Quote:
Originally Posted by PBlonde
Looking at that data, Burnaby is consistently top 3 housing starts going back to 2016. They also have a far smaller population than Vancouver and Surrey to begin with so if you look at it as a % of current population they are proportionately leading the increase in housing over the last 10 years (based on most recent population data: Burnaby ~300k, Vancouver ~750k, Surrey ~700k).
Is there anything inherently wrong with creating a significant amount of density over transit stations/commercial hubs without building much density in between?
|
Yes,....if most of that density tends to be geared towards higher income families (the condo/strata set) as regularly used to be the case before the whole "Demoviction" uproar that forced the previous administration out of office.
It's easy to say (and pat yourself on the back) for executing TOA density (or greater) policies (which,....to be fair they were) until you look into the details and realize that a lot of tht density wasn't actually serving the purpose it was meant to be serving.
And even more so, when the old stock housing it was getting built over was affordable housing that wasn't getting replaced.
Now, a lot of those missteps have been rectified somewhat with new rental replacement and affordable requirement policies, but because the whole region was so far behind the curve in terms of provision of housing, they were never going to be enough on their own.
The reason infill housing and density in areas farther away from transit nodes becomes more important is because thanks in part to TOA regulations, land in areas at or around transit nodes is now more expensive and thus more expensive to build on that as a developer you kind of have to have that market component to make the numbers work if you're going to develop around these areas and provide the requisite affordable housing.
Farther away from the transit hubs, it's still relatively expensive, but not as much as the nodes, and therein comes the question of the missing middle and how infill housing can help provide more affordable (both to build and to rent/own) housing.
You asked what's the difference between a 2/3 bedroom unit in a tower and one in a 4 or 6 plex?
The former is not only more expensive to build, but also takes longer to get to market (due to how much longer it takes to build concrete towers than lowrise woodframes.).
Yes, tower will provide you with more in one shot, and depending on the case (and location) over time could prove better value for money, but in the 4-6 or 7 years it could take to go from rezonig application to construction completion of that tower, you could have built and occupied almost half to 2/3rds as much housing in the form of infill and plexes, in just about one third (or less) time it takes.
Infills and plexes are not going to fix the problem on their own.
Just like TOA densification was never going to be the silver bullet on its own either.
It needs to be an "all of the above" approach, and noted Burnaby has notoriously been slow(er) and more stubborn in some approaches than others (often favouring, or bowing to the SFH'ers and the NIMBY set)
Maybe one thing that Burnaby has in its favour is that it's population isn't growing as fast as Surrey's or Vancouver's, but that obviosuly comes with drawbacks of its own.
Prev
Linear Mode
