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Tag Vancouver

What About Vancouver?

Market urbanists such as myself tend to believe that if a place suffers from absurdly high housing prices, there is probably not enough new housing being built to accommodate rising demand. A recent paper argues that inadequate supply is not a significant part of the problem in high-cost Vancouver, primarily because the number of housing units has kept up with the number of people (p. 11)   It seems to me, however, that this theory overlooks people priced out of Vancouver, thus understating demand. To put the matter in hypothetical form: suppose that in 1991, Nimbytown had 20,000 people and 10,000 housing units.  In 2011, Nimbytown had 30,000 people and 15,000 housing units; however, 30,000 more people are priced out of Nimbytown.    Obviously, it would be silly to say that housing is keeping up with demand. Vancouver is, to be fair, adding housing supply- but at about the same pace it did 20 years ago.  From 1991-95, Metro Vancouver added about 18,000 housing starts per year, ranging from just over 14,000 in 1991 to just over 21,000 in 1993.    Housing starts then nosedived, not reaching the 20,000 level until 2007.  Between 2007 and 2011, the region averaged about 16,000 housing starts per year, slightly fewer than in the 1990s. In a region with a stagnant population, this would be a strong performance.  But from 1991 to 2011, the number of Vancouver households grew by over 40 percent, from just over 600,000 to almost 900,000.  So should a region with 900,000 households have the same number of housing starts as one with 600,000?  I don’t think so. The paper blames Chinese investors for Vancouver’s high housing prices- and logically, any increase in demand should, other things being equal, increase housing costs.  But the author of the paper has written elsewhere: […]

Laneway housing in Vancouver and beyond

Vancouver holds a special place in most urbanists’ heart – a sort of supercharged version of Portland, with its stunning skyline and bold embrace of density and transit. In addition to the glassy forest of skyscrapers, it also passed a law enabling laneway housing under former mayor Sam Sullivan’s EcoDensity initiative. Sullivan was pretty controversial, but he never even came up for a second vote after Peter Ladner launched a party coup and then went on to lose the election anyway. As a result, it doesn’t look like the laneway housing rules have been revised, which is a shame, since as Vancouver architect Graham Barron (who has an excellent blog on development in Vancouver) writes, there are some problems: The objective of the infill design guideline is to encourage the retention of existing buildings, but the guideline’s own side yard setback makes this nearly impossible. In practice, this means that the vast majority of developers of these lots demolish the existing building and construct a new duplex. (Many of these new duplexes look like character buildings, but in fact are built slab-on-grade, i.e. without basements, and without attics, much like the cheap Vancouver Specials that preceded them). This is the first irony. The second irony is that many of the two-family zones in the City are meant to be heritage-friendly zones, which promote the preservation of character and heritage houses. Since it is largely impossible to build infill, and very costly to renovate or expand an older building, most developers will demolish the existing house, and then design the new duplex in a faux heritage style in order to get a density bonus that allows for greater floorspace. Result: character is being replaced with faux character. The final irony is that these new duplexes are then required to have a […]

Links

1. NYT A-1 headline! Number of new single-family homes sold in February was at its lowest point since data was first collected in 1963, but multi-unit sales are up. 2. Lydia DePillis with an example of some abhorrent NIMBYism from DC. 3. Anti-laneway housing propaganda from Vancouver. It looks like some are bucking the requirement that you have one parking spot per lot and are “putting in large windows and heated flooring in the garage of their laneway homes.” 4. A Toronto developer on “podiumism,” or skyscraper form that zoning rules force architects to build. New York City’s first zoning code in 1916 had setbacks that had a similar effect, though it formed more of a ziggurat – a much bulkier shape than is allowed today. 5. The Overhead Wire and The Transport Politic criticize new surburban-oriented low-ridership American commuter rail lines.

Links

1. Laneway housing, Vancouver vs. Toronto. 2. New York state lawmakers want to ban using a phone or listening to headphones while crossing streets. Unfortunately for us pedestrians, there are very few limited access, grade-separated walkways, so in essence this would criminalize listening to an iPod while walking. 3. An interesting article about transportation in Singapore, with an emphasis on congestion pricing and other ways of recouping the enormous opportunity costs of urban roads. 4. I’ve been aware of this for a while, but it still shocks me every time (emphasis mine): We know New Yorkers are being injured and killed just about every day. (Like the 35-year-old woman who was run over by a dump truck on the Upper East Side Monday while legally crossing the street. Did you hear about that one? The dump truck driver stayed at the scene and wasn’t drunk, so it was basically a freebie for him — a clean, legal kill as far as the NYPD is concerned. Can you imagine if she were your wife or sister or colleague? Anyway… back to those damned bikes, right?…) 5. Yet another example of why I don’t think the Texas Transportation Institute’s congestion metrics are useful. 6. As if we needed any more proof: Big cities are inherently green.

Long weekend links

1. The NYT utterly humiliates itself with a story on how difficult it is for a kid straight outta college from “a prominent Portuguese banking family” to rent a $2,500/mo. studio in a Chelsea coop for less than 12 months. Sounds like the perfect posterchild for Sheldon Silver’s rent control plans. 2. What does it cost in bribes to get an 11-story hotel built in Park Slope? $9,850 to Marty Markowitz and 400-space public garage. The developer called the garage a “magnificent cake,” and Irene Lo Re of the Fifth Ave. BID says, “We can’t turn our backs on 400 spaces.” The commenters are throwing a lot of scorn at the developer for the garage, but it looks to me like it’s the fault of Irene Lo Re and the parking-obsessed neighbors. 3. Vancouver considers easing up on “social housing requirement” for developer (for the first time ever?!) if they’ll give the city a few parcels of land. 4. New (again) California Governor Jerry Brown proposes elimination of redevelopment agencies.

New Years link list

Behold, your first link list of 2011! 1. The automobile may officially in decline (very good article!). 2. Interesting parallels between China and its HSR intellectual property disputes and post-WWII Japan and Korea. More here. 3. Fred Barnes writes a stupid article for the Weekly Standard (“The road to hell is paved with bike baths”), and Jarrett Walker responds with a treatise on “coercion” (“We are the libertarians!”). 4. I forget that although rent control has been thoroughly discredited in the real world, NYC developers are still grappling with it. Vornado and another developer had to shell out tens of millions to break the rent control grip on a Central Park South building they bought, with 15 rent controlled tenants receiving payouts of around $1.5 million each. 5. Vancouver is loosening its grip on the street food market, while Stephen Goldberg is trying to create a one-stop shop for getting NYC restaurant permits/licenses/certificates/inspections. 6. The market-defying schemes that liberals come up with would be amusing if they weren’t so horrifying. Read here as they puzzle over why excess luxury condos built in NYC during the boom couldn’t easily be used as affordable housing (Vancouver redux), and watch out for the part on the third page where an organization called “Right to the City” advocates “using eminent domain to seize vacant residential buildings and turn them into affordable housing.” 7. Niagara Falls’ decades-long megaproject failures. The article ends on a positive note, citing federal money for a new train station and grants for a wine bar and a concert hall, but I wonder if anyone in Niagara Falls ever bothered trying to loosen up the parking restrictions and maybe upzone a few blocks.

Vancouver shows how seeking community amenities from developers can go horribly wrong

A lot of time I hear liberal urbanists claiming that trading development rights for community amenities (I’d definitely include affordable housing mandates here) is a win-win situation, but there’s a real danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, as appears to be happening in Vancouver: Development of the Cambie corridor is being “paralyzed” because the City of Vancouver is taking too much of the profits resulting from property rezonings, the Urban Development Institute says. Paul Sullivan, chair of the UDI taxation committee, said at least three potential developments along the new Canada Line have fallen apart because the city is being too aggressive in seeking community amenity contributions when rezonings take place. The city uses the money — an average of 75 per cent of the profits resulting from rezonings — for community amenities like parks and seniors’ centres. It’s interesting that the city openly admits to taking the vast majority of the upshot from the rezonings. One could interpret this as a marginal tax rate on dense development of 75% – I’m not sure that you could find a single politician or economist who would support a such a tax bracket on income, but I guess developers are viewed as less productive and more easy to leech off of than even the ultra-rich. Another odd aspect of the story is that the rules are in fact not even formalized: Sullivan, a real estate appraiser by trade, said the city could solve the problem by establishing a set amount for CACs that developers can factor into their purchase prices. “What we need is certainty in the policy, not just in the density but in the lift so that land can get priced fairly,” he said. “If you don’t have that it makes it very hard to get a […]

Your consolation link list

Apologies to everyone for the light posting – over the next few weeks I may be a bit busy with job and internship applications (any suggestions for work or job offers would be very much appreciated!), but hopefully I’ll still be able to put up a few posts a week. But for now, all you get is this mammoth link dump: 1. Vancouver’s laneway housing program (which we discussed earlier) has been off to a brisk start, and though planners are looking to liberalize sewer rules, they’re also considering only allowing one-story houses as-of-right, and limiting the amount of new laneway houses per block. 2. Former Market Urbanism contributer Sandy Ikeda writes about the urban origins of liberty at the Freeman. 3. The Dukakis Center has released a report suggesting that the gentrification caused by new light rail lines might cause driving to increase, defeating the purpose of TOD. Megan McArdle has also been discussing gentrification. Hopefully I’ll write something about this and gentrification more generally soon, but I wanted to post this in case I don’t get around to it. Any thoughts from the commenters on why this is and how it can be avoided? 4. North Korea “declare[s] war” on its version of the jitney, the “servi-cha.” 5. LA is the only big city in America whose fire department mandates that all skyscrapers have flat roofs so as to allow helicopters to land, but this may be changing (Curbed, parts 1 and 2). 6. Disabled riders file a class-action lawsuit against NYC’s MTA “for not spending a federally mandated 20% of [subway] station rehabilitation budgets on improvements like elevators and ramps.” The ADA’s impact on mass transit and urbanism is something that I’d eventually like to discuss more in depth, but I haven’t seen much research or even many […]

Friday links

1. Miller-McCune (what a bad name for a magazine) has an article about a possible VMT tax, and points out that more fuel-efficient vehicles will lead to less gas tax revenue. 2. Streetsblog has an extremely unflattering profile of Republican nominee for NY Governor Carl Paladino. He made a name for himself politically by detolling a major highway near where he was a real estate developer, and has continued to oppose new tolling projects throughout the state. He’s promising to cut the gas tax rate, and apparently once said, “It’s time we started looking at parking as a public service.” I should note that his Democratic opponent Andrew Cuomo ain’t no slouch when it comes to encouraging sprawl – Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice fingered his tenure as HUD Secretary as one of the “starting points for the mortgage meltdown.” 3. Paul Barter at Reinventing Parking has a guest post about parking reform in Bogotá that was concurrent with their much-vaunted TransMilenio BRT system, and he promises us more about it in the future. 4. Quoteth the Los Angeles Times: “At least 120 municipalities [in California] — nearly one in three with active redevelopment agencies — spent a combined $700 million in housing funds from 2000 to 2008 without constructing a single new unit, the newspaper’s analysis of state data shows. Nor did most of them add to the housing stock by rehabilitating existing units.” 5. Vancouver learns the hard way that luxury public housing is a bad idea. You could call it inclusionary zoning at its finest.

More links!

Why didn’t I catch onto this whole linking thing earlier? Are these link lists boring for you guys? 1. Human Transit has a great post on “density” and all the different ways to measure it, with a cool picture of sprawling apartment buildings that illustrates why transit use in the Las Vegas metro area is so low, despite the fact that it’s actually slightly denser than the Vancouver metro area (?!). 2. Rich old white Manhattanites against BRT lanes. 3. Privately-paid rent-a-cops gaining traction in Oakland. 4. Longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov has been fired, which some hope will make things easier on property developers in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets (“[Current] city policy practically rules out private land ownership and forces developers to lease plots under “investment contracts” that often give a share to the city”). Most, however, are girded for a multi-year transition while new palms are greased. 5. Damon Root at Reason magazine explains why Columbia’s Manhattanville eminent domain takings are illegal even post-Kelo.

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