About Sprawl

[vid]

Originally Posted by MikeOnt

i like sprawl. people want houses. just make it good. BC has good new houses.

[ssiguy2]

I live in South Surrey and the idea that the ALR cannot be developed is a farce in fact it is the biggest sprwal area in Metro. The ALR does NOT allow subdivisions etc but it allows housing to go up...........in other words it the land can be dividied up. You have farmers who are taking advantage of the millions of dollars of agricultural land and selling them for some monster homes but who can blame them...............I would.
This has resulted in the worse of all possible worlds..............montser ultra-low density housing. The ALR is not suffering from mass development which could be stopped but rather death by a thousand cuts.
The reason Vancouver in particularly in a bad situation is due to the truley bizzare housing prices in a mid income city which results in pwople moving further out to even afford a small townhouse.

[dleung]

Heat islands in Greater Vancouver in 1986:
http://www.urbanheatislands.com


2006, with my hypotheses scrawled onto it, lol



Basically in the highest-land value areas of the city proper and downtown, natural growth of existing vegetation, and richly-landscaped new developments may have contributed to a reduction in heat islands, while new heat islands sprout from new sprawl and densification of existing neighbourhoods with multiple-family housing or monster homes. Since the GVRD barely expanded in area in 25 years, a density map better shows where the extra 900,000 people were accomodated; but furthermore a heat map shows the quality of the urbanism that has emerged from housing these people, whether it's the lush terraces and waterfalls of the Bayshore neighbourhood of downtown, or dry concrete lots parked with asphalt-shingled cookie cutter townhouses in Surrey.

[ssiguy2]

Cities can certainly try to restrain urban sprawl by increasing density requirements but that automatically results in higher land and thus house prices.
Vancouver is a mid-income city with bizzare house prices and this is essentially why people move to the burbs. There are other reasons of course but in Vancouver a big selling point for housing prices is the number of bridges you have to cross to get downtown. This explains one of the reasons why Ladner is so much cheaper {by Vancouver standards } than Richmond...................living in Ladner means having to take the tunnel which hasn't been widened since in was built in 1968. Certainly not everyone goes downtown to work but it is the largest emploer area as is UBC, the port, and the Broadway corridor.
Burnaby has nice Central Park but outside of that the place is a bit of a dump but it has no bridges required to get to Vancouver and has 2 SkyTrain lines which explains it ridculously high house prices.

[ssiguy2]

I have always thought that the only way to bring down house prices and make affordable housing offered to the masses is to get the federal Minister of Finance involved. I'm sure you must be thinking that he has nothing to do with house prices but he actually has more power to influence prices than either the Bank of Canada or the CMHC.
Why?............because controls how long mortgages are allowed to be amortorized over.
This idea of 40 year mortgages is obsurd. My dad said that when he moved to Canada in the mid-50s the longest mortgage you could get was 15 years. This is one of the reasons why homes were smaller back then yet the family sizes where quite literally twice the size of what they are now. There are certainly other reasons like proportionatly higher labour costs but if you look at the connection between house price increases and the loner one was able to amortorize the mortgage over are lock n step.
When my mom and dad bought their second house in the 1970s he said that even then you couldn't get a mortgage over 20 years.
If you took all the people in Metro who bought housing in the last two years and said that instead of having to pay the mortgage over 35 years {which Harper correctly brought it down to} and said that they only had 20 years to pay it off most would have never qualified. That, however, would not result in lower house ownership levels but rather much higher levels. Its basic supply and demand................fewer buyers means lower prices, MUCH lower. Not only does it mean house prices decline due to far fewer buyer {just like in a recession} and that has another benefit..........your 5% down for $200k is $5k less than it is for the $300k mortgage.
Real estate companies know this and this is why when Harper dropped the max amort from 40 yrs to 35 it was the real estate agents and construction companies that complained NOT consumer protection agencies.

[Vanman]

^Burnaby isn't even close to being a dump are you kidding me? Outside of the Metrotown area there are plenty of nice neighborhoods and parks everywhere. Capital Hill, Hastings, Burnaby Mountain, Burnaby Lake, the Fraser Foreshore , Barnett Beach, Deer Lake park the list goes on.

[deasine]

If Burnaby is a dump, I would say White Rock is one too.

[Kensingtonian]

if memory serves me correctly, the northern half of Burnaby is nice and the southern half is a dump.

[Yellow Fever]

Yes, N. Burnaby is still nicer but S. Burnaby is catching up quickly.

[dleung]

ROFL at this talk about dumps. It's like saying which is more disgusting - tiramisu or cheese cake. Any real dumps won't be on the burrard peninsula. Even the DTES has amazing potential. In reality, it's the cookie cutter subdivisions next to the high-voltage transmission towers that really have no hope of rising above "dump" status. Personally I rather have sagging old houses and exposed utility poles than some of the infill that replaces them:


Behold the "mohawk", an unexpected consequence and very literal interpretation of the two-and-a-half storey density limit imposed by city planners.

[Kensingtonian]

there were plenty of dumps on the peninsula when i was there 6 or 7 years ago. lots of gross, cheap looking stucco. lots of beautiful homes as well of course.

[Taller, Better]

Precisely. "Dumps" are definitely not a modern invention there.

[dleung]

Up till the last 2 posts I think we were talking on the scale of neighbourhoods. My beef with some inner city neighbourhoods here is with the infiltration of sterile identical boxes where a more varied and vital residential typology once was. But however bad this is, it doesn't compare to the bleakness of the latest asphalt-shingled swath of vinyl boxes in say, Langley or on a former industrial block in Richmond.

[Taller, Better]

I can't imagine living in that type of bleak, isolated compound.

[deasine]

Originally Posted by dleung

Up till the last 2 posts I think we were talking on the scale of neighbourhoods. My beef with some inner city neighbourhoods here is with the infiltration of sterile identical boxes where a more varied and vital residential typology once was. But however bad this is, it doesn't compare to the bleakness of the latest asphalt-shingled swath of vinyl boxes in say, Langley or on a former industrial block in Richmond.

The architectural variety in Vancouver is really really bad. I recall that there was an article that said Vancouver has one of the most boring looking houses in the world. Yes, there are a few flagships, but generally, everything looks exactly the same, just different shaped windows, different paint, and different roofing materials.

[ssiguy2]

Alright, maybe Burnaby isn't too bad but { I should have been clearer} when you consider the incredibly high price of homes there in the rest of the country you would be living in a mansion in very well healed neighbourhood. If Burnaby wasn't part of Metro it would be Canada's second most expensive housing market eventhough it is just a suburb.

[bayviews]

Originally Posted by dleung

That's like saying we should wait for Atlanta's density to catch up before getting smarter with urban planning.

For its population size, Atlanta is the most sprawled out of the US metros. It sprawls out for 25-30 miles in all directions.

By comparison LA is very densely populated.

Compared to US metros, most Canadian metros are quite compact.

Toronto sprawls around the lakeshore. But the built-up strip doesn't extent that far out from the lake.

Calgary & Edmonton are much more compact than Denver or the Texas metros.

Vancouver's sprawl pales by comparison with Seattle or the SF Bay Area.

Montreal appears to be the most sprawled out of the Canadian metros.

[dleung]

Originally Posted by ssiguy2

Alright, maybe Burnaby isn't too bad but { I should have been clearer} when you consider the incredibly high price of homes there in the rest of the country you would be living in a mansion in very well healed neighbourhood. If Burnaby wasn't part of Metro it would be Canada's second most expensive housing market eventhough it is just a suburb.

Yes, but why single out Burnaby? Since Vancouver isn't amalgamated, we can just as easily say that all the other suburbs in the region are respectively the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, etc, most expensive markets in the country. If you're basing your assessment on transit, wouldn't you agree Burnaby has better value than, say Richmond or Port Moody?

Richmond's population isn't growing as fast as say Surrey or the 905, but that's cause a lot of white people are leaving town. The place has by far the most aggressive regime of tearing down older houses for 1.5 million dollar replacements. There's hundreds under construction all over the suburb. 10 years ago, the "typical" cookie cutter monster house costed only $900,000. All this to get Asian money closer to Asian restaurants and amenities, lol. They now have north america's largest table tennis facility in Bridgeport, lol.

Benchmark house prices Dec 2009:

Greater Vancouver "benchmark" price: $766,816 ("Average" assessed price is $912,000)

Vancouver West: $1,516,835
West Vancouver: $1,319,131
North Vancouver: $882,358
Richmond: $817,741
Burnaby: $748,757
Port Moody: $719,075
Vancouver East: $713,210
Coquitlam: $667,707
Delta: $664,527
Squamish: $562,463

Calgary: $451,349

Toronto: $441607

Originally Posted by bayviews

Montreal appears to be the most sprawled out of the Canadian metros.

WTF???

[ssiguy2]

I noticed that about Montreal............it seems to go forever. Montreal is one of the few cities in Canada whos downtown population and complete city {not metro} population are declining.

[dleung]

Actually you're right... it isn't as outrageous as I first thought, a good chunk of the island is SFD, contrary to public perseption.


I love how all the pools in the neighbourhood are inflatable.