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A Look Back, Data Desk, Observations, Research Papers January 16, 2012

The $80,000 Line: Single Family Housing Values in the City of Vancouver circa 1979

As our previous postings have explored the geographic distribution of the City of Vancouver’s Single Family Housing prices in 2011 and its $1,000,000 line, here is its counterpart from 1979 by Paul Raynor, a planner extraordinaire and data guru in the City of Vancouver’s Housing Centre. Before the days of Excel and ArcGIS, Mr. Raynor mapped these Single Family Home values by hand!

For the benefit of our readers, when one uses the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator to adjust values to 2011 dollars, the map scales would be $117,000 for a house worth $40,000 in 1979 and $876,000 for a house worth $300,000 in 1979. Incidentally, a house valued at $80,000 in 1979 would be worth $234,000 in 2011 dollars.

This post also includes Raynor’s observations and analysis which accompanied the map and was published in a City of Vancouver Quarterly Review in July 1979. Interestingly, as Raynor ends his piece with the observation that improvements on the average (largely defined as buildings on a property) accounted for 46 percent of total values in 1979, this percentage dwindles to less than 20 percent by 2011.

A Look Back April 19, 2011

A Flickr Slideshow of the Works of Harland Bartholomew and Associates for the City of Vancouver

Created with flickr slideshow

These images are part of the newly digitized City of Vancouver Archives Harland Bartholomew Collection and are from the Archives’ Flickr Photostream.

A special advance thank you to the wonderful student volunteers from the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) and School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) who are helping at the Harland Bartholomew Event on April 26:

Thien Phan, SCARP ’11
Metha Brown, SCARP ’11
Yazmin Banuelas, SCARP ’12
Lindsay Neufeld, SCARP ’12
Jaime Yee, SALA ’12

A Look Back, Data Desk December 6, 2010

Closing Schools in the City of Vancouver circa 1928

As the proposed closure of five public schools in the City of Vancouver in 2010 has been averted, a view from 1928 provides an important and interesting historical context and perspective. In A Plan for the City of Vancouver British Columbia including Point Grey and South Vancouver and a General Plan of the Region, Harland Bartholomew and Associates developed the urban and physical skeleton for Vancouver through the first (and only) attempt to create a complete master plan for the entire City. Hidden within the plan, there was also the issue of which elementary and secondary schools should be “abandoned”.

A Look Back, Observations August 12, 2010

The Bartholomew Plan and the False Creek Flats: Taking Industry to the Heart of the City

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?

A Look Back May 16, 2009

A Pattern for Tomorrow: Regional Planning in Metro Vancouver 1.0

Created in 1949, the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board was the first regional planning entity in the Metro Vancouver region. The LMRPB’s geographic jurisdiction extended 160 kilometres up the Fraser Valley to Hope which coincided with the regional planning boundaries recommended by Harland Bartholomew. Bartholomew himself returned to Vancouver in 1946 to address the emerging concerns around “decentralization”. Fast forward 62 years later and decentralization is now called sprawl.

Published in 1952, The Lower Mainland Looks Ahead: A Report and Outline Plan for the Development of the Lower Mainland Region of British Columbia marks the very first attempt at a comprehensive regional plan for Metro Vancouver. As a Pattern for Tomorrow, this map illustrates a vision for Metro Vancouver for the futuristic date of 1990 when presumably the region’s citizens would be driving jet cars and in need of a multitude of airports from Point Grey to Hope. On a more practical side, this map also captures the nascent desire for an Agricultural Land Reserve in the Fraser Valley.

As for the the LMRPB, it was disbanded in 1967 and replaced by regional districts which served a coordination and planning function for groups of municipalities. The provincial government had established the regional district concept in 1965 and the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) held its first board of directors meeting on July 12, 1967. In 2007, the GVRD changed its name to Metro Vancouver but still legally titled as the GVRD.

Today Metro Vancouver is a federation of 18 municipalities and two electoral areas whose membership includes the cities of Burnaby, Coquitlam, Langley, New Westminster, North Vancouver, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Richmond, Vancouver, White Rock and Surrey. Districts include Delta, the Township of Langley, Maple Ridge, North Vancouver, Pitt Meadows and West Vancouver, as well as the villages of Anmore, Belcarra and Lions Bay. Electoral area A (University Endowment Lands) and Electoral Area C (Bowen Island) and in the midst of developing a 2040 regional plan. Although with no new airports in Coquitlam or Surrey.

For more on the history of regional planning in Metro Vancouver, check out this entry from Discover Vancouver

A Look Back May 12, 2009

Back to the Future: Harland Bartholomew’s Street Profiles for Metro Vancouver

In 1926, the City of Vancouver’s Town Planning Commission hired Harland Bartholomew to prepare a comprehensive plan for a city region of 1 million people. While never officially adopted by the City, Bartholomew’s plan would set the tone for Vancouver’s urban structure. In the spirit of “what is old is new again”, the plan contained this profile and typology set for major and minor streets in the region. Add a few cycling lanes and these profiles could be placed in any contemporary urban plan.