It feels like the West End is doing its bit - It's over a year now, two(?) since a walk around the first four blocks up from Denman street, along about six blocks wide, had something like 2,000 new units going in, just summing up the counts on the placards out front of the proposed construction.
Is most of Vancouver NOT doing that, is that the problem? The big developments are all in a restricted area? Are all the ones in the papers - Jericho, Broadway - coming so slowly they'll be full before they open? Or is it going to be one of those great free-market overcorrections where prices really fall a few years from now? How desperately we need the latter.
"Is most of Vancouver NOT doing that, is that the problem?"
I think that's exactly it.
In Montreal, when someone wants to build a small apartment building, people don't freak out, because there's already small apartment buildings everywhere - it's not going to change the neighbourhood. (Which is presumably why the West End is also able to add more housing.) In a neighbourhood like Kerrisdale: to opponents, a five-storey rental building is "an unimaginable visual anomaly." https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/149ki76/more_housing_to_opponents_a_fivestorey_rental/
As Gordon Price puts it, people are able to handle change. It's the *rate* of change that worries them.
It feels like the West End is doing its bit - It's over a year now, two(?) since a walk around the first four blocks up from Denman street, along about six blocks wide, had something like 2,000 new units going in, just summing up the counts on the placards out front of the proposed construction.
Is most of Vancouver NOT doing that, is that the problem? The big developments are all in a restricted area? Are all the ones in the papers - Jericho, Broadway - coming so slowly they'll be full before they open? Or is it going to be one of those great free-market overcorrections where prices really fall a few years from now? How desperately we need the latter.
"Is most of Vancouver NOT doing that, is that the problem?"
I think that's exactly it.
In Montreal, when someone wants to build a small apartment building, people don't freak out, because there's already small apartment buildings everywhere - it's not going to change the neighbourhood. (Which is presumably why the West End is also able to add more housing.) In a neighbourhood like Kerrisdale: to opponents, a five-storey rental building is "an unimaginable visual anomaly." https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/149ki76/more_housing_to_opponents_a_fivestorey_rental/
As Gordon Price puts it, people are able to handle change. It's the *rate* of change that worries them.