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Originally Posted by TheTerminalCity
I can't agree wholesale with your hyperbolic view on the Cambie Plan. The original version definitely missed opportunities. The lack of density off any arterial streets, inability to land community amenities, and the complete dearth of new commercial space stand out to me as some of the more grievous offences.
The longer term legacy of the Cambie Plan may be bigger than the corridor itself though. It was the first suburban part of the city to get the green-light to densify, the first area since what, the West End, to see major changes in the scale and form of single-family development? Cambie laid the policy and political groundwork in the last decade in this city to look at six storeys on Arbutus (and every other arterial).
That shouldn't be the endpoint in a city and region growing like Vancouver is and facing the affordability challenges we do. More neighbourhoods need actual planning to guide change over time and not merely to reinforce the status quo. Recent community plans are steps in that direction. Even the updated Cambie plan takes a much more progressive (or aggressive, depending on your viewpoint...) approach, with more density off of arterials, more outright changes to the base zoning, and significantly more height, density and general activity around 41st.
Far from perfect, but it's an arc of progress and a step beyond early versions of Vancouverism based on point towers in reclaimed inner city industrial lands and protection of the single-family at all costs. It's a long-term process, confounded by the issue that the folks who have the most time and access to political discussions are too often the ones seeking a return to a sepia-toned past when all was right in the world.
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I think we agree on the shortcomings, but sorry there's no sugarcoating what happened on the bulk of the corridor - upzoning the half-block fronting Cambie to 2.3 FSR mini Corbusian slabs-in-the-park with no retail. And there's the added insult of this being just dense enough to require a $$$ 2nd level of underground parking with current parking minimums, while the dumb "wedding cake" setback requirement harmed the economics of wood construction which the 6 storey limit was selected in part to encourage. It's not an urbanization, it's shifting from one suburban typology to another.
Even worse, because of the highly visible nature of these developments (literally only fronting the main road), they created a public perception of "lots of development" in Vancouver, while failing to add a meaningful amount of housing or urban amenities. At roughly 60 homes each, you need 8 of them to get to the amount of homes delivered in 1 highrise of the type permitted in Toronto locations of similar centrality and transit access to downtown.
And the townhome developments allowed for in Phase 3 of the plan (in what must have been some sort of joke, adopted 14 years after the rapid transit line was confirmed) are only ~30% denser than what RS-1 allows. From overall density, area encompassed, land uses, implementation timelines, processes established (eg. still requiring rezonings for even the most prescriptively dictated lots), and urban design details, the Cambie Plan managed to get just about everything spectacularly wrong.
Oakridge Municipal Town Centre is the only part of the plan approximating an urban scale, also adopted at least 14 years too late.
By comparison, in the 1950s' the West End allowed any type of multifamily typology on 112 blocks of single family homes at a time when the region's population was 560,000.
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