When Eco-Density replaces sound planning
Since the environment is now invoked by politicians world-wide to justify almost anything, Canadians should watch Vancouver, where the catchy political slogan of Eco-Density has now replaced sound planning process and policy at City Hall.
The city is booming and developers want more land which Eco-Density promises to deliver with little muss, fuss, or delay.
Historically cities do grow and re-build, often in bursts of feverish activity with social and physical disruption; but the planned wholesale destruction of the existing green, thriving, residential areas of a city’s heartland, in the name of the environment, is unprecedented and irrational.
Eco-Density: Outline
The arguments from the City for Eco-Density are as follows: Housing people closer together reduces suburban sprawl and our ecological footprint by making better use of smaller parcels of land. Higher density allows communities to support local commerce, amenities, and transit.
Diverse, dense house types create varied and affordable housing options [due to lowered construction costs, decreased development fees, and fees saved from using existing infrastructure]. This increased density would make new, more expensive energy technologies, such as district heating, more viable.
Sounds straightforward, but major issues and problems seem not to have been thought through: road and transit capacity, timing, interface with other municipalities, parkland, social services, parking.
Citizen Involvement
Over many months the City has carried out an intensive propaganda campaign to sell Eco-Density [the Mayor's copyrighted slogan] to the masses. The actual interface with the citizens has been a sham. No specifics have been revealed; only motherhood statements and obfuscation.
Public meetings were packed with City staff, and no straight answers were given to tough questions from citizens whose way of life is on the line. They now sense that they are expendable.
East Side, West Side
Vancouver is loved by visitors for its beautiful setting of mountains and ocean. It is also unique, since outside of the downtown peninsula high-rise jungle, a magic north-south line divides the large areas of mostly single family low rise into the West Side, privileged, wealthy, articulate, and politically savvy, from the East Side, poorer, denser, divided, and with no voice at City Hall.
However, there is a shocking disparity between the scale and density of recent developments approved by the City and built in these two areas. These set a precedent for what can be expected when Eco-Density finally comes into force. [See the photos]
The West Side will receive coach houses in the rear of their mansions, and mid-rise along arterials. The East Side will gain high rise fortresses along its arterials, mid-rise and lower multi-family complexes sprawling out into their single family neighbourhoods. It will be forced to absorb between 70% and 90% of the densification.
Price to be Paid, Socially and Environmentally: the Nuts and Bolts of Eco-Density
When ground is broken for that high-rise complex a few blocks from your house, your instinct is to sell out and run, but where?
The suburbs are what you can afford. The best of you, and your only real investment, is in that house and garden. You’ve lived, made friends, raised a family, and grown older here. The trees you planted are mature now and have become the lungs of the city. Your property has already been pre-zoned by the City for some transitional density and your taxes have gone up.
A developer will buy it and hold it until he’s ready to build. He rents it out. The garden goes to seed, the lawn isn’t cut, and junker cars litter the back yard. Your neighbour has had enough and he sells out too. This is called block-busting; lot values start to drop.
Now you have, as Jane Jacobs points out, a rotting no-man’s-land which reaches out to destroy the rest of your once charming single family neighbourhood.
As for your old house, with all its imbedded energy; the foundations, framing, roofing, millwork, finishes [except GWB and some metals] will go to the landfill. Your lawn, shrubs, and trees will be trashed. And the City tells us this is good for the Environment!
Conclusion
If the City of Vancouver proceeds with its Eco-Density, it will:
- Destroy Vancouver as we know it, spelling the end of its green, quiet, gentle, and environmentally sound neighbourhoods in a very short time.
- Replace it with a high-rise dominated jungle unrelieved by the fine boulevards and parks of a Paris.
- The East Side will receive the lion’s share of these blessings.
- In the end, the environment will not be spared, nor suburban sprawl diminished.
- The development community will benefit dramatically.
- In a democracy, such a cataclysmic restructuring of a city cannot be left in the hands of a council or its planners, but must go to referendum.