BT | A | Works » Observations

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.

Data Desk, Observations November 3, 2011

2011 Vancouver Trick or Treating Hotspots: An @BTArchitects Experiment in Crowd Mapping

As an experiment in social media, crowd mapping and urban metrics, BTAworks decided to conduct a survey of Trick or Treating Hotspots around the City of Vancouver through the over 1,800 Twitter followers and the 600 plus Facebook fans of Bing Thom Architects. We wanted to explore the question: Could the number of trick or treaters be used as a proxy measure towards illustrating the social cohesion, fabric, and capital of a neighborhood? In a series of tweets and posts between November 1 and 2, we requested respondents send us the number of trick or treaters that visited their households and the nearest street intersection to their homes. From the 16 responses, we processed these replies in Excel and used Google Fusion to produce this map.

While the results can hardly be said to be scientific nor comprehensive, there is promise and perils to this type of technology where citizens can help gather and share information about their environment. We were able to rapidly develop and deploy this data acquisition and analysis system in less than two hours with very little resources. In spite of its representative and severe statistic limitations, the map results follow a popular observation that the best trick or treating areas in the City of Vancouver are, for the most part, in the ground oriented, family sized housing neighborhoods surrounding Downtown Vancouver. With reported number of 200 plus tricker or treaters on its streets, the neighborhood of Strathcona seems to be an epicenter of Halloween spirit.

These observations being said, there are a few challenges and limitations towards the representativeness of crowdsourced/crowdmapped data. Clearly, many more data points need to be gathered before this map could ever be suggested to be statistically representative. One needs motivated crowds to report – a post sugar haze may not be one of them. Within this data, the issue of respondent bias occurs where the data may reflect who the respondent is as much as the desired phenomenon that is being measure. The maps created through crowdmapping are only as good as the crowd who are doing the mapping.

These maps may reflect more those who have access or desire to use social media than the actual measured phenomenon itself as the method defines the responses. As an example, does Strathcona have the most trick or treaters? Or does Strathcona have the most BTA social media subscribers who live in the neighborhood and are generous enough to share information about the trick or treaters? While using new technologies like social media and online mapping resources, this experiment also reflects age old and ongoing challenges and limitation in data gathering and interpretation.

From an urban metrics level, high density tower districts do not seem to be not very friendly towards trick or treaters. At the same time, the neighborhoods that are often identified as the most affluent in the city did not necessarily see many Trick or Treaters. Neighborhoods that saw the most Trick or Treaters tended to be in the older inner ring/street care suburbs of Vancouver who often share a pedestrian friendly scale and block structure compared to other parts of the region. Both in the number of responses and location of responses from Strathcona as well as number of trick or treaters, this perhaps reflects the remarkable social and physical fabric and richness of that neighborhood.

On a much more serious note, organizations like Ushahidi are doing trail blazing work in the field of information collection, visualization, and interactive mapping via the web and mobile phones. Meaning “testimony” in Swahili, the website was originally developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout in 2008. Since then, its software has been used to document and share data on such events like the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami, the 2010 Haitian earthquake, and 2011 “Snowmageddon” in the Northeastern United States. Ushahidi has also set up Crowdmap to monitor elections, curate local resources, and map crisis information which allow technological neophytes to create their own crowdmapping platforms — and, in the off chance, also document a zombie invasion.

Special thanks for the BTA Twitter and Facebook respondents for making this experiment possible!

Data Desk, Media, Observations November 15, 2010

Why are the Public Elementary Schools East of Main Emptying?

A 3 part series in the Vancouver Sun by Pete McMartin examining the state of emptying elementary schools and its causes and impacts on the City of Vancouver. A 2009 BTAworks study on the state of public elementary school enrollment in the City of Vancouver was cited in the article. Any thoughts, dear readers?

Data Desk, Media, Observations November 1, 2010

Turning Schools into ‘Neighbourhood Learning Hubs’

A great article in the Tyee by Katie Hyslop about the challenges and opportunities in declining enrollment and closing schools in the City of Vancouver with comments by Michael Heeney from Bing Thom Architects and Andy Yan from BTAworks.

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?

Data Desk, Media, Observations, Research Papers March 31, 2010

Climate Change and the City of Vancouver

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!

Observations January 28, 2010

Join the Bing Thom Architects Facebook Fan Page

Bing Thom Architects, the parent organization to BTAworks, is now also on Facebook. Become a BTA Fan today and see some of the articles, images, and movies that inspires and motivates us.

Bing Thom Architects on Facebook

Data Desk, Observations December 15, 2009

The Long Road Back to the Downtown Vancouver of the 1940s

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.

Observations July 21, 2009

Laneway Housing in the City of Vancouver: Let’s Make the Most of It

The City should be congratulated for considering the vast swaths of our single family neighborhoods with an eye to densification through building laneway housing. But as the City of Vancouver establishes its policy on laneway housing, it needs to think more broadly – in particular about what kind of housing the city really needs and how its development can be encouraged.

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.

Observations July 6, 2009

The City as Ecosystem?

The City as Ecosystem

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.