Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Vancouver’s rate of residential growth is not even keeping pace with the Metro region:

      The GVRD [Greater Vancouver Regional District, now Metro] grew by about 13 percent over the past decade, while the city of Vancouver grew by about 8 percent, which means that Vancouver is actually losing its share of growth within the region. Or put another way, the surrounding suburban municipalities are growing faster than Vancouver is.²⁴

      But it is true that while the suburbs are booming, the downtown has also been taking on huge volumes of people, which is a major achievement when compared to virtually any other North American city. And the goal of building density in the inner city is a worthy one.

      Living First was largely conceived and popularized by Vancouver’s former co-director of planning, Larry Beasley, and his staff who were looking to create “an urban lifestyle that will bring people back from their 50-year romance with the suburbs.”²⁵ The idea is to radically encourage downtown density by altering zoning laws to support condominiums, encourage pedestrian and bike access over automobiles, and to leverage developers for public amenities and subsidized housing in exchange for sweet profit margins.

      This collaborative process—offering developers density in return for public amenities and good streetscape design—would become Vancouver’s modus operandi for the entire city core. In 1991, Beasley’s department rezoned much of the commercial core to allow residential development where once only offices, small commercial, small industrial and parking lots were permitted. This “Living First” strategy gave the core a shot of adrenaline. Developers snapped up empty lots, underutilized office buildings and warehouses, converting them all to condos and other residential units. Real estate became a high-energy sport.²⁶

      Larry described his thinking like this, after I asked him whether or not Living First and the condo-ization of the downtown core has created a developer’s profit-friendly city where the grail of density has exacerbated a housing crisis and urban inequality:

      It’s a peculiar proposition to wish that developers would make less money. That’s like wishing I was the handsomest man in the world or something. We can wish it, but it’s not going to happen. I’ve taken another view. I’m perfectly happy to see developers make money. What I want to see is a significant amount of that created wealth come back to the commonwealth of the city.

      So, there is a quid pro quo in this city which is relatively unique in North America saying that it is a privilege to develop in our city and you will make contributions back. Real contributions. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contributions. And this is not just amenities. A lot of the housing we have built for low-income people has been built through leveraging wealth and land from developers. It’s not just about creating a park—that’s part of it because our theory is that the only way you’re going to entice people to come back to the city and create the vitality you’re talking about is to give them something they’re going to want to come to in a free society.

      We live in a system where profitability is a driver, and whether I like that or not is beside the point. My point is to say, “let’s take some of that profitability back.” But don’t kid yourself. In Istanbul, in Paris, in Shanghai, in Taiwan, in every city in the world, developers are getting rich. They are exploiting every city in the world, and they are exploiting Istanbul just as much as here. The difference is: in Istanbul they are not putting a nickel back in. They’re telling the government: you manage it. Which is why cities like Istanbul are falling apart, because it’s impossible to manage.

      So, don’t look at the choreography of the street as an indication of what’s going on. You have to look at the flow of money. The flow of power. Taking the drive for profit and using it to benefit the commonwealth is just not being done in most cities, and it is one way to augment the very limited sources of funds that cities have.

      It’s an interesting answer and Beasley is articulating an innovative approach that in many ways has clearly worked: Vancouver’s downtown has changed radically over the past twenty years and is alive now in ways that it most certainly was not in even recent history. More than 20 percent²⁷ of Vancouver residents now live downtown,²⁸ the core is full of people with cash to burn, construction is seemingly non-stop, and it has a very peculiar but vibrant feel.

      The strategy is widely viewed as brilliant and its successes are being replicated in many spots around the globe, in no small part due to Beasley’s energetic proselytizing. But it so happens that Vancouver and Living First are turning the traditional idea of a downtown on its head, with some interesting repercussions. Most obviously, while condo building continues full-force, commercial development lags far behind. The number of jobs downtown has remained stagnant, and there are very few office or commercial projects being built. The logic is obvious: a developer can turn five times the profit on a condo as compared to an office tower, and the buyers just keep coming, so why the hell would they ever want to stop?

      But more (perhaps) unintended consequences are emerging. Right now, Vancouver has a downtown that is increasingly looking and feeling like a resort town, full of tourists, language students, occasional residents, and those visiting their investment properties. And, in an ironic twist, Vancouver now has a huge number of reverse-commuters, people who live in the city but work in the burbs, and it doesn’t appear that trend will slow any time soon. As Trevor Boddy wrote in 2005:

      We may once have dreamed of taking our place in the list of the world’s great cities, but unless something is changed soon, to preserve and promote our downtown as a place to work, we will instead join Waikiki and Miami Beach on the list of resorts filling up with aging baby boomers lounging around their over-priced condos.²⁹

      The core of the city is dominated (and increasingly so) by condos, a huge number of them owned by people who do not live here full-time. Property has become another commodity for the global elite to invest in, to buy and flip, especially in hot cities like Vancouver and Dubai and Shanghai, and even in new, recessionary economic climates property is the investment that people tend to cling to. As David Beers, editor of the Tyee said to me:

      I totally buy the argument that we badly need density here, but how do you get density without a high-priced sterility? And that’s what’s been built here. I don’t mind that there are some parts of town like that, but I really don’t want every part of town like that. The needle-like towers are able to command a high price because of the view, which then turns them into a global commodity. Now you’ve got to compete with everyone in the globe who wants a view of the North Shore Mountains.

      Thus, people with little attachment and few civic bonds to the city increasingly populate downtown: global consumers rather than citizens who care about the place as more than an investment or temporary stopping point. Along with that development pattern comes an avalanche of low-paid service economy jobs to service that economy: retail, restaurant, security, and tourism jobs with wages that ensure that workers cannot live near where they work. This, as every Vancouverite knows, is perhaps the biggest danger to the city: the incredible housing prices and lack of reasonably priced shelter, sending everyday people scattering. And what happens when oil prices start to rise, air travel drops, and the tourists and condo buyers start to stay home? As I am writing this in mid-2009, the ripple effects from 2008 are still being felt across the globe as luxury condo prices collapse. No one really cares much if a few yuppies lose their shirts, but what happens to the rest of us if/when it turns into a full-fledged rout?

      The repercussive effects of the Living First strategy are hardly obscure; they are being debated long and hard, and as a model it has much going for it. Part of the root issue of its development is the urgent desire to see Vancouver СКАЧАТЬ