried up; the price has exceeded the value of a single family home. The area around the Kerrisdale village will feel the pressure the most, because they are in an area already being urbanized.
In a traditional city, these areas throughout Vancouver City would already have been Urbanized. However, Skytrain has relieved that pressure as the train made places around Metrotown and New Westminster just as close (time travel wise) as Kerrisdale. Now that those areas have been developed, the focus is coming back to Vancouver.
And as the area, and Vancouver City as a whole, densifies, it will put a lot of pressure on the Canada line and relief lines will be needed. The #16 is already the 5th busiest bus in Metro Vancouver (and the #7 is no slouch either). Arbutus could easily become one of the higher density corridors in Vancouver (it already is to some extent because of Kerrisdale).