City Conversation #144 was first published 12-Dec-2024. (For a list of City Conversations by Brian Palmquist on CityHallWatch, please visit this page.)
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Four and Five towers per block on Hope Street, Brisbane Australia
The remarks below were (mostly) delivered to Vancouver City Council at a public meeting yesterday. At the beginning of the meeting, the Mayor flipped the agenda so that proposed Broadway Plan amendments went from the top to the bottom of the agenda, requiring 139 registered speakers to completely rearrange their work day in order to be heard in the evening (until 11pm as it unfolded) rather than starting in the morning. Instead, Council focused on the Mayor’s proposal to study the use of Bitcoin for city finances. Some 30 speakers were in favour of this—several were allowed to speak longer than the three minutes allotted to the rest of us. Read on to see how the Broadway Plan amendments played out.
“My name is Brian Palmquist. I am an architect and a Vancouver resident, speaking in opposition to these proposed amendments to the Broadway Plan.
In the three minutes allotted by this Council to me to explain my objections to the amendments proposed in the week old 350-page report before you, I can only focus on one of my many areas of concern about these amendments. I will focus on Figure 3 on page 6 of the report, which illustrates where limits on the number and height of towers are proposed to be removed.
Figure 3 — All the hatched areas will have no limits on the number per block or height of towers.
If adopted by Council, these proposed amendments will result in as many as 180 blocks1 in the Broadway Plan area that resemble this picture, taken by me about a month ago in Brisbane, Australia, a city Forbes business magazine describes as “severely unaffordable.” The rental vacancy rate in Brisbane is less than 1% and those few rentals available are advertised this way: “Room in two-bedroom apartment, $700 per week.” And $700 per week per room is the low end of what I found and what’s emerging in Vancouver at projects like the “affordable” new rental at Larch and Second Avenue.
Most of what you see in this photo has been built in the past six years, not 30 as suggested by city staff, so development can occur long before results are understood. There are five towers along this block of the ironically named Hope Street, many more behind, consistent with what the proposed Broadway Plan amendments permit. And yet the Brisbane vacancy rate is still less than 1% and the city is “severely unaffordable.”
All of this will be likely in Vancouver if Council adopts these proposed amendments. Photos are more realistic than city staff’s aerial isometrics.
To those who argue that the amended Plan includes minimum separations between towers, I will note that there are already several proposals under the Plan that violate the Plan’s so-called minimum separation and height guidelines, NOT requirements, without any mitigating circumstances, just the proponent’s desire to build more, higher, wider and closer.
