A Multi-Billion Dollar Real Estate Project Is Rising on Native Land in Vancouver
architecturaldigest.com
architecturaldigest.com
Sadly the rest of the development in Vancouver is no where near the pace it needs to be to keep housing prices down, so this is merely a drop in the bucket. And it’s also unfortunately perpetuating the idea that the only housing that can be built are single family homes and high rises.
I kind of wish developers would just start developing multi-plexes illegally. Good luck arguing it’s environmentally sustainable to block multi-family homes by forcing new developments to be torn down. Obviously this is unrealistic but it’s the kind of activism that needs to happen to overpower the powerful minority of homeowners in this province.
This is by design. The Vancouver market is aimed at rich foreigners trying to park questionnably acquired assets in a western jurisdiction. Often the house(s) will even be counted as "investment" to acquire citizenship. The income to house price is way better barely three hours south in the Puget Sound anyways.
> I kind of wish developers would just start developing multi-plexes illegally.
Why would they? They cost more to build, Create more supply and the buyers aren't price sensitive (remember, they are getting dirty money out of China). Better make sure there's as little supply as possible to get the best price.
Of course Vancouver’s market is appealing, but it’s not because of foreign induced demand. Do you know anybody who doesn’t want to own a home here? 96% of housing purchased in BC is traceably domestic. There simply isn’t enough housing to meet the demand even amongst domestic buyers!
> Why would they? They cost more to build, Create more supply
They only cost more to build because of zoning bylaws. I’m not a building contractor but I have to imagine the cost per square foot is much lower for a low rise if you don’t have to factor in Comprehensive Development permits and community feedback sessions. Making development more financially accessible would also create new opportunity for smaller developers.
It is Vancouver that has created the problem for itself, which creates the right circumstances for foreign investment to be lucrative, but it is very easy to solve. Just flood the market with supply.
I wonder what qualifies as a "domestic" buyer. Does a Canadian corporation counts? Considering the real estate investment craze started in the 90's, with birth tourism it's now possible for investors to register the properties under their children's name. I'd be lying if I said I've never met anyone who did that.
> would also create new opportunity for smaller developers.
That's precisely what the existing developers don't want!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/city-council...
So you're saying that the descendants of the original indigenous owners, who had their land basically stolen from them by some combination of deceit, force, and outright genocide ... are "irrelevant NIMBYs"?
Actually, there were wars, treaties, legal agreements, etc that created this system. It has little to do with identity, in terms of how it came about. Except, maybe, for the fact that certain "identities" were subject to genocide for much of the 20th century.
My point is that the system currently is more harmful to everyone - specifically native people - than a consistent system based on individuals.
1) This is about money.
2) Vancouver has had massive building in the last 25 years, it's transformed the city. Every community has the right to control what it's going to be. If Van residents don't want to continue to jam everyone into skyscrapers, that is their right.
3) That said, this land belongs to a different group, they have special privileges, they can do as they please.
Vancouver landowners didn't create the massive value of their land through their labor, they were just speculators. They profit by the economic loss of everybody else, they are rentiers, parasites on the system.
If you want to hold on to a piece of land, and keep everybody else out of it, you had better start paying everybody else for that privilege. Land is fundamentally different from capital, different from wealth created by man. Its value comes from either nature, or in the case of Vancouver, by what everybody else has built up around it.
Institute a full land value tax, to return to society the wealth that landowners are stealing from society, and you can hold on to your piece of property. But you should never, ever, be able to enter into a contract with other landowners to agree to kee everyone out. That's exactly what restrictive zoning is, and it should be smashed like any other cartel that is robbing the rest of society for the benefit of the few.
1) 'Local Control' is not some kind of vast conspiracy to suppress people. There's an almost infinite amount of living space. Not all of it is Prime Vancouver Property.
People living in a community can decide if they want it to be New York or Vienna, it's their choice, not yours.
2) "Vancouver landowners didn't create the massive value of their land through their labor"
Yes, they did!
People of Vancouver, largely made Vancouver attractive to others. That's absolutely the case.
They were not speculators they were residents.
3) "If you want to hold on to a piece of land, and keep everybody else out of it, you had better start paying everybody else for that privilege"
False! Land ownership is a right, moreover, all of them pay the necessary municipal taxes to support their community.
You, as a part of 'everyone else' have absolutely nothing to do with that equation, they owe you nothing.
As long as they are not externalizing something negative (i.e. pollution), what they do is not much of your business.
4) "Institute a full land value tax, to return to society the wealth that landowners are stealing from society" - now you're onto a complete separate issue.
5) If there's something missing in your diatribe, it's that vast amounts of land was sold to people who were not even citizens, from money arranged by ill gotten means: we 'outsource' externalizations such as pollution, lack of human rights to other nations, and the totally corrupt leaders of those nations leverage that fact, and bring the money back in one of the only things we can materially sell them, which is land.
If you're concerned about housing prices, ban foreign ownership of property, and ban handing out citizenship for people who are not even residents.
It only takes a small % of 'price insensitive demand', which provides the only 'confident signal' in a market, in order to really skew a market in one direction. In this case, up.
The difference between Montreal and Toronto/Vancouver is that Montreal has a fraction of the foreign investment in housing ownership, and surprise, reasonably affordable housing.
The 'language barrier', among other things, insulates them from some of the ravages of globalism.
If Montreal wanted to change that, they can, it's their choice.
Snippets from Wikipedia:
> In Canadian law all lands are subject to the Crown, and this has been true since Britain acquired much of Eastern Canada from France by the Treaty of Paris (1763).
> In common law systems, land tenure is the legal regime in which land is owned by an individual, who is said to "hold" the land. It determines who can use land, for how long and under what conditions. [...] The sovereign monarch, known as The Crown, holds land in its own right. All private owners are either its tenants or sub-tenants.
In other words, while a municipal or provincial government might have to go through the courts to expropriate your land, the Canadian Government (and esp. the Queen acting through the Governor General) can directly take your land without passing any sort of Act, because it's fundamentally their land—they're not taking it, they're just revoking your use of it, which they granted you [or someone, at some point, by parcelling out land and writing a deed for it] in the first place.
The deed you hold to real estate in Canada (and other common-law countries) is fundamentally a granting of use of that land from the Crown to you, and a promise by the Crown to be on your side in any property dispute between you and any other subject of the Crown. But it's not a repudiation of the Crown's fundamental ownership of the land. A Canadian property deed is essentially a feudalist freehold lease, with the Crown as feudal lord and the property owner as tiller, and federal property taxes as the freehold payments.
(You might not have to pay federal property taxes if you live on land deeded from the Crown to a province—and then perhaps further deeded to a municipality—because of negotiated settlements between the Crown and the Provinces. In a sense, the Provinces are paying that tax for you, and then charging you separate taxes in turn. Make no mistake, though; you would be paying federal property taxes—and estate taxes, when those existed—if your land were deeded directly out of federal land, i.e. if you have a deed to unincorporated land in the Territories.)
---
And, inasmuch as Canadian indigenous bands hold title to land, they're still modelled within Canadian law as subjects of the Crown who've been granted the land by statute; not as, say, small land-locked foreign enclaves that the Crown has to negotiate external treaties with. Within the framework of common law, land is deeded from the Crown to the indigenous people, never from the indigenous people to the Crown.
One more Wikipedia excerpt:
> However, the British and Canadian authorities recognized that indigenous peoples already on the lands had a prior claim, aboriginal title, which was not extinguished by the arrival of the Europeans. This is in direct contrast to the situation in Australia where the continent was declared terra nullius, or vacant land, and was seized from Aboriginal peoples without compensation. In consequence, all of Canada, save a section of southern Quebec exempted by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, is subject to Aboriginal title. Native groups historically negotiated treaties in which they traded tenure to the land for annuities and certain legal exemptions and privileges. Most of Western Canada was secured in this way by the government via the Numbered Treaties of 1871 to 1921, though not all groups signed treaties. In particular, in most of British Columbia Aboriginal title has never been transferred to the Crown. Many native groups, both those that have never signed treaties or those that are dissatisfied with the execution of treaties have made formal Aboriginal land claims against the government.
Note that what the First Nations peoples of Canada were trading away in the Numbered Treaties was land tenure, not land holding. Under common law, the prior claim of title by First Nations peoples did not translate to a top-level, independent claim of ownership ("holding") over the land, but only to an automatic grant — and then only in some cases! — of tenure from the Crown to the First Nations peoples (which were then traded for other benefits.)
The very fact that the First Nations peoples with a claim to most of the land Vancouver sits on, don't have legal power to enforce that claim, is the best demonstration of the fact that there is no right to land ownership in Canada separate from the Crown granting land to you, revocably, on a case-by-case basis.
2.) Neighborhoods in Vancouver were decided long ago and they mostly developed around racist an exclusionary ideology, these “communities” exist simply to separate the haves from the have-nots. Despite conservative efforts to eliminate growth, the city has grown where it can and now the same people who complained are gleefully cashing out on the growth the tried so desperately to disrupt. By the way, home owners are a minority in Vancouver so I suspect most Vancouver residents just want somewhere affordable to live! And since NIMBYs own all the land, the only economically viable developments are high rises!
3.) The land was taken from them and only returned in part after decades of lawsuits. Despite that, the “community” still thinks they deserve to be able to decide what can and can’t be built.
Completely false. It's worse than false.
" Despite conservative efforts to eliminate growth,"
More complete rubbish.
It's hard to read past any of that complete misinformation, but here's some help:
Any historical issues regarding segregation 1) have little to do with growth and 2) there's nothing even residual regarding housing today.
The population of Vancouver at the turn of the last century was only 26 000 people. It has nothing to do with what Vancouver in 2021.
Vancouver's growth has been very consistent since it's inception, which disputes your made up claims about 'conservatives wanting to stop growth'.
Vancouver is a city with almost a 50% foreign born population. Demand to live there among 7 Billion on earthy who might want to live there is almost infinite.
If Vancouver wants to turn into Pacific New York, that's fine.
If they want to keep it mostly homes, that's also fine, it's entirely up to them, not ideologues on the internet.
Suburbs were designed to isolate their residents from the poor (and predominantly visible-minority) people who lived in the denser urban areas. Single-family zoning was created to make illegal the development of more dense/affordable living options such as row houses or apartment buildings. That is limiting growth, clear and simple. It is limiting growth (by your own admission!) to "keep it mostly homes" as opposed to turning the city into "Pacific New York."
I said nothing about Vancouver's growth having been "stopped." What I said was, there were - and continues to be - efforts to eliminate growth. The city grows despite the NIMBYs (albeit less quickly and less efficiently), but it is absolutely their objective to inhibit growth for their own benefit. Growth is often exponential, too, so if the city has been growing somewhat linearly that's a good indication that its growth is being inhibited.
If people want to live here, good. Let them in, let them build. Not sure why you believe it's your right to live here and keep others out. Perhaps you're someone who has benefited greatly from Vancouver's growth, despite yourself.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/articl... [1] https://www.straight.com/news/734491/history-shows-racism-ha...
How far does the "right to control" extend? What if Van residents don't want Jews or Black people in their community? What if they don't want poor people? What if they just don't want any more people at all? Do they have the right to do any or all of these things?
It's not unreasonable to think about the limits of what kinds of control communities can have, but as you've posed it, it's completely rhetorical.
Nobody is 'banning Blacks' from anywhere. The level of hysteria on these kinds of things is creaking into every discussion even when it's mostly inappropriate.
Vancouver has a busy city with X homes, Y flats, a certain infrastructure and that's that.
If they want to decide to not want skyscrapers everywhere, they can do that, and it has nothing to do with 'banning a group'.
'Tolerant and Progressive' Vancouver has made very material choices that have made living their excessively difficult for people living on the margins, and highly favourable to very wealthy non-citizens who want a place to keep their money safe. Which is their choice, but it's an odd one, more importantly, I don't think communities generally make choices to 'stop poor people', that's not part of the cards, rather policies indirectly do that.
If there is a systematic issue at play here, it may be the 'growth mindset' of new world city managers and businesses, all of whom want 'more sales, more revenue, more tax revenue, more leverage, more power' etc. 'to build that thing and provide that service', never really contemplating something resembling actual sustainability.
As I said in another comment, one of the problems with this approach is the the actual process of decision making for such issues is deeply flawed. The question of who "they" is and precisely how "they decide" is far from simple; the answer is certainly not "the citizens of Vancouver".
Retrospectively, I do think that my comparison with bans on various protected groups was a bit silly. Even so, these decisions are not some simple mapping from "the will of the people", and that means that it's not as simple as "they get to decide".
The only reason to deny something like this is to create artificial scarcity to enrich current Vancouver landowners, who have already been enriched enough, thank you very much. How many times the average wage does a typical Kits house run these days? That's all theft from the rest of society, and should be taxed away and returned to the rest of society.
My wife’s band settled a huge land claim not too far back. This land claim resulted in a cash payout to all 3000 band members and the rest of the money was put into a trust.
How many would like to claim membership?
I don’t know, you tell me. It seems like their membership grew, so I would guess people have claimed membership based on their heritage and that their membership was honored.
Do you have any specific information you can provide or is it all hand-waving and rhetorical questions?
There are few real world examples of buildings like this (one in Italy I believe) but it ended up being a far cry from the original renders.
1. https://persquaremile.com/2013/03/07/trees-dont-like-it-up-t...
They were a low-maintenance species, and had automated irrigation in the soil so nether me or the building owner had to touch them.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're a net environmental cost, but the cost has to be small compared to the overall impact of the building construction, and they have other benefits.
The plants look nice from inside and outside, provide a bit of privacy without blocking too much light, and deaden road noise.
Plus,people like greenery, if that's a "gimmick" bring it on.
In addition, compared to the major consumer of greenhouse gases, poor land use requiring massive personal vehicle use, and the poor thermal envelopes with far larger surface to volume ration that happens with single unit development, these sort of critiques are missing the forest for the trees.
This is what can happen when NIMBYs are finally cut out of the picture. So many people's lives will be improved by this project.
It's like the housing version of the field of dreams.
1) massive commutes by car 2) astronomical housing prices 3) forcing people out of state due to these massive housing prices 4) increased pollution because of increased commutes from further and further exurbs 5) massive homelessness from those that aren't able to move before they run out of money, or who hit a massive car or medical expense as the struggle to pay for housing.
Take a peak at the carbon consumption of households in dense areas and suburban areas across the US:
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/cmjones/viz/USHouseho...
Dense urban living is sustainable, suburban living is burning the planet.
The world needs a lot more of these towers. If there's going to be less of any sort kf housing, it's time to tear down suburban homes.
So we’re back to the original question: rural, sub-urban or city? City living is by comparison actually the least environmentally damaging. (If you think cities are bad, wait until you try housing 8 billion people in single family homes.)
nice places have very little housing
This vague “actually it’s worse” nonsense is meaningless babble because it projects the problem through one simple dimension (number of houses) and ignores important things like average energy consumption per housing unit and average energy consumption for transportation.
If you are concerned about "multiplying," then refusing to build housing does nothing to fix that. People living in cities with high incomes ans education and freedom to control their lives have fewer children than those who are poorer and live in less developed parts of the world. If you actually care about "multiplying" then you should be encouraging as many people as possible to move into urban areas for the greater economic, educational, and general awareness of the number of humans around them.
Secondly, if you are the least bit concerned about natural resources, you should also be encouraging more people to live in urban areas, where they consumer far less resources, far less fossil fuels, and generally have far less impact on nature.
Thirdly, that quote from a fictional character is just utter bullshit. Nobody is leaving Vancouver because they consumed all the resources, quite the opposite. People want to move there from other places, and not spread out. Opposition to projects like this forces people to spread out against their will.
The only thing opposition to this project does is increase environmental impact of people, reduce their happiness and access to the high value resources of the city, and most crucially of all to current power holders, put people out of sight while they consume more and are less happy for it.
So really, opposition to projects like this can only be viewed as an extreme form of greed. Adding in supposed concerns about nature, or multiplying, just points out that a person is just fine with both of things, as long as it's not insight. That is a fundamentally thoughtless, selfish, and asocial way to view the world, and it has caused immense harm over the last few decades.
Every community has the right to build, or not, as they chose.
You have no say in someone else's community.
Even then, Vancouver has added quite a bit over the last 25 years.
Finally, the notion that 'constant building' will make homes more affordable is just not true, the most dense places in the US are among the most expensive.
Given that this is a different bit of land, under different governance, they can do as they please, that's fine.
Fantastic. You have no say where the jobs are and you aren't allowed to go where the jobs are. Absolutely perfect.
>Finally, the notion that 'constant building' will make homes more affordable is just not true, the most dense places in the US are among the most expensive.
Developers aren't running a charity. They only fulfill existing demand and if you don't even do that things are going to become even less affordable.
Anyone can list jobs anywhere they want.
"you aren't allowed to go where the jobs are"
You can go anywhere you want, so long as someone is willing to sell you or rent you a place to live.
"They only fulfill existing demand"
The 'demand' for living in places like SF, NY etc. is infinite. There's no such thing as 'existing demand'.
None of your arguments are working out here.
The problem with this way of thinking about it is that communities are not people, and they do not "make a choice" in an organic, unified way. Instead, questions about development get resolved through messy, often complex political processes, with the outcome often reflecting specific subsets of the community rather than the whole.
In addition, there's the time preference problem, in which the decisions and choices of today's community is given excessive weight compared to those of the many different future communities that could emerge with different decisions.
Some people believe that they ought to be able to have homes bulldozed and skycrapers build 'because they want something'.
There is basically infinity livable space in the US, so find a place that works. Employers will have to adjust to cost of living.
https://senakw.com/img/vision/MountainTowersfromVanierPark.j...
They obviously did not try to fit into "neighborhood character" - very impressive though looking at details (the bikeable underground garage, the density + green space combo - super interesting).
I'm very excited about this project. I wish it all the success in the world, and I hope other housing-starved localities are taking notes
I'm all for letting nature be nature, but how about we let cities be cities?
This sort of structure preserves nature and allows thousands of people to experience Vancouver that would not be able to otherwise.
Stanley Park is close by for those who want actual nature, rather than the little speck of lawns that was where these buildings are being built.
I mean you could build these towers elsewherez perhaps even demolishing some existing single family dwellings.
Youve made a bit of a false dichotomy here.
The whole deal here is that this project happens only because 1) the Squamish got some of their land back, and it's in an urban area with all the infrastructure one could want, and 2) as reserve land, it’s not subject to the city’s zoning laws, so they YIMBY'd a forward-thinking project.
For your example, it is almost literally impossible to destroy enough SFH's to build skyscraper apartments (where do these people go?) even if these SFH lots were somehow also zoned for massive skyscrapers (which they are certainly not).
I think your example is not necessarily a bad idea either, it's just an impossible idea. Nowadays we just can't simply displace thousands of people and then build structures in areas that aren't zoned for those structures.
This land is Squamish land, which is the only reason it's getting built. Otherwise greedy neighbors would block it.
You said it's either build this or build thousands and thousands of homes sprawled across many miles.
Where's the land for those thousands of homes coming from?
These tall buildings are illegal nearly everywhere, and most importantly, they are illegal where they make sense to build, near job centers.
This difference, between what is legal and what is illegal to build, is why the alternative to these towers is sprawl. There is no other plot of land where they could be built, but people still need housing.