“Like it or not… the city has turned to selling its airspace as a way to pay for a lot of things that people think the city needs to provide. That’s another reason why the corridors are up for discussion.”

A skeptic like me might say that is most likely the main reason for the discussion, isn’t it? The big problem the city faces now — after twenty years of erecting condo towers downtown — is that no developer can afford to build new office towers in the core given the far higher returns with condos. It’s doubly hard in a recession. And even if they wanted to, where exactly will they go? As others have alluded to, all the talk of breathless aesthetic moments sounds a little rich in light of this key problem the city faces, so it’s very likely that this “discussion” about view corridors is being carefully framed to address this underlying issue going forward? In the core, offices have become a negotiable “amenity” that compete for space against affordable housing. If you’re pro-developer, this is a perfect storm. Witness Mr. Geller’s blustery challenge to lead the debate!

But “deliberate poor”, Mr. Geller? Now that is really a pathetic thing to say for a man in your position. What scares me is that you are in charge of teaching our young and impressionable future city planners, and you will also likely be the loudest and most commanding voice in the debate over view corridors.

I’d also like to add my voice to those skeptical of Mr. Beasley’s admirable-sounding comments. From my limited and admittedly biased experience with the planning and permits department back in the 90s, the word I associate most with Mr. Beasley’s administration is “relaxation”, as in, “we grant the developer the following code relaxations….” Under his watch, Vancouver perfected the art of negotiating amenities into planning, and then, with a nudge and a wink, letting the developer start whittling away at them before the ink on the “approved” stamp is dry. Bauhaus parks are one result. Heritage facadism another. Maxing out everything but the view corridors is another.

These policies might be within the code (and if not, relax!), and perhaps it is necessary to leverage amenities to some degree. But it became so systemic in the 90s that developers even began cutting corners on basic and necessary design features to gain building space. For me and many others, the result was years of living under tarps and legal battling over another planning phenomena in Vancouver: LEAKY CONDOS.

I can tell you from personal experience, Mr. Beasley took zero responsibility for this disaster, yet who else was to blame? According to him, it was the developers. According to the developers, it was the City. Both walked away from the problem unscathed. As our life savings vanished before our eyes along with our dreams of a happy new home, we ended up immeasurably poorer. I can assure Mr. Geller, however, it wasn’t deliberate. At least, not on our part.

And may I offer the same sage advice, as above, to Mr Gordon “paradise” Price.

There is a scintilla emerging, in the city, of a more enlightened approach to urbanism that precludes the burnt umber proboscis . . . Dios bendice

If you intend on telling me that you think that Yaletown or False Creek or Coal Harbour were “planned” properly, then I think you need to live there. If even five percent of the people moving in decide they need a car, gridlock reigns supreme.

It’s nice that you list the amenities that the city demands and the airspace sale…but that’s irrelevant to my point. I’m well aware of the for sale signs in the sky, thanks.

My point is and was that we have overbuilt the downtown core. What happens when the next wave of development comes? We’ll be Manhattan.

So much for all the bleeding hearts and their concerns for the environment. Beasley’s plan is the opposite of what so many sycophants say it is.

He remains, for me, and many others, hardly the visionary–and for damn good reason.

That was true at one time. I lived in the West End myself, for seven years, back in the late 70s and early 80s, when it was still the neighbourhood to go to if you needed relatively affordable accommodation on short notice. But that history is at an end, MB. Or haven’t you heard about the steadily increasing number of evictions of tenants from rental buildings by landlords wanting to do “renovations”? Spencer Herbert, the newly-elected MLA for the area, has done much good work in trying to call attention to the disappearance of relatively affordable West End rental housing, and City Hall seems to be ponderously turning its attention to the problem, but the merciless law of supply-and-demand appears to be hard at work once again, and there will likely be little anyone can do to stop these inevitable changes. Vancouver is, inexorably, becoming a very difficult city in which to find a place to live if you can’t afford to buy. Where will all those evictees find new homes? Not in Yaletown, certainly.
gmgw

New York is the only place I can think of where tall towers are celebrated for themselves—”

Hate to disagree, Wag, but tower-fetishism is popping up in the strangest places these days: Chicago (the Sears Tower– which was recently renamed), Kuala Lumpur (Petronas Towers), Taipei (Taipei 101), Shanghai (Shanghai World Financial Centre), and, lest we forget, Canada’s very own CN Tower, though it’s considered more of a “structure”. All of these behemoths are in the range of 1500 feet or so, but even they have been dwarfed by the Burj Dubai, in Dubai, UAE, which reached 2,684 feet(!!) in January and won’t even be completed until this fall. I realize you were speaking of New York, with its scores of towers, but these individual structures are certainly “celebrated for themselves”; skyscraper buffs come from around the world to see them. As globalization gathers momentum (not so much lately!), it’s understandable that countries that were once considered economic backwaters but are now (or were) rolling in dough, so to speak, would want to show off to the world, and one of the simplest ways of doing that is to slap up a building so impressive that even Americans will be forced to stand up and take notice.

With respect, you’re also mistaken about Paris. It is true that the Parisian city government, in the Haussmannian tradition, imposes strict development guidelines inside the Périphérique (the enormous elevated expressway that surrounds central Paris)– although there is increasing pressure to relax those guidelines. However, in the late 50s the Gaullist regime began to promote the idea of building large towers in central Paris. This ultimately led to the construction of the 689-foot Tour Montparnasse. Completed in 1973, it was at the time the tallest building in Europe. There can be few buildings anywhere so at odds with their surroundings. Apart from its height, which causes it to loom over south central Paris like a concrete-glass-and-steel King Kong, there is absolutely nothing architecturally distinctive about the Tour, and it’s a standing joke among Parisians that the real reason its 55th-floor observation point is so popular is that it’s the only place in Paris from which the Tour can’t be seen. Mind you, it’s also said that after the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889, the writer Maupassant lunched every day in the tower’s restaurant so that he would not have to see the tower itself, which he despised (I must strongly disagree with him).

In any case, the construction of the Tour Montparnasse led to a huge public outcry, such that no further towers were built inside the Périphérique. Instead large-scale commercial development was shifted to the burgeoning La Défense district, across the Seine from Neuilly. If you stand under (or atop, if you prefer) the Arc de Triomphe and look west past the insane traffic circling l’Etoile, you can see, a few kilometres away, the extraordinary Grand Arche de La Défense, one of the most distinctive buildings on the planet. An enormous business hub has developed at La Défense since its beginnings in the late 50s (as well as a large group of residential towers for all those office workers), and it continues to grow; a whole complex of new 600-to-1000-foot-plus office towers is planned or under construction. The taller towers will dwarf the hated Tour Montparnasse– and thus, unfortunately, will be all too visible from central Paris’s higher points, such as Belleville or Montmartre.

So there you have it. Parisians made it clear they didn’t want towers, so their government thoughtfully moved the towers out to the western banlieues (‘burbs), where their growth can be all but unrestricted. Is that an improvement? An acceptable compromise? Who can say, really? Personally, I’d rather not have them so close to the Paris I know and love; but really, I think only a Parisian could give an appropriate reply to this question. And if I know Parisians, that reply would likely involve slapping the palm of the left hand onto the inside of the right elbow joint, followed by a vigorous upward motion with the clenched right fist, accompanied by a large raspberry. Which is as it should be, really.
gmgw

Such unctuous nonsense provokes me to try once again to join this conversation: my earlier post, evidently, having been subsumed by the rush to self-serving hyperbole.

The “Cone of Vision” or view debate goes back to the early 1970′s. Granville Square initiated the first controversy. Alderman Warnett Kennedy promised his tower would not impede the mountain view north on Granville. Unfortunately the good alderman miscalculated as is evident today.

As the FCN conversation warmed up views of the mountains became a hot topic for those who had bought into Fairview slopes. During debate Councilor Puil averred to a wait-and-see policy until Concord had sited their towers: sort of an ass backwards approach in my opinion.

The result being a wall of towers obscuring the view north to the mountains to all but the most elevated on the slopes.

Actually the ensuing impermeable wall of concrete and glass is quite dramatic, especially at night, when seen from my sailboat anchored in the Creek. And the orchestrated, elevated decibel thrum of the city, at a distance, can be quite beguiling.

Mostly, though, the “cone of vision” policy has been a failure: the white sails obscuring the promise of mountain view north on Howe being another.

While paying lip service to uni-directional (i.e. northward) distant mountain views the greater value of intimate close views has been completely over looked.

It is my opinion the view of a well designed scaled urban place, à la the Georgian crescent garden, or Mexican rinconada, has been completely lost in the Vancouver planning process and is more reliably attainable and, indeed, cannot be blocked those ubiquitous tower intrusion . . . Ojala . . .