As City of Vancouver deliberates over the future of the False Creek Flats, the Bartholomew Plan provides one unfulfilled vision of area. In 1928, Harland Bartholomew and Associates were hired by the Vancouver Town Planning Commission to develop the first (and only) master plan for the nascent City of Vancouver — a plan was never officially adopted. Interestingly, this was also when the City was split up between Point Grey, South Vancouver, and Vancouver. In the heyday of train oriented goods movement of the 1920s and 1930s and Vancouver as “Canada’s Pacific Gateway”, Bartholomew suggested that the City would be best served with if the False Creek Flats (and indeed most of today’s Strathcona) were developed as a light industrial six storey and heavy industrial zone with False Creek being relegated towards being little more than an industrial trench. For the building typology he was thinking, the architecture around Yaletown provides the best example of Bartholomew’s vision. Industry at the heart of the city…who would have thought that could ever work?

Sometimes to move forward, one needs to take two steps back. This set of Ubyssey clippings is a window on first day for the UBC Student Union Building in September 1968 courtesy of the Ubyssey archives.

Despite the promise of free donuts and coffee on opening day, the first day for the current UBC Student Union Building was a bit rough with “problems everywhere”. From running out of money to equip the building to serious accessibility deficiencies “SUB architecture forgets paraplegics” to the oversight of not having a student pub, this look back show how notions of sustainability, student participation, and community space have changed over the decades. Important lessons perhaps for the Alma Mater Society and students of UBC who are in the midst of an innovative stakeholder driven process to develop a new Student Union Building.

Incidentally, it would be after five years (1973) and several “Pub-in’s” before the current Pit Pub be created. A then-UBC’s Associate Professor of Zoology David Suzuki declared “What this campus needs is a pub!” who with full support from the AMS President (former Minister of Forests) David Zirnhelt help establish the Pit Pub.

The Georgia Straight recently published on cover article on BTAworks’ upcoming atlas and toolkit on the Neighborhood Effects of Global Climate Change. Click here to read the article. Watch this blog for Part One of the publication!

While Vancouver’s lack of Inner City Freeways is often cited as one of the “nine decisions that saved paradise”, it did not necessarily stop sprawl, but severely impeded. More importantly, it set the stage for the re-urbanization of Vancouver’s downtown core in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even so, despite its recent history of residential condominium construction, when viewed through the lens of history and as a proportion of overall City population, Downtown Vancouver is only now recovering to levels that were last seen in 1941.

Based on a historical census survey of Downtown census tracts and the rest of the City population from 1941 to 2006, growth outside the Downtown core has consistently been more the rule than the exception. From a high of 16 percent of the total City population living in the Downtown Peninsula (including the West End) in 1941, this proportion plummeted to 9 percent by 1961, but stabilized at 10 percent for most of the middle 20th Century. Only since 1991 and the rediscovery of Downtown living, has this proportion slowly inched back to its World War Two levels.

The significance of Downtown Vancouver’s Urban U-Turn should not be understated. In the short space of 20 years (1986 to 2006), the population of Downtown Vancouver has more than doubled from 42,960 to 87,973. At the same time, this growth builds on a preexisting DNA of dense urban living engrained in Vancouver as the Downtown population has never dipped below 40,000 people since 1966.

As density grows outside the downtown core, it will be curious to see if the proportion of the City population living in Downtown Vancouver will stabilize or even perhaps decrease. Now, instead of sprawl decimating the Downtown core, the development of neighborhood centres and nodes could transform Vancouver from a one centre city to a multi-centre metropolis.

Special Thanks to Paul Raynor at the City of Vancouver’s Housing Centre for the statistics.

VANCOUVER - Research reveals that since 2004, enrollment in public elementary schools in the City of Vancouver has declined by more than 13 percent (over 2,600 students) — a continuation of a steady enrollment decline since 2000.

“While our overall City population has grown, it is surprising to discover that public elementary school enrollment has actually been on the decline by so much and for such a long time”, observed Andrew Yan, a BTAworks researcher and Urban Planner who wrote the brief. “Almost 20 percent of all Vancouver public elementary schools lost more than 20 percent of their students over the last 5 school years”.

BTAworks, the research and development division of Bing Thom Architects examined enrollment data from the Ministry of Education as part of their ongoing series focused on the health and sustainability of Vancouver neighborhoods and the overall city.

Yan notes that enrollment decline was very geographically uneven, with schools in the Northeast section of the City facing the largest losses while school enrollment on the City’s west side remained largely stable and, in certain cases, increased.

Elementary schools in the Northeast of the city, such as Lord Nelson, Walter Moberly, and Queen Alexandra lost about 25 percent of their enrollment, with William McDonald losing 50 percent of its student enrollment over the 5 most recent school years while Kerrisdale and Lord Tennyson saw 20 percent increases over the same period.

While some have suggested that an exodus of students to the independent school system accounts for this loss of students, Yan notes that growth in the private system in the same time frame only accounts for a partial number of missing elementary students.

“There is no single reason behind this decline in public elementary school enrollment, but the perfect storm created by factors such as an aging city and shrinking family sizes, combined with an open boundaries policy for all City of Vancouver schools and an outflow of independent schools who all have a role. This is compounded by a lack of affordable housing that is suitable for young families with children”, Yan suggests.

“If we cannot create a city where families want to send their children to the school down the block, what chances do we have of creating the greenest city in the world?”, said Michael Heeney, a principal at Bing Thom Architects, “This brief highlights one of the most basic sustainability challenges we have in the City of Vancouver.”

Heeney concludes, “Schools are only one example of millions of dollars of existing child supportive infrastructure in this city that runs the risk of being wasted. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, the decline in elementary school enrollment may also mean that families will start to disappear from Vancouver as well.”

The full data brief is available at www.btaworks.com.

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BTAworks Elementary School Enrollment Media Release (PDF)

BTAworks Elementary School Enrollment Data Brief (PDF)

BTAworks Elementary School Enrollment Map (PDF)

Media Contact

Andrew Yan

Researcher/Urban Planner

ayan@btaworks.com

(604) 682-1881

For most of the City of Vancouver’s history, population growth has symbolized the vitality and the desirability of the City and its region. In its first 25 years, Vancouver grew by 700 percent. Since the end of the Second World War, the City has grown steadily by 15 percent every 10 years with the exception of a downturn in the early 1980s. Projecting into 2021, Vancouver is set to grow another 15 percent by 2011 and 6 percent by 2021. If these projections are true, a major planning dilemma for the City will be where to put the next 120,000 new Vancouverites in the next 12 years.

Growth by itself does not necessarily shape cities. Questions of “how many?” need to be tempered by inquiries into “Who they are?” The answers between these two questions have deep implications in shaping the economic, social, and cultural life of any city. In this next series of entries, we’ll explore some of the characteristics, distribution, and consequences of recent population growth in the City of Vancouver - all of which perhaps provides a glimpse into the City’s future.

Take for instance the issue of family housing. Amongst other things, this is an important economic issue as parents of young families are critical members of our workforce - and we are losing them. Laneway housing represents an extraordinary opportunity and if implemented correctly could strengthen our economy and revolutionize the delivery of housing stock in the city.

The urgency for initiatives like laneway housing comes as our single family neighborhoods with their rich collections of family life amenities are becoming increasingly underutilized. Between 2004 to 2009, the Vancouver public school system shrank by over 2,100 pupils or 4 percent. This occurred despite an overall population growth of 6 percent in the city. The future is gloomy as over a third of all elementary schools lost more than 10 percent of their 2004 student populations which will eventually work its way up to the diminishing secondary school population. MacDonald Elementary near Victoria Drive lost nearly half of its student population! We need to find a way to repopulate these schools or risk abandoning millions of dollars of family supportive infrastructure.

Under the City’s current laneway housing proposal, most families would have great difficulty in living in a laneway house as it limits unit size to a maximum of 750 square feet for single family lots with 50 foot frontages and approximate 500 square feet for the vast majority of lots with 33 foot frontages. While the City’s proposal will provide a new source of rental housing for a targeted population of seniors, singles, and couples, the City’s substantial condominium industry already produces a ready stream of this type of housing units.

Based upon our recent condominium ownership study, the market has been very effective at producing a large number of small rental apartments. Essentially, investors have been buying small condos in droves and renting them out. We do not actually need more of this type of housing – what we do need are rental units with two or more bedrooms that can be occupied by young families so they can take advantage of infrastructure that already exists in our single family neighborhoods.

The City needs to find a way that they can encourage the market to produce this kind of housing and laneway housing could hold the key. In other words, rather than have a maximum size of 500 sf feet for a laneway house on a 33 foot lot, the City should be using all its resources and creativity (both inside and outside the Hall) to figure out how to put livable and affordable secondary family units on a 33 foot lot.

The fact that the City is now allowing laneway houses to be built on a test case basis is a very positive step – but unless more leeway can be given as to the size, form and parking requirements for this housing, the experiment will be of limited value. We need to broaden the discussion by allowing larger units that could be inhabited by young families with one or two children. This is an opportunity that should be studied beyond planning regulations and building design. It should also involve investigating and testing different building delivery methods, complementary financing and ownership models and potential incentives to encourage its construction.

With an aging population and declining birth rates, laneway housing could be part of the bulwark to Vancouver’s ability to retain these critical young workers. While our solid stock of smaller units works well at initially attracting these workers, unfortunately the lack of available family housing is forcing these workers to leave and find work elsewhere once they decide to start a family. The real tragedy about this is that this occurs often at the point in their careers where they are the most valuable to our economy, so their loss (often to locations outside the city or even the province) is detrimental to our future productivity and competitiveness.

Michael Heeney is a partner and the executive director for Bing Thom Architects.

Recently we’ve been looking much more closely at the work of those we like to call the system thinkers- the William McDonoughs, Michael Braungarts and Janine Benyus’s of the world. Their theories share the approach of modeling our solutions to the challenges posed by environmental degradation on those used by nature. Beyond ‘triple bottom line’ they propose approaches that are closed loop in strategy, eliminating non renewable energy input and waste creation. There is also an underlying theme that resources and energy are finite in quantity. At BTA we first started looking at this approach in our proposal for the 2010 Expo in Shanghai, where we established a set of guiding design values known as ‘The Shanghai Principles’ based on Cradle to Cradle strategies. This got us thinking more widely about the concept of cities or neighbourhoods as ecosystems. In nature no one individual species tries to ‘go it alone’- they all depend on other species for their food, shelter and energy needs. Why then do we aspire to our buildings becoming stand alone islands of self sufficiency? It this not contrary to the collective spirit that we claim is essential to solve our global environmental, social and economic challenges?

It seems to us that as with so many of our current issues what is required is a paradigm shift in how we frame the issue. Suppose that instead of looking for strategies to meet a projected ongoing increase in demand for resources such as energy, water and waste management that we simply started from the premise that all these resources are finite in capacity? Suppose we set limits for the amount of electricity that can be generated, potable water supplied and waste treated based on what our regional ecosystem can sustain without permanent and irreparable damage? Once we start to consider a resource such as electricity as finite, we can start looking at our demand issue as one of redistribution rather than increased supply.

So how might this work in practice? Lets say that in the future a developer wishes to build a project in Vancouver. Their first requirement would be to quantify the amount of electricity, gas, potable water and solid/liquid waste their development will generate. Their next step is to source the amount of resources they require from within the existing system. They do this by funding retrofits to existing building stock that generate savings equal to the resources they require. Meanwhile a parallel program has been developed that works with Strata corporations and low-income owners to undertake resources audits that identify the quantities of energy water and waste that could be saved by building upgrades. A central resources database is thereby established that identifies retrofit projects, costs and potential quantities of resources saved. The developer accesses this database and selects projects that singly or combined generate the resources required to allow their project to proceed. A commitment to fund these retrofits is required for a Permit to be issued. This could be phased in over a period of time, with developers initially only having to find eg. 25% of the resources they require, ramping up to a long-range target of 100%. The City could pass the associated long term savings generated by reductions in infrastructure projects in the form of reductions in other development charges.

A recent proposed project called Stable Flats in Philadelphia, by a design development collective called Onion Flats is based on similar principles. It proposes a very novel heating and cooling system based on building a 1.6million litre underground tank that will accept storm water from both the site and the larger community/ surrounding area. The development will then use that water as a heat exchanger to help heat and cool the building with a geoexchange system. An additional benefit is that they’re working to have this feature recognized as public infrastructure and have the City contribute to the cost of the tank. The economics of this project work because since 2006 the City of Philadelphia has required developers to absorb storm water on new developments rather than directing it to storm sewers. In November 2008 it began charging a fee to projects who could not meet this requirement, with the intention of using the money to fund community based storm water projects. This raises the potential of creating a storm water transfer system as an alternative to expensive sewer replacement projects. Already, new developments in drought impacted areas of California are being required to fund water efficiency retrofits in specific existing buildings that save the amount of water that the proposed development is calculated to require.

What this really represents is a cap and trade system that reaches far beyond the current carbon debate. By treating our region as an ecosystem of finite capacity we can facilitate new development and retrofit existing building stock without limiting the resources available to future generations.

Vancouver, British Columbia - The popular belief that there are large numbers of empty downtown condos with offshore owners is largely disproved by a new study released by BTAworks. The study, undertaken to examine condo ownership in Downtown Vancouver also confirmed that the majority of the area’s condos are not-owner occupied.

BTAworks, a new research and development consulting division of Bing Thom Architects, examined data from the City of Vancouver, BC Assessment, BC Hydro, and the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation for 2,400 condos in Downtown Vancouver - almost 10 percent of all the condos in the area.

“Working with BC Hydro data, we were able to determine that only 5.5 to 8 percent of study condos were unoccupied.” states Andrew Yan, a BTAworks researcher and Urban Planner who led the study.  “While the number of empty condos in Downtown Vancouver is low, condos in our study were typically non-owner occupied, but rented out by their owners”.

In addition to an estimate on empty condos, the study found that:

• Condo ownership is a relatively new form of housing for Vancouver. Over 88 percent of condo units in Downtown Vancouver have been built since 1990.
• Less than 40 percent of downtown condos have more than one bedroom.
• The majority of condos are not occupied by the property owner.
• The majority of non-owner occupied condos are owned by BC residents, with a scattering of foreign owners, predominately from the western US states such as California, Washington, and Arizona.
• Owner-occupied units are typically worth $30,000 to $40,000 more than non-owner occupied units, and the more bedrooms the unit has, the more likely it is to be owner occupied.
• A family with one child in the City of Vancouver earning the median income of $75,000 a year would have great difficulty in finding and paying for a condo bigger than one bedroom, even if condo prices were to fall 25 percent below 2008 assessment levels.

The study findings outline some of the elements behind Downtown Vancouver’s remarkable housing boom and suggests that the majority of growth in Downtown condos has been dominated by investors and those looking for a second home, rather than homeowners. These trends signal emerging housing and planning challenges in providing suitable and affordable housing for working and middle-income households, especially those with children.

“If Vancouverism 1.0 is embodied by tall skinny towers and one bedroom, investor-driven condominium projects for Downtown Vancouver, then Vancouverism 2.0 needs to redress this imbalance by providing more affordable family-oriented housing units with great supporting amenities,” concludes Yan. “Without this, the sustainable communities with opportunities to live, work and prosper that the City aspires to are likely unachievable.”

“We’re proud to fund this study and inform the ongoing and important housing and planning dialogues occurring in the City” said Bing Thom, principal of Bing Thom Architects. “Vancouver is often viewed as a global example of downtown residential development and we must work to ensure that what we are modeling for the world has substance with a commitment to affordable and suitable urban housing for families with children to stay and grow with our city.”

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BTAworks Condo Study Media Release (PDF)

BTAworks Condo Study Full Report (PDF)

Media Contact

Andrew Yan

Researcher/Urban Planner

ayan@btaworks.com

(604) 682-1881