Granted it is close to transit being a house or two a way from Victoria and a few blocks to Hastings, could parking be the concern? If you Google Street View the laneway, there is number parking for 5 vehicles (though stall 5 is shared with a garbage bin so probably a motorcycle parking at best).
The challenge we have is that it is not only housing policy, but a car culture we have to deal with. I live in an old 2-story apartment building which is 1.5 blocks from a Skytrain station, and close to shopping, schools, etc. However, I am one of the few (if not only) person in my building who doesn't have a car. Granted, some people need a vehicle for their work, but there are a lot of people who should abandon their cars.
Matthew Yglesias observes that all alternatives to owning a vehicle - public transit, cycling, e-bikes, Uber, car-sharing services like Evo and Modo - complement each other. (As any of them improves, you get fewer people who need to own a vehicle, which increases demand for all of the other alternatives as well.) My wife and I do have a car, but I don't use it much. I commute to work by bike; sometimes I take transit; if I really need a vehicle and my wife's using the car, I can use an Evo.
It was a rhetorical question. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, people hated the handful of high-rises going up in Kitsilano, and they hated the West End. In 1973, TEAM won a majority on city council, and they downzoned the city, reducing what it's legal to build by right. Some slides from Nathan Lauster and Jens von Bergmann: https://homefreesociology.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/apartment_construction.pdf
Of course it's like pushing down on a balloon. When you block new housing, the people who would have lived there don't vanish into thin air, they just get pushed further out. This is why housing in Metro Vancouver is so scarce and expensive, and why our roads are congested. It's not a law of nature, it's the result of anti-growth institutions we set up back in the 1970s.
If the city of Vancouver could get out of its own way and allow more housing (e.g. by making it legal to build small apartment buildings by right), so that prices and rents continue to decline, I figure there'd be less development pressure in places like Tsawwassen and Langley. Shawn Oaks vs. Semiahmoo Shopping Centre: https://morehousing.substack.com/p/shawn-oaks
I was never good at rhetorical questions Russil! Valid comments but the reality, I feel, is that the 1970s "institutions" held up well and helped developed the much-loved Vancouverism until after Expo and even more so after the Olympics. Growth was clustered in the downtown peninsula allowing the Vancouver suburbs to maintain a single family lifestyle. We, clearly, cannot turn back the hands of time but I wonder if we knew then what we know now, what changes would have been considered.
I don't want to discount Vancouverism (an emphasis on high-density central-city livability) entirely. I really liked a recent video from Oh the Urbanity! on Griffintown and urban design priorities. Summary: https://morehousing.substack.com/p/griffintown
Granted it is close to transit being a house or two a way from Victoria and a few blocks to Hastings, could parking be the concern? If you Google Street View the laneway, there is number parking for 5 vehicles (though stall 5 is shared with a garbage bin so probably a motorcycle parking at best).
The challenge we have is that it is not only housing policy, but a car culture we have to deal with. I live in an old 2-story apartment building which is 1.5 blocks from a Skytrain station, and close to shopping, schools, etc. However, I am one of the few (if not only) person in my building who doesn't have a car. Granted, some people need a vehicle for their work, but there are a lot of people who should abandon their cars.
Matthew Yglesias observes that all alternatives to owning a vehicle - public transit, cycling, e-bikes, Uber, car-sharing services like Evo and Modo - complement each other. (As any of them improves, you get fewer people who need to own a vehicle, which increases demand for all of the other alternatives as well.) My wife and I do have a car, but I don't use it much. I commute to work by bike; sometimes I take transit; if I really need a vehicle and my wife's using the car, I can use an Evo.
It was a rhetorical question. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, people hated the handful of high-rises going up in Kitsilano, and they hated the West End. In 1973, TEAM won a majority on city council, and they downzoned the city, reducing what it's legal to build by right. Some slides from Nathan Lauster and Jens von Bergmann: https://homefreesociology.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/apartment_construction.pdf
Of course it's like pushing down on a balloon. When you block new housing, the people who would have lived there don't vanish into thin air, they just get pushed further out. This is why housing in Metro Vancouver is so scarce and expensive, and why our roads are congested. It's not a law of nature, it's the result of anti-growth institutions we set up back in the 1970s.
If the city of Vancouver could get out of its own way and allow more housing (e.g. by making it legal to build small apartment buildings by right), so that prices and rents continue to decline, I figure there'd be less development pressure in places like Tsawwassen and Langley. Shawn Oaks vs. Semiahmoo Shopping Centre: https://morehousing.substack.com/p/shawn-oaks
I was never good at rhetorical questions Russil! Valid comments but the reality, I feel, is that the 1970s "institutions" held up well and helped developed the much-loved Vancouverism until after Expo and even more so after the Olympics. Growth was clustered in the downtown peninsula allowing the Vancouver suburbs to maintain a single family lifestyle. We, clearly, cannot turn back the hands of time but I wonder if we knew then what we know now, what changes would have been considered.
I don't want to discount Vancouverism (an emphasis on high-density central-city livability) entirely. I really liked a recent video from Oh the Urbanity! on Griffintown and urban design priorities. Summary: https://morehousing.substack.com/p/griffintown