Quote:
Originally Posted by squeezied
I have a hard time believing that.
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Burnaby may not be as much of a stretch in 30-50 years because they are getting closer to being border constrained for construction thus why you're seeing a lot more density in Brentwood and Metrotown. We have to remember that a major contributor to density in cities is land constraint. If a city has loads of land to develop, the preferred development methods are single family and townhouse residential. Density only starts to come with the combination of incentives along with land constraints.
Case and point, West Vancouver has land constraints but they certainly can't densify the British Properties or out towards Horse Shoe Bay. And building highrises has been difficult to get past residents, so what have they been doing? Cutting down trees and heading up the mountains aka "acquiring" new land. You either do that, or you start building highrises.
Surrey, have my doubts overall density and even downtown density wise. We have to remember though that Downtown Vancouver is quite dense, the third most dense downtown core in all of North America to be exact. For a city [Vancouver only, not metro] way down on the population charts in North America (lower than #50), that's a pretty good achievement in itself. And for Surrey, it is simply a land area game. It seems very few people realize the fact that Surrey land wise is just slightly smaller (11.5 square km) than all of Vancouver + Burnaby + Coquitlam combined.
Vancouver = 114.97 square km of land vs Burnaby @ 90.61 square km. But Surrey = 316.41 square km. There is a lot of land out here and quite a bit being farm land = overall densities will never be great even in 100 years I'd imagine. But pockets could be dense.
So any city in Metro Vancouver to rival downtown density, I agree, hard to believe. But in many pockets, some of the suburbs including Burnaby, Coquitlam, and Surrey, are building far more dense projects and neighborhoods than the vast majority of Vancouver itself outside of Broadway and downtown.
While overall density per square km in Surrey may never reach Vancouver's density ever, population and pocket densities in 30-50 years will definitely grow considerably.
That said, Vancouver will still grow in those 30-50 years and since there is basically no more room, it only has the choice to continue to grow up. How far it can do that is open to debate, but I've said it in other threads, that the downtown core could most likely handle another 500+ highrises and you're seeing a lot of "spillage" now to the other side of False Creek and out east along Hastings and Terminal Avenue. It wouldn't surprise me if "downtown" Vancouver in 30-50 years stretches from Stanley Park to Clark Drive, and from Waterfront to Broadway.
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