Brendan Dawe
@BrendanDawe
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Urban Planning and Real Estate Consultant, Urbanics Consultants. DM’s Open. Occasionally makes maps
The West End
Joined September 2011
Don't wanna be here?
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fascinated by the urban form of this turkish town near the Georgian border which has a bunch of small-foot print apartment buildings sprinkled in the corn fields
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We-underbuilt-the-housing-stock-so-therefore-we-must-continue-to-underbuild-the-housing-stock-to-respect-all-the-underbuilt-housing-we-built
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I find the block by block population density of Canada to be visually interesting
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In Calgary, the internal airport transit is just a tiny brt
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@MattZeitlin
hell being from the west coast and wandering through a midwestern suburb can have that same effect without even leaving the country
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This sort of take is the most consistent tell that someone has never lived in a walkable neighbourhood.
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This sort of thing does more for livability than a thousand setback regulations
New York noise-bylaw pilot fines stock Porsche owner $800
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Not only did a turkish sociologist from the a area chime to comment with background information, someone dm'd me from this town with his house circled on the map and volunteered interesting socioeconomic details
Sadly never quitting this website
fascinated by the urban form of this turkish town near the Georgian border which has a bunch of small-foot print apartment buildings sprinkled in the corn fields
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If you’re involved in drafting a federal housing platform, please I beg you to consider how we have the fewest homes per capita in the G7 and home building peaked the 1970s with a much smaller population. Housing is expensive because we don’t build enough housing
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Train....the word you're looking for is train
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Something I am still sorta surprised to learn is that as of Q4 2022 the Skytrain has more average weekday ridership than all US heavy rail systems that aren’t the New York City Subway
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@mnolangray
imagine how much better every US city if every "boulevard" was turned into an actual boulevard with mutually reinforcing bastions and defensible ravelins
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A more irritating piece of rhetoric is the insistence that there is a difference between a “housing shortage” and an “affordable housing shortage”
No, these are the same thing, prices are what show you that you have a shortage
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I don't know how someone becomes a planner reads a zoning code, and then claims we have 'neoliberal' housing policy.
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This is basically the skeleton key for understanding where post-70s urban planning methodology went off the rails
New: Massive Jericho Lands project inches ahead as polls show vastly different views
1st 3 images: new renderings of 13,000-home project from local First Nations
4th image: from City report, shows 2 surveys producing divergent views of proposal
Story:
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One thing I find consistent in Vancouver's more veteran planners is that they expect the statement below to speak for itself.
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I’m going to post pictures of the most impressive interurban stuff from William Middleton’s The Interurban Era
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'We're not nimby's, we just oppose towers!' Team Hardwick says.
Here is a selection of lowrise buildings Hardwick opposed
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@mattyglesias
To think you could’ve put the whole “secret Muslim” thing to bed with this knowledge and you didn’t
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“Canada welcomed 122,748 immigrants from July to September 2021, the highest number in any quarter since 1946” - Statistics Canada Daily today
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Amazing how we get a car shortage and cars start to be priced like houses. We’ve just been living so long with systemic housing shortage that we don’t see it
In Cambridge, a 2021 BMW that cost $79,000 new recently sold for $85,000 — used.
As the shortage of new cars turns used cars into objects of intense desire, dealers are begging car owners to turn in their vehicles early so they can flip them for more.
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In order to aid train twitter in looking at what Amtrak is proposing without clouding your thinking with your distaste for the Southwest Chief, I've greyed out the existing, unaltered services from Amtrak's map
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The guy from Australia shows up in my feed periodically championing how heterodox he is, so here’s his grasp of housing supply policy
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So, Burlington Vermont housing building permits. Top line indicates partisanship of the mayor. One "Bernie Sanders" was independent mayor 1981-1989
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It’s frankly disgraceful to think anyone is getting “fucked” when the Squamish Nation builds homes on their land.
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Yes actually
do any of you guys live in walkable cities that you really like that aren’t new york
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It’s hard not to get the sense from this sort of commentary that Poilievre’s embrace of a pro-building agenda was rather shallow and performative
The two men who have doubled housing costs and made Vancouver the world’s 3rd most overpriced city are “working together in collaboration” to inflate costs further.
My common sense plan cuts the bureaucracy to build the homes.
Sign if you agree the rent is too high:
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Here in Vancouver, we Care About The Environment, which doesn't mean that we're moving the buses out of mixed traffic or ditching parking minimums, but rather means that I have to drink this bubble tea out of a horrible paper straw
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Urbanists of all stripes to an extend I think underestimate how important cheap sprawl was to keeping housing costs in check. There’s a lot less cheap sprawl going on for a number of reasons
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Thinking about Vancouver should not just abolish setbacks, but actively encourage buildings that overhang the sidewalk this morning
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now I'm no rapid transit expert, but this is not a lot of stations
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The key to my heart is small lot infill development
Revelstoke
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I have lived in four-storey buildings with little-to-no community and I have known people who lived in 21-storey towers who had a bridge night every Wednesday.
Some people just don't like tall buildings and have been trying to rationalize this taste since the Tower of Babel
World's
#1
Most Influential Contemporary Planner in Planetizen's 2023, Danish renowned urbanist Jan Gehl, based on much research says "once you go above 10 floors, you have more in common with birds & planes, than with other people."
Not me; Jan, who knows much more.
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A local lunch counter being bullied into turning off the “Russian” in their name does not speak well of our society
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It’s deliberately easy to forget this, but West Vancouver is closer to the largest concentration of jobs in Western Canada than any other suburb, and closer than most of Vancouver proper too
B.C. housing experts question why smaller municipalities selected for 'naughty list'
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When I am Emperor of Canada we are are going to commission the mother of all high speed rail studies. It will require one hundred million man-years of consultant labour. Copies will be hand transcribed onto vellum made from the skins of 10,000 finest Alberta calves.
Any serious Regime has a vanity megaproject what would yours be
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The West End is good.
If you think the West End is bad, you are obviously and trivially wrong
But more importantly, if you think the economic and planning policies that turned a neighbourhood of detached houses into a neighbourhood of apartments is bad, you are also wrong
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Three principles from Alain Bertaud to improve Vancouver planning outcomes
Via Global Civic and Sam Sullivan
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one way we can have better bus service without having to hire more bus drivers or buy more buses is to help the buses go faster by moving more stuff out of their way
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The vision: Empowered public participation to bring about democratic oversight of the growth and development of the City for all residents.
The reality: empowered weirdos and busybodies who dislike other people
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Don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece of architecture so ruined by ionic columns
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The scale gap between Squamish nation development proposals and whatever adjacent municipalities permit is actually a quite decent demonstration of what what local governments are squandering
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British Columbia’s unbroken streak of producing extremely short lived Prime Ministers goes further than I could have imagined
Former Burnaby, BC resident, Liz Truss, in the late 1980s. Tuss attended Parkcrest Elementary School in Burnaby in the late 1980s while her father taught at Simon Fraser University. She is currently looking for work, likely outside of the UK.
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Every time someone drives a big rig to a protest to use it as an noise making parade float this should be taken by policy makers as a sign that the carbon tax is too low
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Imagine society if we’d legalized housing ten years ago when interest rates were low, unemployment was high and construction was cheaper
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This is a key insight- the Vancouver planning tradition was built by people who thought (and think) that the West End is an unlivable slum and only their brilliance could “save” new development from being like the West End
The West End is Vancouver’s best neighborhood, and people like Wise and Ray Spaxman view it as a nightmare. Their judgment is not to be trusted.
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20) I kid you not this is near Los Angeles, on the “Alpine Division” of the Pacific Electric Rwy
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liberal land use policy ended in the early 20th century. There never was a 'neo'. When they de-regulated much of the economy in the 1970s-90s (for good and for ill) land use policy was decidedly left out, and if anything became far more illiberal in that period
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@t_NYC
In actual reality, getting rid of technically obsolete jobs like conductoring or train driving allows for high frequency wide span services that create a tremendous demand for human operated connecting buses
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[Sees Justin McElroy walking down Burrard Street looking at a rezoning sign, rolls down window]
Wife: “please don’t yell at Justin McElroy”
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People are unsurprisingly unaware of Canada’s 40% increase in defense spending between 2014 and 2020
Pop Quiz: of all G7 countries, which has had the largest gdp-share increase in defence spending since 2014?
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Someone brought up the Zurich tramways in the context of building Vancouver skytrain lines and I just want to say that these are not equivalent things:
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I’m just gonna have to say: so much of these recent BC legislation is going to depend on pro-actively whacking every mole that municipalities are going to try and come up with to blunt the impact of these rules
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it's interesting how a car doesn't really make a downtown job anymore accessible for someone in Vancouver with the huge exception of the North Shore and Dunbar
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@reason
I mean if we’re making laws out to be contracts may as well just roll up the whole libertarian project right now
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You shouldn't get *too* mad at the neighbours, they've been told for decades by the city and planning orthodoxy that their whining is actually a laudable act of democracy and community empowerment.
You should get mad at the policy makers who enable this sort of decision
A story worth reading by
@fumano
about a proposed 8-child daycare near Douglas Park being rejected by the city due to complaints by neighbours
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The greatest failing of left nimby notions of price formation is the inability to understand that every developer *individually* maximizing profit does not imply that they *collectively* manage thus to maximize profit
Quiz: I'm a developer in ON. I've just saved 13% on building costs thanks to the HST waiver. I'm going to:
A) pass those savings onto purchasers by lowering the price of my units below market rates
B) Price the unit at or above market rates to maximize my profits
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Friends, you too should join me in calling for the abolition of the Parks Board.
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the plan to widen Beach Avenue so that some people can rat-run through the West End more readily is basically vandalism.
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But if we’re not going to sprawl, we’re going to have to infill, and it becomes incumbent to ensure that we can actually make infill work. A huge part of that is getting over an ahistorical fear of large buildings next to small buildings
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If you’d crack open your local zoning bylaw, you’ll notice that it contains several provisions limiting the unit count, height, lot coverage and/or ratio of floor area to land area of housing built on any particular lot
Rather mechanically reduces the potential housing supply
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Appreciate the comedy of building a new single family home in...the West End
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Every once and a while when you see what's getting built in odd corners of the outer suburbs that's illegal in most of Vancouver, and you can't help but get mad at the misanthropes who rule us
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hear me out:
money is no object, politics are no problem: what is one transit project you'd have built in your metro area? and why?
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Since the Liberals dug up the 10-lane Massey-replacement bridge, it's a great time to remind everyone why this was a bad idea
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<cough> ubc <cough>
Every time I go to UCLA, it blows me away that there are single family homes abutting a campus with 45,000 students. It's like seeing the Grand Canyon, pictures just don't do it justice.
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It might be the case that requiring almost any building larger than a house to get its own special law passed in order to be built was a mistake that previous generations of policy makers did not really think through
The City of Vancouver has confirmed that they have rescheduled the public hearing for the rezoning of a Safeway next to the Commercial/Broadway SkyTrain station until after the election because council has run out of time
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@sandypsj
my favorite was the guy trying to convince me that 'hoping to pass it on to your children' was among the features that made it not-wealth
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@YIMBY_Princeton
I think the chart suggests his successors were relatively hostile to housing
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@pressFToTweet
@globeandmail
What would my family finances look like if I could print money and conscript resources from firms and households?
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Still wild to think that all-time quarterly Canada housing starts peaked in 1976 and completions peaked in 1973
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11) the 97 mph interurban that was faster than a biplane in 1930, Cincinnati & Lake Erie
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I made a thing comparing the urbanized areas around Toronto (L) & London, England. (R). Yellow is built up area, red is in proportion to population size
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It’s impressive how many people want to believe and have convinced themselves that idling is the primary driver of automotive emissions
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Sometimes the nostalgia FB groups turn up good stuff like this 1919 (!) aerial photo of Senakw and downtown
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Not gonna lie the idea that coconuts are picked by trained monkeys is actually kinda cool
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Confession: I do not why planners impose frontage minimums.
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This is fun
You’ve almost certainly been lied to after Googling how big the world’s cities are. How can it be that Melbourne in Australia has 5 million residents, whereas New York City only has 8? It's been very difficult to compare cities, until now...
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