Everyone fears the wrecking ball.
In most neighbourhoods, homes on city lots are protected by the fact that someone owns them. We may have modified the French Revolution’s famous dictum that property is sacred, but the basic idea is still the same. Expropriation powers exist and are occasionally used when someone’s property is in the way of a major government project – a highway, for example -but they are seldom used.
More often, people lose the homes they live in to private development, and in a city where that development provides largely unaffordable housing, homeowners – and especially tenants – have good reason to worry about the wrecking ball demolishing the homes they still can afford.
False Creek South residents who live on the 80% of land leased from the City understand that the land will not be sold from underneath them. They also understand that at some point, there will be significant changes in the neighbourhood. New development, both desirable and necessary, can meet the needs of the City and those of us who live here – not only those on leasehold but on the 20% of land that is freehold. But what kind of development, as Creek resident Graham McGarva has it, would allow us to change but “stay the same”?
Aside from coining memorable phrases, Graham is an architect with some hefty credentials, including designing the Roundhouse Community Centre and leading the master planning of Southeast False Creek and the Olympic Village. He also chairs the Community Planning Working Group (CPG), the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association’s planning committee, a subset of RePlan. The CPG’s recent focus is to demonstrate what “stay the same” could look like. How much can we change and still remain “recognizable”? Graham describes key elements, including:
* The invisibility of sharing:
- Shared entry thresholds and courtyards, light and fresh air coming into most dwellings from two sides all give a sense of belonging and neighbourliness;
- Compact, oblique personal views into and through lush and well used courtyards, reinforce an expansive feeling of belonging to a place that is more than the enclosed walls of home.
* Density through liveability strategies:
- Using livability strategies akin to the existing community, we can add a million square feet of density and double the False Creek South population with approximately a 50% increase in built volume.
*Breathing room through open space, form and scale:
- False Creek South is not an island. Its open space, form and scale, provide breathing room for the surrounding neighbourhoods that overlook it. Fairview, especially, uses it as an adjunct amenity.
- The scale of infill and replacement development has to be considered in terms of its complementary function in a denser hinterland.
- The pursuit of density for its own sake flies in the face of the needs of the larger community.
The next 30 years will bring to the fore another pressing need for liveable development: the continuing aging of a population here and virtually everywhere else in the city and beyond. At the same time, COVID-19 has brought into relief the shortfalls and terrible tragedies inherent in much of the long-term care system.
Sparked by the imperative of the long-term care facility on Lamey’s Mill Road, Broadway Lodge, to expand its capacity, the CPG is working with the Lodge on the idea of a Campus of Care to meet a number of social and health care needs, including the desire of most older adults to remain in their own community. Too often the next step from living independently in one’s home is one to complete institutional dependency, a model that falls short of providing optimum or even appropriate elder care.
The Campus of Care envisions a reset of that model to one of a continuum of services. This includes direct and comprehensive care where needed, but also the introduction of individual units with common areas shared among relatively small cohorts of residents. It also features a range of medical and other integrated services to those living both within the Campus or in their own homes, including meals on cafe or restaurant models and food delivery. The overall focus is to meet health and wellness needs through the right balance between independent and community living.
Connected with and/or adjacent to a Campus of Care, new development could include an Intergenerational Hub, providing mostly rental and co-op affordable workforce housing – especially for those who provide essential services to the city – as well as such supportive components as child care and other amenities.
Graham and others working with the CPG are quick to add that the designs for a Campus of Care and Intergenerational Hub aren’t meant to be a blueprint for the City to adopt, but a demonstration of how new development can meet the actual, present needs of the City while retaining the essential characteristics of a viable neighbourhood – in other words, show that we can change – and stay the same.
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Fourth in the series False Creek South: The Solution, Not The Problem, by the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association.