Highlights from the Mount Pleasant Community Plan

The residents of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver, together with the planning department, presented a community plan to City Council on November 18, 2010. The plan was unanimously adopted by Council. Perhaps the most contentious aspect of the plan was the large site issue, and Rize Alliance's proposal to put a 22-storey highrise at the corner of Kingsway and Broadway.

However, tucked away in the community plan were a number of excellent recommendations from the community about the shape of future development that residents would like to see in their neighbourhood. These are some of the highlights:

Encourage contemporary and innovative design:

Keep finding a good way for contemporary design to also fit into the
neighbourhood. As an appreciated contrast / complement to preserved
heritage, invite and support architectural innovation that creates new
legacies (individual sites and/or streetscapes) of which the community
is proud. (page 9)

Encourage laneway development:

"Encourage laneways as a prized feature of Mount Pleasant [...]
providing a ‘second face’ of Mount Pleasant with expanded
opportunities to position architecturally innovative new development
along these routes; (pages 10-11)

Encourage laneway housing and rearyard infill:

Encourage housing on lanes in Mount Pleasant – both infill and
'Laneway Housing' [...] fix the existing infill housing policy to
enable infill housing to be built on most lots (e.g., 33 foot lots). (page 15)

Promote sustainable design:

Explore opportunities to further sustainability and energy efficiency
in design (page 15)

Encourage variety and innovation in housing, and discourage new faux heritage houses:

Investigate opportunities to increase the variety in design of new
housing (e.g., discourage 'cookie-cutter design') and innovation in building design (e.g., discourage replications of heritage-style
architecture or 'faux heritage'). (page 16)

Discourage duplexes as a way to add units to residential lots:

Explore impacts of reducing the height and bulk of new duplexes
(including likely impacts on unit size, property values, and carbon
footprint). (page 16)

Encourage retention of existing heritage houses, in part by fixing the bylaws that allow rearyard infill:

Discourage demolition of older buildings and development of new
duplexes, increase the incentives/regulation relaxations (including
zoning and building code) for heritage retention in Mount Pleasant.
Allow transfer of density within Mount Pleasant as a heritage
retention tool. Recognize that infill housing promotes the retention
of heritage. (page 21)

In short, the residents of Mount Pleasant demonstrated through a long series of workshops and neighbourhood meetings that they are forward-thinking, cosmopolitan and conscientious when it comes to housing and architecture.

One of the first entries I wrote on this blog was about the need for better zoning to allow rearyard infill. The new Mount Pleasant Community Plan addresses all of the issues I brought up in that article, and for the same reasons: laneway housing and rearyard infill are sustainable; they are better alternatives to duplexes; they promote heritage preservation; and they should be encouraged by the City.

Now all the City needs to do is turn this community plan into bylaws. In my opinion, this can't happen too soon.

Ken Lum's VanEast Light Sculpture Almost Vertical

Ken Lum's light sculpture at the corner of Clark & 6th is almost vertical. It is one of a set of public art works commissioned to coincide with the Olympics. I was honoured to work with Ken on this project.

Mount Pleasant Promotes Contemporary Architecture in Future Zoning Revision

The renewal of Main Street, together with the humming light industrial area of southeast False Creek, has made Mount Pleasant the creative centre of Vancouver over the last decade or so. Now Mount Pleasant is gearing up to add architecture to its leadership role in the City, as participants in the neighbourhood's Community Liaison Group have shown overwhelming support for contemporary and green architecture during a round of reviews of the area's residential zoning.

The City of Vancouver has received a lot of credit, some of it deserved, for its approach to planning in the City's core. The term "Vancouverism" popularized by Trevor Boddy has its own art exhibit extoling the City's success. In a nutshell, Vancouver planners pioneered a development model which offered density bonuses to developers who provided public amenities, a win-win that has led to a downtown that is the envy of most other cities in North America.

Less well-known is that Vancouver's planners have used a similar approach in the City's single family home neighbourhoods, except that instead of handing out extra density for public amenities, the City has given it to designers and builders for putting faux heritage facades on its houses. The City achieves this through a set of design guidelines which accompany the zoning bylaws. The design guidelines require the building permit application to include a streetscape analysis which compares the existing houses to the new proposed house.

For example, the single family zone RS-5 includes this image in its design guidelines, with the accompanying text: "Where a streetscape offers identifiable facade composition, a new house design should be derived from common patterns":

In other words, new houses should look like existing houses.

To make matters clearer, a further example is given which explains how the new house should be sure to incorporate period details: "A streetscape of houses of different styles and periods requires the designer of a new house to select some predominant context elements and compose these into a design which generally fits into the surrounding context":

In Mount Pleasant, which is an area with many heritage houses, this enforcement of periodized copying has meant that most new houses built in the neighbourhood have earned the name "faux heritage." In some parts of Mount Pleasant, faux heritage houses outnumber the original heritage ones they were intended to copy.

If a designer objected to this, they would be told that they could still build something different, but if so then they had to do it "outright," i.e., they had to build a smaller house. Since most clients wanting a new house, and practically all developers, prefer to build as large a house as possible, in practice that means that the vast majority of new houses are faux heritage. Lately, the requirement to build faux heritage has extended to the outright designs as well.

Why would the City believe that this is a good idea? To answer that question you have to look at Vancouver's history over the last thirty years or so. I would argue that the key moment arrived in the 1980s when Vancouver experienced an unusually high rate of immigration. At the time, there were no design guidelines, and new immigrants with enough money built large houses that looked different from the existing housing stock. Locals called them "monster houses" and proceeded to pressure the City into the creation of the design guidelines: if people wanted to build a large house, then it had to look like an existing house.

Vancouverites might not want to admit this, but the design guidelines are a clear form of architectural xenophobia. This is echoed in one of the comments from an earlier Mount Pleasant community liaison group meeting, in which one person wrote that there should be design controls in place to ensure that new houses are Edwardian or Victorian in style rather than "foreign looking."

In general Vancouver as a city has moved on from this xenophoboic moment and has become a cosmopolitan, outward-looking Pacific Rim city. Most Vancouverites don't just tolerate our multi-cultural diversity, we celebrate it and see it as one of the City's greatest strengths.

The xenophobic design guidelines, however, are still on the books.

This enforcement of antique design is an obstacle for local architects and designers who wish to pursue contemporary and innovative forms. It is particularly debilitating for the careers of young designers who usually cut their teeth on smaller buildings such as houses or laneway houses, but who are forced to produce dated designs.

Permit applications with contemporary design mean that the designer has to fight for approval or alter the design to meet the design guidelines. House builders, meanwhile, who are more concerned with square footage than aesthetics are happy to comply with the design guidelines if it means an easier passage through the permit process, which can otherwise be time-consuming. To make matters worse, many of the faux-heritage designs that are accepted use inexpensive techniques, such as slab-on-grade and engineered trusses, that were part of the reviled Vancouver Special and monster house repertoire, but which are now acceptable provided that they are hidden behind a periodized facade.

How refreshing it was, then, to attend the Mount Pleasant Community Liaison Group last Wednesday.

The group split up into three rooms, two for design of new houses, and one devoted to preservation of existing heritage houses. I joined one of the two design groups. I was ready to speak my mind, expecting to have to fight for contemporary design, only to discover that everyone in the room felt the same way.

This was graphically demonstrated when we were asked to put stickers next to ideas on the walls that we agreed with, and the most stickers were stuck next to sustainable design, followed by contemporary design.

Even more heartening was to sit in the full session following the design meeting, and discover that the other design group also felt exactly the same about the need to promote contemporary design, and to stop promoting faux heritage.

Everyone felt that existing heritage houses should be protected, and should be easier to designate as heritage. No one argues with the value of the City's architectural history. What people object to is the idea that architecture stopped in 1920, and that the neighbourhood should be frozen in time.

The thorny issue of how to incentivize contemporary and green design in Mount Pleasant still has to be worked out, and it will be tricky. But the first and crucial step has already been taken, and that is the rallying of this trend-setting community around the belief that contemporary architecture is important to the cultural life of the City and should be promoted.

Vancouver Laneway Housing: An Unfinished Project

The City of Vancouver recently approved its Ecodensity initiative, which includes a provision for laneway housing in single-family zones. This is a welcome and progressive move by the Council, since it adds density, and all its benefits, to the least-dense parts of the City. Metro Vancouver is expected to double in population before the middle of this century, and all those new people need to live somewhere. The general view is that laneway housing adds density without disrupting the granular building pattern that makes these neighbourhoods so desirable. The fact that the City was able to increase density in areas that have traditionally been reluctant to allow it is a sign of how appealing laneway housing is.

What Vancouver failed to do, however, is apply the obvious appeal of laneway housing to other appropriate parts of the City, in particular two-family zones. The thinking seems to be that two-family zones in the City already allow laneway houses in the form of infill housing, so including these zones in the Ecodensity initiative was unnecessary:

Current City regulations already allow one type of laneway housing. These are zones in which lane houses are placed over garages, in order to provide the required parking. They are generally on larger lots (50 ft or more) in areas zoned to have duplexes, conversions, and other similar development in addition to laneway housing. Although the main house is often retained, both the main house and the laneway house are part of a site redevelopment by small scale developers, with units in both buildings sold through strata titling. This zoning is very suitable for, and successful in, some parts of the city and could possibly be expanded to other locations. Ecodensity Initial Actions (p 18)

The reality however is that infill laneway houses are nearly impossible to build in these two-family zones because of an overly-restrictive set of design guidelines. In Vancouver, many parts of the City have both a set of zoning and development bylaws, which are legal documents passed by Council that determine what can be built where, as well as policies and guidelines, which are less rigorously written and enforced, but which have significant influence on the outcome of development proposals in the City.

In most two-family zones in Vancouver, there is an infill design guideline on the books that limits what can be built. The stated objective of infill is "to retain existing buildings by allowing the construction of a second residential building on appropriate sites" (p 11). The restrictions provided in the design guideline however make laneway infill nearly impossible. These restrictions include:

1. Separation between existing and infill building of 4.9m (16 ft)
   
2. A rear yard area of 195 m2 (2100 sq ft)
3. Infill building maximum height of 7.7m (25 ft)
4. Rear yard site coverage of less than 35%
   
5. For mid-block infill, a side yard adjacent to the existing building of 4.9m (16 ft)
   

This is what that looks like:


The first four restrictions make laneway infill doable on many lots, provided the existing house is relatively small and forward in the lot. However the last provision, the side yard setback, effectively kills laneway infill as a popular option. The reason is that most Vancouver lots are either 33 feet or 50 feet wide, while houses are rarely less than 25 feet wide, and are usually placed near the centre line of the lot. For a 33 foot lot, that typically leaves 8 feet of side yard, divided between two sides, while a 50 foot lot has 25 feet of remaining side yard. So 50 foot lots are a rare possibility, provided the original owner built a narrow building and located it off to one side, but 33 foot lots are out of the question.

In other words, the objective of the infill design guideline is supposed to encourage the retention of existing buildings, but the guideline's own side yard setback makes this nearly impossible. In practice, this means that the vast majority of developers of these lots demolish the existing building and construct a new duplex. (Many of these new duplexes look like character buildings, but in fact are built slab-on-grade, i.e. without basements, and without attics, much like the cheap Vancouver Specials that preceded them). This is the first irony.



The second irony is that many of the two-family zones in the City are meant to be heritage-friendly zones, which promote the preservation of character and heritage houses. Since it is largely impossible to build infill, and very costly to renovate or expand an older building, most developers will demolish the existing house, and then design the new duplex in a faux heritage style in order to get a density bonus that allows for greater floorspace. Result: character is being replaced with faux character.

The final irony is that these new duplexes are then required to have a two-car garage on the lane, a parking requirement that is meant to reduce crowding on the street. (Never mind that many duplex owners park on the street anyway, and use their garage for storage.) This required garage ends up being about the same size as the infill laneway house that the design guidelines originally prevented.

The question, then, is what is the point of these design guidelines that prevent infill laneway houses in two-family zones?

Perhaps it's because the municipal infrastructure cannot support the added density? Not true: the allowed duplexes add the same load to the infrastructure as the disallowed infill. And anyway, the numbers for family sizes and residents per building have been falling in Vancouver for decades.

Perhaps it's a matter of safety, i.e. the 16 foot side yard setback is the distance required to get emergency fire and medical services to the infill unit to the back of the lot? Again, not true: the BC Building Code only requires 3 feet for emergency access, which is the setback required for laneway housing in the new ecodensity initiative, and anyway, the lot can also be accessed from the lane.

No, the reason for the 16 foot side yard setback is that whoever wrote the guideline decided that it looked nice. To make that clear, they included this picture in the guideline:



At the time of writing, the City felt that all of the dwellings should be visible from the street. Notice, too, that the laneway house matches the main house to a large extent in terms of style. There is an idea here about the character of the streetscape and the granularity of building pattern relative to open spaces. A couple of questions come up immediately, however.

The first question is: why does this idea of streetscape trump all of the benefits of sustainable urban growth identified in Ecodensity? Laneway housing has proven to be the most visible and popular aspect of the Ecodensity initiative, with very little concern shown for the fact that these small new laneway houses will be hidden behind the existing homes. The answer must be that when the guidelines were written, the sustainable nature of laneway housing was not well-recognized; in other words, the design guideline is obsolete in today's thinking.

The second, and to my view larger and more interesting question, is: why are the City's planners trying to design houses? This is not their job. There is a point where design guidelines cross the line from being general regulations concerning safety and massing of buildings, and into the territory of individual building design. The former is a fair matter of concern for City planners, but the latter is a matter for architects, house designers, developers, owners and their neighbours.

Here and elsewhere, the City of Vancouver has attempted to quantify certain characteristics of older homes in the City, and has developed a set of incentives to encourage developers to build new buildings similar to those old forms. This is a large topic and worthy of a blog post of its own, but for now I will say that I am not alone in feeling that this encouragement of faux heritage new construction is turning the low-density parts of Vancouver into a theme park of kitsch architecture.

It is especially confounding when a kitsch design idea such as the side yard setback for laneway infill ends up encouraging the demolition of the very character homes that the new kitsch houses are meant to emulate. Yet this is what is happening throughout two-family zones.

The City Council showed admirable insight and gumption when it recently passed the Ecodensity initiative. That initiative effectively fast-tracked a slow and tedious neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood revision of zoning bylaws in order to allow small laneway houses in single family homes. Some zones, including Cedar Cottage, have already jettisoned the restrictive design guidelines that prevented laneway infill housing, while other two-family zones, such as Mount Pleasant, are attempting to do it one by one, as part of the regular neighbourhood rewriting process. The City should now show the same pluck and fast-track laneway infill housing for two-family zones.