Embrace and Enhance to Evolve Vancouver’s Future
CC# 207—The remarks I will be making this evening at 7pm at the Dunbar Lutheran Church at 3491 West 31st Avenue.
The Vancouver Official Development Plan—what I call the Vancouver Official Destruction Plan— was enacted March 31st, erasing all city neighbourhoods.
That elimination of all of Vancouver neighbourhoods does not mean these remarks about the city where we live don’t apply just to Dunbar. It simply means they apply to all of Vancouver’s former 22 neighbourhoods. Fair do’s when City Council has cancelled us all.
Vancouver has a long history of the densification we are often accused of refusing. The part I participated in and many of you have lived through started some 50 years ago. I need to briefly review some of that history because it affects most of Vancouver and offers some clues about how to improve life for all Vancouverites. I will conclude by outlining a three-part approach to making things better.
In the mid 1970s when I arrived in Vancouver to a rental market with a ½% rental vacancy rate, the NDP provincial government of the day was addressing housing affordability in the form of HCBC—the Housing Corporation of BC. HCBC was a provincial crown corporation run like a private development company—in fact, it was a private development company that government bought. Its management was told to run it like a private company, except it would build on free or cheap provincial crown land, trading profits for affordability. In collaboration with municipal and federal governments, this model quickly built thousands of affordable rental, co-operative and strata homes. That model would still work today.
Fast forward to 1986, when Vancouver City Council approved our recommendations addressing “monster houses”—not monstrous because they were unaffordable, but because they were unneighbourly—the home on the left of this image was deemed “monstrous” in 1986. My employer, Architect Rick Hulbert, was retained by the city to study the issues, and appointed me as project architect. Monster houses had all but eliminated any rear yards in favour of garages attached to the main home, resulting in loss of green space, increased shadowing and overlook of neighbouring properties—basically, the loss of the quiet enjoyment of one’s home, whether owned or rented.
We started our research with a technique all but forgotten by today’s city staff—we interviewed the citizens affected by the issues. City staff under former Director of Planning Dr Ann McAffee had carefully noted many of the complaints about monster houses. We knocked on those folks’ doors and asked about their concerns. We looked at their issues—observed the back yards shaded, the fruit vines dying for lack of sunlight, the overlooking carports that had become roof party decks. The number of complainants was large but we discovered there were only a few common areas of contention.
Mandating a rear yard space between the main home and a garage on the lane, which was our main recommendation, resolved most of the issues reported by neighbours—see the red-dotted area to the right of the image above, taken from the 1922 zoning bylaw. There was more to our work, including some massaging of the permitted height and massing on a property. Perhaps anticipating as we now know that planning solutions could actually exacerbate problems,
Dr McAfee contracted a couple of home designers to make of our interim recommendations the largest, boxiest solutions they could. In this way we worked through a few “Oh my God!” iterations until we landed on proposed massing that resolved the monster house issues of that day. City Council passed the zoning refinements and the monster house issue receded. Public consultation and experimentation with form produced an enduring solution. That model would still work today.
In the fashion of “why not leave well enough alone?”, the colour photo above captures our evolution: on the left and right are “old timers” built in the 30s and 40s. The beige home was built under the RS zoning in place until 2022, with periodic tweaking. Notice it’s just a bit taller than the old timer to the right.
The home under construction is NOT a multiplex—it’s what’s allowed for a single family home today. I will be writing a City Conversation on this subject shortly.
Inadvertently, the simple expedient of mandating a decent sized yard between a home and its garage or shed also preserved the future option of additional density through smaller dwellings at the back of the rear yards of small city lots some 20 years before they were proposed in Vancouver. That mandatory rear yard, as well as nuanced building height, roof slope, etc., have been lost in recent multiplex zoning changes. The folks wanting the quiet enjoyment of their homes are still there, albeit a bit older. They are just being ignored.
Fast forward another generation to the first Vancouver EcoDensity forum in 2008. The EcoDensity Initiative was officially launched in 2006 as a response to urban sprawl. The initiative proposed using density, design and land use as catalysts towards livability, affordability and environmental sustainability.
In those days the city’s staff and politicians still held meetings where they all listened to the public—remember those? I was ready the evening of the first evening EcoDensity forum when comments were invited from the audience—ready with a site plan of my own property and floor plan showing how a single storey one bedroom laneway home, including an off-street parking space, could be comfortably accommodated in the approved garage massing of a 33 foot wide standard city lot— which is what 70% of the lots in Vancouver were at that time.
My proposal was not rocket science, but it caught the fancy of the audience. The politicians in attendance noted that and instructed planning staff to get behind the initiative.
There were many ideas put forward that evening, but the Vancouver audience seemed ready for laneway homes, some 10-20 years before they were adopted in many other North American cities. So Vancouver’s citizens were ready to densify a generation ago, despite the high planning, building, engineering and utility fees and the lengthy approval periods attached to them by city staff.
There are now about 400 laneways built each year in Vancouver. These would accommodate more than 10% of the city’s historic annual population growth. Imagine if they weren’t so difficult to build.
Positive tales in negative times
Why are laneway homes so popular despite the high costs of their approvals and servicing? I believe it’s because they are a simple idea that clearly represents gentle densification, which has many meanings, but I take to be building forms that accommodate population increases that are fairly easily absorbed into existing neighbourhoods, with acceptable impacts on infrastructure (roads, sewers, etc.) and community amenities (schools, parks, etc.).
In the almost 40 years since setting the stage for laneway homes, the development landscape of Vancouver has changed dramatically. Vancouver is not unique in suffering from lack of affordability, loss of open space and tree canopy, aging of schools, community and healthcare facilities. For confirmation, read the headlines and story précis of the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald or The Guardian—they are interchangeable with the Vancouver Sun in their dismal descriptions of housing affordability issues—everywhere there is hopelessness leavened with anger.
For me, this anger crested with the October 2022 Vancouver municipal election, at which an extremely pro-development regime was elected to a four-year mandate. Sadly, their performance to date has its roots in 2010, when Vision Vancouver was elected to run the city. In short order:
The Real Estate Department changed from a place where land was held and leased to create affordable housing, into a place where land was sold at the highest price possible consistent with poor management, squandering the city’s endowment to fund a rapidly expanding bureaucracy and unnecessarily enrich private developers;
Neighbourly building forms and laneways were jettisoned in favour of the massive multiplexes and high-rises we see today;
The Planning Department abandoned neighbourhood-based planning in favour of today’s top down decision making; and
Elected politicians and their staffs gradually eliminated opportunities for the public, their electors, to be heard.
In the face of four years of disastrous development, which have not addressed the issues of affordability, unequal opportunity and community amenities, I nonetheless embrace the positive. I believe we need positive recommendations going forward, applicable generally rather than to interest groups.
Wrapping the Complex in the Simple
In the course of writing more than 200 City Conversations to date, I have identified just three underlying themes that between them capture an urban design philosophy that I believe works for Vancouver and comparable cities:
First up—Embrace
Embrace in urban design is a concept with a long history around the world. It tells us to work with the past history of the places that we have been bequeathed, and that only where we do this can we move in directions that work for all. It tells us NOT to discard past plans, especially those developed with significant citizen input.
Embrace is also a scientific concept in urban design. There is ample peer-reviewed research that above about 6-8 storeys, residents lose connection to their street, their neighbourhood. There is also ample peer-reviewed research describing the many social problems arising in high-rise housing forms.
Embrace tells us to hold close our history and science-based massing while understanding and accommodating the impatience of those for whom our history is not by itself working, including our younger citizens. We must embrace the future with our youth.
Embracing our future revolves around making conscious decisions about beneficial futures for all. Those decisions require that we first determine our actual population and realistic growth projections, then the resulting housing needs, rather than accepting “aspirational” bureaucratic targets based on little if any research, as shown on the left side of the confusing city diagram above. At the same time we must determine how many homes of what sizes are actually completed or under construction, to better match housing supply to need. Then we need to add in our unbuilt capacity, by which I mean what might be built at defensible, humane low or mid-rise densities. Those measures will give us our go forward data.
In summary, we must embrace the past, the present and the future whenever we are considering urban design solutions for our communities. This leads to my second prescription for community development,
“We have to relearn how to improve our cities and towns bit by bit, so we can get back to processes that worked so well a generation or two ago.” The planning and urban design lessons of the 60s and 70s seem to have been forgotten by today’s planners and designers—or perhaps they were never taught. Dr. Penny Gurstein and Dr. David Ley reinforced these concerns in their recent Local Focus remarks.
Enhancement was foundational to generations of urban designers. For each major planning breakthrough such as False Creek South and Granville Island in Vancouver, there were literally hundreds of local scale opportunities arising with each new building.
We need to return to an approach where new development at scale provides public amenities, in most cases not just cash. At historic provision levels, currently planned and proposed large scale developments would require new parks equal to ten times the size of the Langara golf course. That may be excessive, but at the moment, proposed developments include almost no publicly accessible spaces.
Enhancement requires community consultation and fine-grained analysis by qualified planners. One of the foundational views of the visionary planner Jane Jacobs is that local people know best what is appropriate for their neighbourhood.
If we concentrate on the study of our existing neighbourhoods and the identification of each development proposal as an opportunity for improvement rather than destruction, we are ready for the third element of successful planning,
“We have no issue with increasing density along with population—cities must evolve!” say many folks at the neighbourhood meetings I attend. In the run-up to the 2022 Vancouver civic election, Councillor Colleen Hardwick invited me to participate in Zoom meetings (due to COVID) with representatives of about half of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods. At every one, we asked the question, “Can your neighbourhood accommodate X hundred new homes per year?” where X was an estimate of needed annual growth based on an existing neighbourhood’s size and unbuilt capacity, and assumed growth would be shared equitably across the city, consistent with actual population projections.
When proposed as a more modest neighbourhood-based number rather than “The city needs 83,000 new homes!” which was city staff’s aspirational, unresearched target in 2023, the response by each neighbourhood to a logical neighbourhood-based target was always positive and supportive. It is sad to note in passing that the recently approved Vancouver Official Development Plan, which I have dubbed the Vancouver Official Destruction Plan, has eliminated the city’s 22 existing neighbourhoods as bases for public consultation and planning.
To summarize my remarks, here are at least five things government at every level should do:
1. Find out the true dimensions of housing need, including housing and tenure types and community capacity;
2. Match those needs to more cost-effective housing types, typically low or mid-rise;
3. Review and remodel regulations to create true efficiencies and reduce costs;
4. Make municipal, provincial and federal lands available on a long-term lease basis to retain value for citizens and truly reduce land costs;
5. Use private sector development models to build as efficiently and quickly as possible.
In conclusion, the successful evolution of communities requires that their existing natures and plausible futures be embraced and their neighbourhoods be enhanced as a natural byproduct of development.
When considering how to vote in this year’s election, I encourage you to ask of candidates:
This post is over 2300 words—takes about 15 minutes to read—quite a bit more than the 3-5 minutes citizens are allowed when they speak to the current Vancouver City Council, in their efforts to suppress democracy. If you appreciated this post, please share to your social media and consider becoming a free subscriber to City Conversations at
Brian Palmquist writes in the ancestral lands of the Musqueam people. He is a Vancouver-based architect, building envelope and building code consultant and LEED Accredited Professional (the first green building system). He is semi-retired, still teaching, writing and consulting a bit, but not beholden to any client or city hall. City Conversations mix real discussion with research and observations based on a 50-year career including the planning, design and construction of almost every type and scale of project. He is the author of the Amazon best seller and AIBC Construction Administration course text, “An Architect’s Guide to Construction.” A glutton for punishment, he is threatening to write a book about how we can Embrace, Enhance and Evolve the places where we love to live. Some of its content may appear above.