Source: American Planning Association, Jan 2007
Vancouver has been praised as one of the most livable cities in the world, and Larry Beasley, who recently retired as the city’s planning director, has now become a proselytizer for high-density living. Meanwhile, Vancouver is getting ready to go to the next level. Mayor Sam Sullivan is convinced that density is ecologically responsible and must be actively promoted. Last June, he launched the “EcoDensity” initiative, which promotes high-quality densification as a way to reduce the city’s ecological footprint. A big problem with density, though, is its unpopularity. Planners may not be czars, but they still have tools. Many cities begin by increasing density in new developments, particularly on former industrial land where there are no existing residents who are likely to object. Both Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver have had great success with this approach.
Vancouver brings the concept of eco-density to North America.
Vancouver loves density. The downtown population has doubled to 85,000 in the last 20 years; most of those residents live in slender, green glass towers sorrounded by snow-capped mountains and ocean views. Shops, community centers, restaurants and parks are within walking or biking distance, and on a sunny day the seawall along the Pacific Ocean attracts parents pushing strollers, bikers, runners, and roller bladers of all ages and income levels.
Vancouver has been praised as one of the most livable cities in the world, and Larry Beasley, who recently retired as the city’s planning director, has now become a proselytizer for high-density living. He travels all over the world to tell city planners of the Vancouver miracle. “When we started out 20 years ago, what we were trying to do was to create a positive experience, an opportunity for citizens to come back and live in our cities,” Beasley reflects. Now, he says, the city has succeeded.
Traditionally, densification has not been an easy sell in North America because it is often associated with higher congestion, air pollution, and noise. In the late 1990s, Seattle-about 140 miles south of Vancouver-considered a moderate density increase in single-family neighborhoods but had to abandon the plan. “One of my staff actually got a death threat from a neighbor,” says planning director Diane Sugimura.
Meanwhile, Vancouver is getting ready to go to the next level. Mayor Sam Sullivan is convinced that density is ecologically responsible and must be actively promoted. Last June, he launched the “EcoDensity” initiative, which promotes high-quality densification as a way to reduce the city’s ecological footprint.
The term ecological footprint refers to biologically productive land and water that a population occupies, measured by the resources it consumes and the waste it creates. According to the Living Planet Report 2006 released by the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) and the Global Footprint Network (a nonprofit based in Oakland, California), the U.S. in 2003 had an ecological footprint of about 9.5 global hectares (23.5 acres) per person, but the planet’s total remaining supply of productive land and water ecosystems was only 1.8 global hectares (4.5 acres) per person. In other words, we would need four more planets to sustain our North American living standard.
Greed is not nood
Vancouver is no exception to the North American pattern of resource use. According to William Rees, a professor of community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia and the inventor of the ecological footprint concept, Greater Vancouver’s 2.1 million residents have a per capita ecological footprint of 6.7 hectares (16.5 acres). Thus, the total ecological footprint of the city’s population is almost 300 times its geographical area. So for all of its achievements, Vancouver is not a truly sustainable city.
Rees says there are many reasons why greater density would help Vancouver become a “one planet city.” He notes that some of the largest components of the ecological footprint are related to personal transportation and the construction, maintenance, and operation of buildings. “The city is a huge consumer of energy and material,” he says.
Rees compared three forms of city housing: the single-family house, the three-story walk-up, and the high-rise building. He asked how each pattern affects personal transportation requirements, capacity for public transit, and the energy required to build and maintain a household. Hefound that “moving from single-family to either three-story walk-up or high-rise resulted in a 40 percent reduction in that part of the ecological footprint of the household that was related to housing and transportation.”
In other words, it’s easier to reduce energy and transportation impacts when more people are squeezed into an area.
A bad rap
If high-density living is good for the environment, freeway-free Vancouver should be proud of all its accomplishments. Car trips in and out of downtown have decreased over the last 10 years, and walking has become a popular way to get around downtown.
But Mayor Sullivan believes this is not enough. He wants to increase density all over the city, not just in the downtown core. Single-family dwellings take up half the land area ofVancouver (pop. 600,000). “No city, including Vancouver, has totally realized the potential of high-density living,” Beasleysays. “High density with the right infrastructure is probably the only way that we are going to bring our cities’footprints anywhere near to what people say is necessary.”
A big problem with density, though, is its unpopularity. Kent Portney, a professor of political science at Tufts University, has developed an index of the seriousness of efforts under way in 40 U.S. cities with sustainability initiatives. He finds that many cities relate sustainability to density, but without making the connection explicit. “They don’t want to encounter the wrath of the people who oppose densification, so they keep it a little bit secret,” Portney says.
Seattle ranks first in the “taking sustainability seriously index,” updated by Portney in January 2006. The city created two programs, one for cottage units and one for detached accessory dwelling units (also known as DADUs) in single-family areas. (The basic standards for cottage units are a 650-square-foot footprint and a total floor area no more than 1.5 times the footprint or 975 square feet, whichever is less.) The city’s planning staff sees both DADUs and cottage housing as a gentle way to increase density without changing neighborhood character.
In Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood, six cottages and three carriage units (units above garages) were built on a site that would normally allow two single-family houses. According to Diana Sugimura, most residents were pleased with the results, and the smaller units blended well in the neighborhood. Today, she says, “people drive by and they see two houses there, but they [don’t notice] the cottage development.”
But despite the success of the demonstration projects, they did not change residents’ perceptions, and at the end of the day the community rejected these options for permanent housing.
Detached accessory dwelling units are now allowed in single-family zones only in Southeast Seattle, and cottage development is not allowed in single-family neighborhoods.
What’s to be done?
So what can ecologically responsible planners do to convince city residents that density is good for them and for the environment? “Af ter almost 35 years of being a planner, it has become a profound reality to me that when people occupy land, they just spoil it,” Beasley says. “IfI had my way, ifl was the czar of the world, I would say as of today let’s draw a line and we shall not go further into the natural environment for at least 200 years.”
Planners may not be czars, but they still have tools. Many cities begin by increasing density in new developments, particularly on former industrial land where there are no existing residents who are likely to object. Both Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver have had great success with this approach.
Vancouver’s EcoDensity initiative encourages density m existing neighborhoods. “The city has shown that density buys a lot of cool stuff,” says Patrick Condon, the James Taylor chair in landscape and livable environments at the University of British Columbia.
The “cool stuff” is the public amenities, infrastructure, and mixed use that density brings. Beasley and his team used a powerful discretionary zoning system and flexible density bonuses to persuade developers to pay for parks, child care, cultural facilities, community centers, and social housing, all ingredients necessary to building complete and vibrant neighborhoods.
“We realized that unless we brought a highquality urban design and community development into the exercise, consumers were not going to buy it,” Beasley says. New downtown development included town houses for fami lies with children and others who wanted to live close to the ground. The inclusion of town houses at the base of apartment towers became a signature of downtown Vancouver.
“We can design density in order to maximize the quality of the urban life experience,” Rees says. He notes that even the term EcoDensity is meant to make converts. “If you can associate density with something good like a better environment, better ecology, then that sells.”
Expanding choices
Some areas will always be more amenable to higher density than others. In 1994, Seattle designated five urban centers (a sixth one was added in 2005) and 24 urban villages that will receive most of the city’s growth and will allow it to direct development away from single-family areas. The urban villages tend to be neighborhood commercial nodes located close to transit stations and accessible to job centers. The city’s transportation plan calls for all villages to be linked by transit with 15-minute headways, 18 hours a day, seven days a week.
Patrick Condon estimates that half a million people could be added to Vancouver simply by increasing density along arterials and bumping up the supply of four-story, mixed use buildings close to transit in these areas. Such development is already apparent along some Vancouver streets, but much more could be accomplished.
To advance that goal, Vancouver has experimented with several options. One is invisible density-converting single-family houses to three dwelling units but giving no outward appearance of the change. Others arc courtyard rowhouses and small houses and duplexes.
Patricia St. Michel, an urban designer with the city of Vancouver, has introduced both types of units to single-family neighborhoods in Vancouver’s Kingsway and Knight area, a change that could produce 800 additional units and accommodate up to 2,400 more people over 20 years.
In her work, St. Michel presented neighborhood residents with choices of various housing types. The dialogue focused on affordability, changing city demographics, and the need to find appropriate housing for smaller households, the elderly, empty nestcrs, and first-time home owners.
St. Michel also described the benefits, such as shopping area improvements and quality design. “We wanted to demonstrate that it was not just about packing more stuff in,” she explains, adding that she was surprised that the community supported the rezoning of a much bigger area than originally envisioned.
Have Vancouverites changed their attitude toward density? “The way that density has been handled in the last 20 years has moved people from being suspicious of density to understanding that density comes with rewards,” Condon says.
What’s next
More work on density and sustainability is needed, says Vancouver’s new planning director, Brent Toderian. “In a city that is already doing more than most cities in North America around issues of densification and smart growth, it is a challenge to find another level of creativity,” he says.
Toderian notes that the development of the Southeast False Creek area, including about 80 acres of former industrial land near downtown, is an opportunity for creativity. The Olympic Village for the 2010 Winter Games will be built on this site. Among various innovations being considered is passive design, which takes advantage of available sunlight and reduces reliance on a building’s mechanical systems.
“You are orienting or structuring the building in a way that responds to the environment,” explains Roger Bayley, a principal with Merrick Architecture, one of the firms involved in the design of the Southeast False Creek residential buildings.
Passive design features include ventilation shafts, open stairwells, and deeper balconies. Because these elements use more space than traditional building elements, the developers want to exclude them from the total floor area. The citv has never offered these exclusions before but has agreed to grant an additional floor area allowance of up to two percent of the total.
Toderian says the Southeast False Creek project will offer a good Eco Density experiment. He hopes to calculate the ecological footprint of this newly created community and compare it to other Vancouver areas to see whether these new approaches make a tangible difference.
Spreading the word
Other cities are also using ecological footprint analysis. Santa Monica, California, reports that it has shrunk its ecological footprint by almost six percent in 10 years, but acknowledges that it is difficult to calculate the city’s exact footprint because data are incomplete.
Santa Monica uses the eco-rootprint more as an educational tool than as a planning tool. “When people get that wake up call, we can provide them with information on how they can live more within their means,” says Dean Kubani, Santa Monica environmental programs manager. “The most valuable application of ecological footprint is actually in storytelling”-in other words, getting people engaged, says Greg Searle, the codirector of One Planet Living North America.
Planners also question the ability of city governments to significantly affect the ecological footprint if people do not change their behavior. A paradox of Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek project is that with all the sustainable features in place, the development will still cater to high-end consumers who may have an unsustainable lifestyle.
“It does give them a slightly warm feeling because they sense they are being responsible even though they have just jetted hall way around the world,” architect Roger Bayley says with a big smile.
Experts seem to agree that it will take a cultural revolution to reduce our ecological footprint. Meanwhile, Larry Beasley is traveling the world to make density converts. He says that he uses ecological footprint analysis as a “spiritual guide.”
