the downtown lifestyle -- sans jobs

This article from Governing magazine, aimed largely at American city and state government officials, provides a somewhat interesting take on the pros and cons of "going Vancouver" with the planning of your local CBD. The author writes about the sharp increase in downtown residents over the last 20 years, the decrease in corporate headquarters (down nearly a third in the past 5 years), and most apparent, the sprouting-up of "hundreds" of residential towers.

"These are all striking changes, but are they really problems? After all, cities have changed their function repeatedly over time. If, 20 years from now, historic downtowns are mostly places to live, with diverse entertainment choices and a vibrant street life, and the offices and jobs exist somewhere else, who will really suffer?"

Who will suffer, the article goes on to claim, are those who rely on downtown jobs for their livelihood, as corporations will choose to move to friendlier suburbs, or even to other provinces entirely. Trevor Boddy, of course, claims that we will all suffer as our city becomes a resort, losing its diversity, its status as the province's major economic centre, and its claim to being a "real" metropolis. But wasn't one of the major attractions to living downtown supposed to be living close to where you work? I wonder if living downtown would hold the same appeal for the same demographic of young, working couples if they had to commute to work for 45 minutes each way - into Burnaby or Richmond. How long would it take them to relocate closer to work once they realized that the same amount of money they had spent on a downtown condo would buy them a house with a piece of lawn to mow in New Westminster? Doesn't that negate a large portion of the environmental benefit of an urban densification strategy, as well as a lot of the appeal? It seems to me that if a much larger portion of the downtown jobs were to relocate to other places, the only people
for whom living downtown would be really appealing are those only interested in the lifestyle, opening the door to it becoming even more of a resort atmosphere.

vancouver's dorkiest condo names?

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek article, "Seattle's Dorkiest Condo Names," got me thinking a lot about the marketing machine that processes new residential real estate in Vancouver. Although it's written about Seattle, the article could have been written about almost any city undergoing a building boom. In highly competitive markets, it is the 'branding' of a project - not its design - that gives the developer a competitive edge in appealing to a given group; as a cynical architecture student, I would even argue that the more generic a city's current brand of architecture is, and the more inadequate the suites are in meeting the needs of buyers' imaginations, the more its producers need to rely on a marketing image to make it shine. Or just to make anyone buy it.

This phenomenon is certainly going on in Vancouver, too. While there are a lot of candidates for Vancouver's dorkiest condo name (the Elan, the Virtu, the Ritz, Soma, Uno, Firenze, Espana), my personal favorite is Bohemia. Surveying some of these websites, it quickly becomes clear that the developers are not in the business of selling the real estate itself, but an image or lifestyle. From Bohemia's website:

"One day you want to go antiquing in Lower Shaughnessy, the next, it's bargain hunting in Mt. Pleasant. Whether it's finding that rare blues recording in Kitsilano, picking up fresh basil and curry from Granville Island, or taking in a new play at the Stanley, Bohemia puts you right at the source."

On the flipside of the romantic image-crafting involved in condominium sales is the dispassionate, commodity-style buying and selling of properties also common in a hot real estate market. It seems that properties in Vancouver are bought increasingly not as homes, but as investments. Buying a unit from the builder and selling it once completed, never lived in; the quick renovate-and-flip; the purchase of units sight-unseen because the price and square footage are right: the person who applies these insider tricks judiciously stands to make a substantial chunk of change. But gone is the romantic notion of the 'family home,' to be lived in for years. Instead, even the amenities most often sought in a suburban family home - back yard, sunlit windows, ventilation, space to entertain - have been replaced by symbols of a nice place to live: granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors, mountain view. All of these 'amenities' - commodities, really - are not only much easier to communicate in a three-line real estate advertisement, but they are also much easier to construct without spending too much time thinking about the real quality of a space.

re:place

A link to re:place, a new online magazine dealing with urban issues in Vancouver, came through my inbox and I thought some of you urban thinkers might find it interesting, either as a future source of ideas on the city, or as a place to contribute your own thoughts.

vancouver: resort or metropolis?

I stumbled across this excellent article on Jason van der Burg's blog site which I think bears some discussion from the perspective of real estate as well as from that of urban sustainability. If you haven't already read it, you might find it useful - the author raises the interesting argument that by giving over all of the downtown core to new residential real estate developments, we may achieve a shining example of Larry Beasley's "liveable density" concept, but at the cost of the city failing as a vibrant, functioning metropolis which also attracts business and industry. He points out that while downtown currently seems hip and diverse, with typical residents portrayed as "mountain-biking software and computer game developers, walk-to-work denizens of the postmodern economy," a lot of evidence points to the fact that a significant proportion of new condos built in the last decade are owned by "a golden global class temporarily parking their investment dollars, linked with a huge cohort of Canadian baby boomers planning to spend their final years in Vancouver."

Estimates are that one-quarter of downtown purchasers are international speculative investors and another quarter are Canadian non-residents who rent out their apartments, Vancouver's only new source of rental housing in a decade. These mainly young renters give downtown its current
air of diversity. But soon after the arthritis kicks in for their greying landlords, these cultural creatives will get booted out.

Boddy also suggests that because 90 percent of downtown tower construction over the last 10 years has been residential condos, not only is Vancouver faced with a serious shortage of new rental housing, but Vancouver's downtown is

heading towards a fate as a dormitory suburb (transit ridership projections have more people leaving the core than coming in each morning, and downtown traffic levels and commute times have been reduced)
while new employment continues to locate in suburban fringes ill-served by transit.

When I considered focusing my blog around real estate demographics, I must admit in retrospect that it was in fact the intense focus on residential development so apparent in Vancouver at the moment that had piqued my interest. I had almost forgotten that the real estate market also governs the other important uses of land that drive a city's economy: agriculture, retail, industrial, and of course commercial. It looks like it's possible Vancouver's planners have made the same mistake when it comes to the downtown peninsula.