South by Northwest

Over 80,000 people currently live in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, the heart of Canada’s third-largest metropolitan area. They represent fifteen percent of the city’s total population of approximately 585,000. It is projected that another 4,000 people will move downtown by the end of this year, and in five years, when the city hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics, the number of downtown residents is expected to top 141,000. The volume of people living and moving through Vancouver’s downtown core far surpasses that of any comparably-sized U.S. city. San Diego, which has over 1.2 million residents, can only claim 27,500 downtown inhabitants; smart growth poster child Portland, Oregon, with a city population of 538,000, only has about 10,000 people living downtown; and Houston, population, 2 million, has fewer than 3,000 downtown residents.

With a vibrancy well beyond that of most cities its size, Vancouver regularly wins accolades as one of the most livable cities in the world. Typically suburban amenities, such as daycare programs and schools, supermarkets, and even big-box retailers, are sprouting in the downtown core. Small wonder, then, that Vancouver has become a point of reference for urban planners in the U.S. concerned with the fabric of their own downtowns. 

San Diego is among the cities that hope to emulate Vancouver’s experience: it plans to increase its downtown population to 85,000 by 2030. Fort Worth, Texas, is another example. Plans worth hundreds of millions of dollars are afoot to restore the city’s relationship with its waterfront; the project will see a former industrial area transformed into what the Dallas Star-Telegram proclaimed the “Vancouver of the South.” The success of these U.S. cities in growing their downtown constituencies depends on setting firm but economically fair rules for private developers, and establishing a vision of streets graced rather than overwhelmed by high-rise residences.

Creating a New Model

Vancouver Director of Current Planning Larry Beasley, a guiding force in the city’s development since the late-1980s, fields several inquiries a week from cities eager for lessons in urban renewal. Many of those inquiries lead to visits from municipal leaders, including recent delegations from Boston, Pittsburgh, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle. “They want to see if this damn thing is livable, if it’s attractive, how it works. Once they see it, they’re desperate to talk to us,” he said.

It’s a switch from the early-1990s, when even Vancouver had yet to prove the model. “We were just dreaming about these things fifteen years ago,” Beasley said. Those dreams had deep roots, however. In the mid-1960s, while freeways were cutting through cities across North America, Vancouver rejected a massive urban redevelopment plan that would have seen a freeway and a forest of office towers and commercial space replace the aging stock of industrial buildings that made up its downtown core. Unveiled in 1966, the scheme had promised to make Vancouver’s downtown competitive with a host of new shopping complexes in adjacent suburbs.

Social workers and other critics argued that the plan would disrupt the local Chinese immigrant community and low-income residents of Skid Row to the east of downtown. Their opposition gained momentum, and eventually everyone from shop owners in Chinatown to university professors spoke out against the project. The scheme collapsed.

Twenty years later the market for office space in North America crashed, and the city entered a period of profound soul-searching. Vancouver began to develop a comprehensive plan for its downtown that would have been impossible had a freeway bisected the city. When other cities were attempting to anchor downtown with new commercial or entertainment uses, Vancouver instead encouraged residential development in the downtown core. By bringing people closer to the jobs available downtown, the city hoped to create a market that would sustain the area’s flagging retail sector.

Residential development became the lynchpin holding together the various other components of the urban core. Vancouver entered the vanguard of a new approach to urban development that put residents first.

The city put strong policies in place to steer residential developers in the right direction, allowing development that was dense and profitable but also aimed at building an urbane, attractive environment. Buildings were set back from the street to allow for wide sidewalks that encouraged mingling. Guidelines encouraged public open spaces within new developments. Town homes were recommended at the base of residential towers to ensure what the Jane Jacobs called, “eyes on the street”: the close presence of homeowners would discourage criminal activity. “[Cities] have to establish a level of expectation of developers; otherwise these are the things developers, without realizing what they’re doing, will trade off,” said Beasley.

Levies on development costs garnered revenue to support municipal services to the new residential towers; new residents were thereby ensured schools, parks, and other publicly funded amenities. Some developers were initially unhappy with all the demands being made, but towers were soon sprouting at the south end of downtown along the north shore of False Creek, where Hong Kong’s Li Ka Shing had bought 204 acres in 1989. Developed by the Concord Pacific Group, the site was planned to house 15,000 new downtown residents in accordance with the city’s new principles.

The city’s aggressive efforts to define building design and public amenities paid off. Concord Pacific and other developers adapted to the new environment by marketing features the city required as advantages for prospective residents. The property values of surrounding neighborhoods began to appreciate. And the United Nations Center for Human Settlement has recognized the Concord Pacific site as one of the best urban plans in the world.

“Developers in the inner city [now] market the [features of the] entire community, and then at the end say, ‘Oh, we have a two bedroom apartment if you really want it,’” Beasley said. He goes so far as to claim that the first new developments were so marketable that architects now design projects in accordance with the city’s ideals without being asked.

Applying Vancouver’s Lessons in the U.S.

Spurred by the city-owned City Centre Development Corp., San Diego has drafted a community plan it hopes will guide its future growth. The city’s ideals echo those of Vancouver, from the emphasis on mixing uses, integrating neighborhoods, and enhancing livability, to the clear intention to mandate space for amenities such as urban parks and a tree-lined waterfront walkway.

San Diego didn’t stop at design ideals. It has also attracted veteran Vancouver developers, such as Nat Bosa who designed the noted 1000-unit CityGate high rises, as well as architects and marketing geniuses who could apply lessons they’d learned in Vancouver to a new city. The high-rise condominium towers sprouting along the San Diego waterfront bear more than a passing resemblance to the tall, thin towers with street-level town homes characteristic of Vancouver. And people bought into the idea of downtown living. The redevelopment exceeds what anyone imagined possible 15 years ago when efforts to renew the city’s downtown were faltering.

A $360 million redevelopment plan that will effectively double the size of downtown Fort Worth promises a more coordinated implementation of the Vancouver model. Spearheaded by the Tarrant Regional Water District, a state organization that supplies Fort Worth with water, the project originally aimed to rehabilitate the Trinity River for recreational use but has expanded to include redevelopment of a former industrial site along the river. Work is set to begin in 2006.

By removing levees and developing a floodway for the river, the water district hopes to make public access to the river the centerpiece of a desirable new residential neighborhood on the fringe of downtown Fort Worth. “We thought this area could really complement the downtown area by providing a residential community that would support downtown,” said Jim Oliver, general manager for the water district. “This will be the first area developed in the very-near downtown area that will be designed for families.” The expected influx of people and businesses into the 834-acre site will create a tax base and generate revenue for the city.

The integrated vision owes its origins to Vancouver. “We looked at Boston, we looked at New York, we’ve looked at a number of other cities, but we were just really impressed with Vancouver,” Oliver said. “Vancouver seemed to be very well planned out--how the housing and the businesses really came together in one area.” Oliver said the water district hopes ultimately to hand leadership of the project to Fort Worth, noting that urban redevelopment should really be the job of cities, not water authorities.

For all of the optimism, Vancouver architect Bing Thom, the Fort Worth project’s designer and a veteran of similar projects across Canada and in China, points out the challenges of transferring the Vancouver development model to Texas. While parks and community pools are part of the plan for the area, Thom said, U.S. stakeholders tend to prefer free enterprise to government directives. “They’re used to, for example, building a school when the demand is there,” Thom said of U.S. governments. “In Vancouver, we actually built a school when the private developer went in” in order to guarantee public services ahead of time.

Thom says continuing education is needed to get U.S. cities to take the lead, even once they profess an understanding of the importance of public involvement in redevelopment. A redevelopment initiative, he quips, “isn’t just a series of drawings. It’s a series of policy initiatives that’s needed, that takes a little longer to explain. But you have to give them the vision of what’s possible.” Highlighting the importance of government involvement, Thom asks: “If the public sector does not put their money where their mouth is regarding policy, how is the private sector going to respond?”

What Could Have Been: San Francisco

The Rincon Hill project in San Francisco demonstrates the important role governments play in setting the tone for developers. Vancouver-style high-rise developments had long been touted by many as a solution to San Francisco’s lack of affordable housing, but in December 2003, the City Councilmen settled for two buildings that ignored standard zoning requirements for their area. Rather than the tall, slender, and well-spaced towers with town houses at their base that are the hallmark of projects in Vancouver, the Rincon Hill towers soared 400 feet with just 82 feet between them.

Promising to overwhelm the very space they occupied with their bulk, the proposed towers were rightly criticized as a misinterpretation of Vancouver’s successful approach. San Francisco’s distinguished former head urban planner, Allan Jacobs, described them as “behemoths” all in all, they were an ironic response to the equally monstrous live-work lofts that many deemed part of San Francisco’s housing problem.

Vancouver architecture critic Trevor Boddy reflected on San Francisco’s approval of the Rincon Hill towers in a recent issue of Places, noting the ease with which Vancouver lessons regarding high-density development can be overlooked. Just because a building is tall doesn’t mean it’s right, he argued: the measure of its success is the environment the building creates on the street and in the surrounding neighborhood.

According to Larry Beasley, the single biggest risk for a high-rise project is that it could lack sensitivity to the people who live in and with it. Even if a project is beautiful, people have to be comfortable with the kind of community it will engender. “The magic of contemporary planning is the first five or six floors,” Beasley said. “If you get it wrong, people are oppressed even by ten stories.”