Quote:
Originally Posted by Canucks223
Here is a thought. Lets say a developer was able to somehow bypass the height restrictions and they completed a tower over the view cone limit. Would anyone in the public even know or care? Would there be a single complaint from a Vancouver resident? Who are these views reserved for anyway? The general public or Vancouver residents themselves?
I'm really curious about this. Has the general public ever been consulted about the view cones (I'm talking years after them being implement) to see what the general public opinion of them are? If no one cares, then get rid of them.
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Not sure how your hypothetical scenario could possibly ever get through the city anyway, but ok, let's play along. Yes, there would definitely be backlash:
- Other developers: "How come they were allowed to build past the viewcones but our tower had to be scaled back just to abide by this arbritary height restriction? We could have made tens of millions of dollars more if we were allowed to go higher! This is not fair!" -> Court case for the city.
- Residents within the shadow: "This huge tower is ruining our light and causing wind downdraughts! We can't grow our gardens any more or walk safely! It's destroying the peaceful enjoyment of our property! We expected a tower to go in there at some point, but not *that* tall!" -> Court case to the city and developer.
- Residents within sight of the development: "This tower is ruining our view of xyz! When we bought we were told that the viewcones only would affect our view up to a certain height and width so we were ok with it. This is beyond what we were told!" -> Court case to the realtor, city, and developer.
I understand your point about building a tower that slightly impinges upon the limits - "who's going to care?". But the reality is, if a developer just breaks the rules a tiny bit without city response, the next developer would see that as meaning they can break them more, and the next even more, until eventually some developer breaks the height limit a lot. There will have been precedent set, so in the eventual legal battle, the probable outcome would be a mess. And then that *could* lead to unregulated development. That may or may not be a good thing, but I could see many scenarios where that becomes incredibly undesireable.
An example of somebody trying to get one past the city, and how strict the city can be with sticking to these rules (even when it's deletirious to enforce them) is when the Wall Centre - at the time the tallest building in the downtown core - went up with black glass. The city didn't like what it saw, and made them stop installing the dark glass. So for many years we had a mismatched tower with 2/3 really great-looking dark glass and the top 1/3 clear glass that looked awful. It became iconic for the wrong reasons.
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Looking at the future renders from early 2020, the height seems tall enough, but I wonder about the design itself. First, if people think it's a design breakthrough, perhaps not ...
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