Into the Belly of the Beast

Dear Bob

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Neighbourhood Horrors Checklist

The Neighbourhood Horrors Checklist

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The proposed new tower development at Broadway and Kingsway:

Fails to incorporate or follow most of the guidelines set out in Mt. Pleasant’s Local Area Plan (still unpublished).

Check.

Fails to adequately inform local residents of planning workshops, design meetings, consultation, etc. Project seems to appear out of nowhere.

Check.

Grossly out of scale and character with the surrounding neighbourhood.

Check.

Disregard for historical plat and heritage, including the demolition of historic buildings.

Check.

Includes tower and podium design.

Check.

Tower has maximum glass exposure on all sides, requiring extra energy to heat and cool.

Check.

Tower blocks existing views and physically fragments neighbourhood.

Check.

Tower has lone obligatory tree planted on roof, enabling the project to market itself as “green”.

Check.

Building density increases developer’s margins without providing meaningful community amenities or civic infrastructure.

Check.

Rezoning establishes a precedent for more over-height buildings on nearby blocks (Main and Broadway fire site, Kingsgate, etc.).

Check.

Project demonstrates that “land-lift” CAC’s = Easy Money for Planning Department, reaffirming the Money is God mantra that eclipses all neighbourhood visioning.

Check.

Inflates surrounding real estate values, residential and commercial rents (having the opposite effect to that which is intended with STIR).

Check.

Exceeds 1 parking space/1 unit, encouraging continued proliferation of automobile use in urban environment and multi-car households. Full parking inclusion uniformly raises unit costs, which compromises the stated STIR goal of greater affordability.

Check and Check Again.

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In conclusion, this development scores very high on the Neighbourhood Horror Meter, and will result in another new monstrosity looming on the skyline that will haunt local residents for decades.

Needless to say, the project will recieve the full and ringing endorsement from Dr. Frankentower, our City’s quack DoP.

Scaaaary kids!

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Powell Street Festival Returns to Oppenheimer

The Douglas Coupland School of Marketing

What the heck is this box doing at the corner of Carrall and Cordova, next to an old disabled couple camped out on the stoop of the empty Rainier? What is “House in a box”, a new form of housing for the poor? Is some charity collecting appliance boxes and giving them to homeless people? Is this so crazy that I should visit the website, or drop by the address on the box to check it out?

Well, it was only a block out of my way, so I walked by, and it was a bloody “concept” furniture store having a grand opening, and this box in the street was their cynical little marketing ploy to generate foot traffic on a block where there generally isn’t that many pedestrians owning new condos that need professional design and furnishings, if you know what I mean…

I found this marketing ploy to be totally disrespectful and sickening (and I fully realize that I’m playing right into their hands by posting pictures), but unless the owners were just simply too clueless about their new neighbourhood to see why this was not ethical advertising, they should be ashamed of themselves. Then again, if they knew the neighbourhood and the high rate of business failures in Gastown, especially since the recession, well, they probably wouldn’t have moved here in the first place….

As if that brush with guerrilla advertising wasn’t enough, I was walking along later that night and there appeared to be another opening at the old kicks store that just went belly up on Powell after 3 years. When I saw the sandwich board with “RootsxDouglasCoupland” in black and white beside a rainbow banner, I thought, hmmn, maybe he’s launching a new book.

Admittedly, I have a love/hate relationship to Douglas Coupland as a writer. On the one hand, I thought Generation X was boring as hell when it first came out, and couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. This is supposed to be the defining novel of my generation? Compared to Trainspotting or Fight Club or American Psycho, Generation X was embarrassingly cute fluff. Pffft. I could write a better novel than that, no sweat, and I have a drawer full of unpublished fragments to prove it!

But on the other hand, Coupland is only a few years older than me and grew up just up the mountainside from where I did. His locally-set novels and non-fiction reflect an eerily similar geographic perspective on the city to the one I grew up with. Vancouver is one of those places where geographical location can play a big part in shaping your psyche, and Coupland has captured that sense of ironic distance to the city one gets from growing up across the water and high up on the side of the North Shore mountains. As Rudyard Kipling once mused, “Vancouver is a beautiful but fickle woman, best admired from afar….” Well, the North Shore mountains are an ideal place to admire her from.

Coupland’s writing grew on me over time, as did a shared fascination with historical minutae. And then, about ten years ago, I went to a VIWF event featuring Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh and local boy Douglas Coupland in an intimate conversation. I thought the foul-mouthed, hard-living Scot would make a meal of Coupland, but it turned out to be the other way around. Coupland disarmed Welsch immediately by taking off his sweater to reveal a Hearts jersey, and then proceeded to have everyone laughing and enthralled for two hours, including Irvine. Since then, I’ve gained a definite appreciation for Coupland’s work. Although I still don’t like everything he creates, there’s no denying there’s a certain genius at work behind it.

Well, the small group of smokers and texters milling around on the sidewalk outside the store looked just like the impeccable hipsters on the rainbow RootsxDouglasCoupland posters I had seen in a couple of places around town earlier in the week. In contrast to the fashion slaves, I was three days unshaven, flying the flannel, and sporting twelve-year-old Docs worn razor thin at the sole – clearly a local and not on the guest list.

One of the chics rolled her eyes at me as I walked up and poked my head in the door just to see if Coupland was actually there. He was talking to a small group, the last few left in the store, which I now noticed was full of Roots clothes that I would never wear, mainly because I couldn’t afford to these days, but also because if I were to buy some new clothes, it wouldn’t be these ones, yunno, cause they looked kinda touristy. Though I might have gone in and dropped $20 on a book…

But oh, Doug, you can’t be serious! You designed a clothing line for Roots? And you’re launching it here in Gastown because, what, it gives you some kinda cred? You make me wanna puke! And so does your technicolour yawn of a marketing campaign, complete with the obligatory photo collage (like Rennie’s Woodwards ads) and the flurry of canned tweets it links to. I dare anyone to view the RootsxDC splash, marketing video and click through to the collage and not feel immediately nauseous and the need for a hot shower.

I’m sorry, but I’m not sensing any irony here, just a pure, unadulterated shill.

Thankfully, it was a one-off event, and Roots isn’t opening a store permanently on Powell. I guess they have a little more business sense than MAD, no matter how questionable their latest clothing line may be.

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Octogenarian Architect Speaks Out Against City Planning

Roger Kemble, aka Urbanismo, is a mariner, but he’s all about the land. At 82, he appears to be having the time of his life. He clearly doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks about him, nor does he like bullshitters — he challenges people all the time to be truthful. But where other commentators like old Gassy might come off as fucking hacks or partisan wonks, Urbanismo has literary gusto, writing wildly punctuated fragments in a high modernist style. And he frequently drops cultural references into his blog comments that would make Douglas Coupland’s head spin.

After a long career as an architect in Vancouver and educator at UBC that stretches back to the 1960s, Urbie isn’t afraid to call out the current Vancouver Planning Department as dimwitted and drunk on power. He strongly believes the current direction of City policy — and the public consultation process — is badly in need of a new planning paradigm. In my own isolated experience with the Historic Area Height Review, I found myself agreeing with Urbanismo more and more.

While his take on Vancouver being a failed city? may lead some to scratch their heads, there’s no doubt a lot of truth to what he says. And while I and others dither over the details, Urbanismo just went ahead and plotted a new planning paradigm over the course of a couple of rainy afternoons. If you like cities and urbanism, and non-pedantic writing, it’s worth taking a look at the pages.

Prolificus Vancouveritis

(L-R) Gassy Jack’s Ghost, Lewis Villegas, Roger Kemble (Urbanismo), Michael Geller, David Mah.

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I had coffee at Woodwards with a group of long-winded blog commentators/architects last week to discuss a research project we’ve been trying to develop. A very fun meeting, though somewhat odd as text-based avatars converge with their flesh and blood creators in real time under the towers that should not be.

For the first time in a long time, I was the youngest in a group; just a wide-eyed babe compared to these well-respected and accomplished folks, who have all had a direct hand in building the Vancouver we see today.

Can these guys save the world, or at least the city, from the grips of rabidly increasing DENSITY?

Well, we’ll see….

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A Sun Yat-Sen Moment, After Things Get Weird

Well, I have to say, Sunday was a long, strange day, for many reasons. And one of the odder moments occured about 10 minutes before I took the picture of the fish….

Since posting some opinions about the Historic Area Height Review earlier in the week both here and on the Bulablog, I wanted to get some more pictures of the tower sites that had been approved. But I had a busy week and didn’t have time to do it during daylight hours until Sunday morning, during a little down-time between hockey games in Burnaby and Richmond.

On the right of the picture below (taken on Carrall) is the sign on the NW corner of the Sun Yat-Sen Garden’s white wall. The two-story grey building in the middle is 8 Pender, the site of the new tower that Council approved. The red building is one of the Heritage buildings on the north side of Pender, with the 8-storey hotel behind, and, on the far left, the Pennsylvania at Hastings and Carrall. Fifteen storeys is planned for this site, nearly double the height of the West Hotel.

So there I was, taking lots of pictures, wondering if this wasn’t just a dead issue and a waste of time, when suddenly a couple of large SUVs come squealing around the corner and pull up beside the grey building. As I’m walking up the block taking pictures, I notice that these two SUVs have illegally parked right on the bike path of the new Carrall Street Greenway.

“Assholes,” I say under my breath, as one typically does when you see jerks in SUVs doing, well, jerk-type things.

A group of 5 or 6 well-dressed, well-coiffed guys hop out and convene a little meeting on the sidewalk. These guys are players. They look like money. They act important.

And not only are they driving two big, black, emission-spewing SUVs, they don’t even bother to turn off the engines as they chat over on the sidewalk. Wow! The arrogance! These are the kind of guys that people love to rant about on blogs and call-in shows, you know? Too rich to care about gas prices or bike lanes or parking fines or pollution. Oh look! They parked by a fire hydrant, too…

Anyway, I’m getting a little agitated as I’m walking up to the group. I’m trying to formulate a cutting satirical remark that is nevertheless subtle enough that it might not lead to me getting shit-kicked into the pavement by the five of them.

Then one of the guys walks over to the side of the building and, pointing to the wall, says, “It’ll be right here.” He draws an imaginary line that extends up (way up) into the sky.

Wait a second. These guys are here on a Sunday morning having an animated discussion about the tower that’s going up at Carrall and Pender?

That’s weird since, here I am, camera in hand, taking pictures of the tower site and I’m trying to wrap my head around what a fifteen storey tower will look like on this spot, too.

One of the guys looks me up and down, glances at my camera, and shoots me a real nasty look as if to say, “Why the hell are you taking so many pictures of this thing for?” He clearly didn’t like me poking around them, snapping photos, and I thought he was going to tell me to bugger off.

I smiled.

And then I kinda recognized this guy. And then I definitely recognized the guy who was pointing where the tower was going to be. And, oh yeah, I recognized one of the other guys, too.

Now, that’s really ironic. I mean, what the heck are these guys doing in Chinatown having a mini-charette about this tower on at 10 am on a Sunday morning?

Looks to me like the clock is ticking on the Vancouver’s Historic Area much faster than we thought…

Heightened Senses: A Late Night Walk in the Rain

What’s that you say? Public support for any tower proposal was virtually non-existent?

At the risk of being tossed in the klink for a sideways glance on Day Six of the DES popo pre-Olympic sweep, last night I took a late stroll around Chinatown to check out the only TWO tower sites approved, right? Huh? Right? Um, well, unless we consider… the financial considerations… cause someone, I’m not sure who, might have maybe inquired, so we thought maybe we’d look into it, on the City’s dime…

Nothing like a walk in the rain to heighten your senses! It’s money well spent, so to speak. Unlike other things….

I reconfirmed in my own mind that the Budget Rental site one could sorta swallow a high rise on, given Fung owns it and it’s still under the height of the Sun – pretty much anything will improve this intersection, And hey, now someone will be there to complain to Alex Tsakumis about the pissing drunks, loud groups of girls, too many furries coming and going, or the constant reek of McDonald’s deep fryers from across the street in Tinseltown.

But 8 East Pender on the SE corner at Carrall (bordering the new Greenway no less) is right across the alley to the north of Sun Yat Sen. So how the heck is this site any different than the site Council nixed at Keefer Square or the Cultural Centre site that didn’t even make it to Council? It’s still 150 feet over and above Sun Yat Sen, and much closer to it than Keefer Square. Remember, the business plan here says: go for UNESCO World Heritage Site. But, but… the Scholar’s Room won’t see this one unless you stand on your tippy toes, so, yeah, its totally OK, and there’ll be no shadows coz it’s to the north? A fine logic, indeed.

Yes, a tower and podium proposal to set it back …yawn… and lessen the spatial impact, but then, on the other side, across the street on Pender, a string of heritage pearls lie low, awaiting polishing. Either way, aspect ratio be damned, the sun will hardly illuminate the pearls, you know. And we’re gunning for FIFTEEN storeys here! Blah! It won’t matter what size plate you serve this thing up on…

And speaking of nimbys, I bet all these new high risers on Carrall will band together and force Rennie to take down Everything Will be Alright, or at least turn it off by nine pm so they don’t have to stare at it every bloody night from their roosts.

And, in an ode to how fast council quorums can make real estate decisions, the For Sale sign is already up on the old (unprotected heritage) service station in Keefer Square – the one tower site that got nixed by Council. I guess there’s really no point in updating the Heritage Register at this point, eh? It certainly wasn’t on the agenda presented to council by Planning, because hey, this review is all about high ideals, right? Groans (from speculative heights). More groans.

Twelve storey Paris-style apartments traversing the Hastings parade route! Think of it, even higher than the ugly Luxling! Quick, wall that whole sucker in before an Area Plan process is approved! The 20% is already institutionalized; so there’s really no limit to what we can do here now, old boy! Ever been to Greenwich, mate?

For Wendy P, and all the starving or successful artists who used to live around here, a final thought to ponder about the INTENSIFICATION! policy that’s behind all this, as quoted from a Skyscraper:

“These changes should allow the populate to increase from 8000 today to just under 17000 upon build-out in about 20-40yrs.” (Sic)

Most of you will be dead by then anyway, eh? It doesn’t really matter if it’s livable.

And either way, I’ll still be a ghost.

So I’ll give it a rest, already…

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