Frances Bula
Sun

VANCOUVER I The city is getting international admiration for its catchily named EcoDensity initiative, but some city residents are nervous about what it means for them.

As the city heads into the home stretch of public consultation on what will become an “EcoDensity Charter,” resident groups have banded together to express their concern that the policy — marketed as a way to make Vancouver a more environmentally sustainable city by promoting compact living and green building — may result in density just being shoved into their neighbourhoods.

As well, they worry there isn’t enough emphasis on creating affordable housing or complete neighbourhoods with libraries, transit and community services to go with the density.

Those are some of the points that a consortium of 23 neighbourhood groups has made in a formal letter to city council, in an effort to modify the final EcoDensity Charter, which is due to be voted on at the end of the month.

“The concept isn’t bad, but we want a sustainable city, not just a dense one,” said Mel Lehan, a veteran Kitsilano resident activist, who speaks behalf of groups from Southlands to Commercial Drive and Dunbar to southeast Vancouver.

Lehan said people feel the process is being rushed through and they fear that the new charter will mean that “we will have 40-storey towers that will be built in the middle of nowhere.”

As well, they don’t like a postscript added by Coun. Suzanne Anton to consider taller buildings in the city’s heritage neighbourhoods of Chinatown, Gastown and the Downtown Eastside.

City planning director Brent Toderian said he can understand why the proposed EcoDensity Charter is provoking fear and skepticism.

“It’s an unusual process and it was launched in an unusual way, so it’s a challenge for the community,” said Toderian, who inherited the job of putting the initiative into action when he started his job as planning director a year and a half ago.

Mayor Sam Sullivan had announced the EcoDensity initiative as a way to launch the World Urban Forum in Vancouver the previous June, somewhat to the surprise of some of his councillors.

“There are concerns about the politics and process and that’s making it a challenge for us,” Toderian said.

However, he said he and his staff are meeting with every community group that wants to meet with them and he is reassuring them that the EcoDensity Charter will not override the local plans most Vancouver neighbourhoods developed over the past decade as a part of CityPlan.

Instead, he said, the new charter will allow planning staff to push for environmental initiatives that complement existing policy or where policy is vague.

“I think we can do a lot that is different but is not incompatible,” Toderian said.

Some resident groups are cautiously willing to give him, and the city, the benefit of the doubt.

Colin Gray, chairman of the Dunbar Visions group, which developed the west-side neighbourhood’s local plan 10 years ago, said Toderian met the group before Christmas and allayed some of their fears.

On the other hand, Gray said, residents hear about proposals to build seniors’ residences in their neighbourhood that are much higher than the current four-storey limit.

“There’s this pressure to use the seniors’ card to get more height. It just feels like there’s huge pressure to get higher density.”

But Gray said his group is waiting to see how events evolve.

“We’re nervous, but we’ll play a little bit longer.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Jeannine Aversa
USA Today

This foreclosed home is in Chicago. For all of 2007, the economy grew by just 2.2%. The housing collapse was the biggest culprit. By John Gress, Reuters

WASHINGTON — Empty homes and for-sale signs clutter neighborhoods. You’ve lost your job or know someone who has. Your paycheck and nest egg are taking a hit.

Could the country be in recession?

Sixty-one percent of the public believes the economy is now suffering through its first recession since 2001, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

The fallout from a depressed housing market and a credit crunch nearly caused the economy to stall in the final three months of last year. Some experts, like the majority of people questioned in the poll, say the economy actually may be shrinking now. The worry is that consumers and businesses will hunker down further and pull back spending, sending the economy into a tailspin.

“Absolutely, we’re in a recession,” said Hilda Sanchez, 44, of Waterford, Calif.

Squeezed by high energy and food bills, “we can’t afford the things that we normally buy,” she said. “We are cutting corners in our spending. For our groceries, we are buying a lot of generic and we are eating out less.”

For many, the meltdown in the housing and mortgage markets has proved especially disturbing. Record numbers of people were forced from their homes, unable to afford the monthly loan payments. People watched their single biggest asset fall in value, a reason to tighten the belt.

“Obviously the housing market is creating deep concern. And one of the real problems could be that if people, as a result of their value of their homes going down, kind of pull in their horns,” President Bush said in a television interview aired Sunday.

Credit has become harder to get, thwarting would-be home buyers, adding to the glut of unsold homes and aggravating the housing industry’s woes.

“For-sale signs are everywhere. In my area, 35 to 40 homes are standing there and aren’t even complete. There aren’t any buyers,” said Jim Sims, 60, of Greer, S.C.

Nanette Dahlin, 52, of St. Louis Park, Minn., called the situation “very scary.” She said friends in Madison, Minn., put their home up for sale recently and reduced the asking price more than $100,000 in just a week. “They are in bad shape,” Dahlin said.

For all of 2007, the economy grew by just 2.2%. That was the weakest performance since 2002, when the country was struggling to recover from the last recession. The housing collapse was the biggest culprit in 2007. Builders lowered spending on housing projects by 16.9% on an annualized basis, the most in 25 years.

The job market is faltering — a point driven home by a report showing that employers cut jobs in January for the first time in more than four years.

“The way things are, people are afraid of losing their jobs,” Sanchez said.

Employment concerns are contributing to darker feelings about the economy and people’s own financial well-being. Consumer confidence, as measured by the RBC Cash Index, dropped to a mark of 48.5 in early February. It was the worst reading since the index began in 2002.

A cooling job market along with high energy and food prices are taking a toll on paychecks. Workers’ average weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, fell 0.9% last year. In 2006, earnings grew by a solid 2.1%.

Wall Street is unsettled and as a result, people’s nest eggs are not what they once were.

In fact, that was the top economic worry in the AP-Ipsos poll. Fifty-nine percent said they were worried “a lot” or “some” about seeing the value of stocks and retirement investments drop.

“I really dread opening my (financial) statements,” Sims said.

By one rough rule of thumb, a recession occurs when there are two consecutive quarters — six straight months — when the economy shrinks. That did not happen in the last recession, though. The economy contracted in the first quarter of 2001, turned positive in the second quarter, shrank in the third quarter and turned up again in the final quarter of that year.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the recognized arbiters for dating recessions, uses a more complicated formula. It takes into account such things as employment and income growth. By that measure, the last recession was in 2001, starting in March and ending in November.

Bush, citing some experts, said the U.S. was not in a recession, although he acknowledged “that the signs are troubling enough” to justify the $168 billion economic rescue plan that passed Congress this past week. The measure he intends to sign on Wednesday includes tax rebates for people and tax breaks for businesses.

To bolster the economy, the Federal Reserve embarked on a rate-cutting campaign in September, with two big reductions last month. In just eight days in January, the Fed slashed rates by 1.25 percentage points. The hope it that the lower rates will induce people to buy more and revive the economy.

So if the poll figure of 61% is right — that the country is now in recession — then those relief efforts will help ease the effect of a downturn.

“People are both depressed and anxious about the state of affairs. The anxiety is going to persist because we are in an uncertain season economically and politically,” said Terry Connelly, dean of Golden Gate University‘s Ageno School of Business.

Tony Gioventu
Province

Dear Condo Smarts:

Our strata council has a unique situation. We recently had a lawsuit that involved owners of a unit who alleged that they were treated unfairly because we prevented them from renting out. We did start the proceedings but after legal consultation decided it was easier to settle rather than take it to court.

The strata council agreed to pay $15,000, then filed a claim with our insurance company for the settlement plus $10,000 in legal bills. We have been informed by our insurance company that our claim has been denied because we had an obligation in our insurance policy to contact them immediately upon identifying that we were being sued.

They claim that as a result of not notifying them, we did not allow them the opportunity to establish a reasonable defence against the suit.

Now council is stuck with the $15,000 settlement and almost $10,000 in legal bills and our owners are expecting us to pay this out of our own pockets. So who pays these bills?

— DF in Metro Vancouver

Dear DF:

This is a perfect example of why every strata corporation should have directors and officers liability insurance coverage if possible.

There are a number of situations where councils have to make decisions that place themselves or the strata at risk or enforce bylaws that may be challenged. The key to your insurance, though, is that you must reasonably comply with the terms and conditions of the policy.

The company reserves the right to not only defend the claim but also subrogate the claim, an action on your behalf to recover the loss. There are other significant reasons to carry D&O insurance.

For example, where the strata corporation provides water and sewer services, or there are public facilities or amenities on the strata property. It’s not only a general liability issue, but your failure to properly maintain or service your common assets may also expose your council to lawsuits. Make sure your property managers are named on your policy as they are your agent, and check for exclusions such as Human Rights Claims, or underinsured clauses.

Before a strata decides on settlements that have both financial and liability implications, get legal advice. Ask yourself this question: Why would our strata council have the authority to settle a lawsuit and authorize legal fees without notifying the owners of the strata about the lawsuit or calling a special general meeting to approve the deal?

Of course you want to defend against the claim but, at some point, the owners of the corporation are paying the bills and they need to decide how much, how they are being paid and the terms of the settlement.

On the day you receive notice of a lawsuit, there are three actions a strata council should immediately undertake: Call an emergency strata council meeting, call your lawyer and call your insurer. Don’t wait till the dust settles to wonder if you’ve done the right thing.

Tony Gioventu is executive director of the Condominium Home Owners Association (CHOA). Contact CHOA at 604-584-2462 or toll-free at 1-877-353-2462, or e-mail [email protected].

© The Vancouver Province 2008

Province

OTTAWA — Canadian housing starts jumped more than 20 per cent in January, beating expectations and reversing a downward trend in the previous month.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. said Friday that the seasonally adjusted annualized rate was 222,700 units last month, up from 184,700 units in December.

Many analysts had expected 210,000 housing starts in January.

“Historically low mortgage rates, solid employment and income growth as well as a high level of consumer confidence continue to underpin the high level of housing starts,” said CMHC chief economist Bob Dugan.

“Housing starts in January returned to a level more consistent with our expectation that housing starts will total 211,700 units in 2008, remaining above the 200,000 mark for the seventh consecutive year.” The rate of urban starts rose 25.2 per cent to 189,500 units. Multiple-unit dwellings surged 64.1 per cent to 108,000 units, while single units fell 4.8 per cent to 81,500.

Urban starts in January were up 43.7 per cent in Ontario, 22.4 per cent in Quebec, 19.4 per cent in the Prairies and 17.5 per cent in B.C., but the Atlantic region declined 17.4 per cent.

TD Bank economist Pascal Gauthier wrote: “Residential construction should remain one of the bright spots in the domestic economy, helping to limit (but not eliminate) the extent to which the U.S. slowdown acts as a drag to overall economic growth.”

© The Vancouver Province 2008

An exploration of ‘punctuation,’ ‘iconic’ design in the city

Bob Ransford
Sun

Vancouver is better known for its quality inner-city urbanism than for its outstanding architecture. But an opportunity exists today to combine our understanding of what makes a quality urban fabric with some serious thought about the changing housing needs of an aging population and the planet’s threatened ecosystems to develop a unique Vancouver architectural language, especially in the design of housing.

A huge shift has occurred during the last two decades in Metro Vancouver in the type of new housing that is built, with the detached single-family dwelling giving way to multi-family dwellings. Last year, more than 70 per cent of the new homes built in Metro Vancouver were in multi-family, rather than single-family dwellings, when the reverse would have been true no more than 15 years ago.

I would argue that the architecture of housing has benefited, albeit slightly. Most would still be hard pressed to define a local architectural language.

In Vancouver‘s downtown peninsula — a stunning example of inner-city livability — there is a preponderance of glass and concrete residential point towers of largely modernist style. There is some coherence in terms of form, but little in terms of an architectural language that speaks with a uniquely Vancouver dialect. Looking at Vancouver‘s skyline or even studying a typical downtown streetscape, it would be difficult to define what distinct local influences inspired the architecture of most Vancouver buildings.

Missing, too, are landmark buildings that speak to their location or signature buildings that evoke the identity of their use.

Vancouver‘s director of planning, Brent Toderian, recently attempted to provoke a discussion about whether Vancouver needs an iconic architecture. He expressed his nervousness with Vancouver deliberately pursuing the design of attention-getting “iconic” buildings merely to make a statement on the world scene. His fear is that we might end up with “flavour-of-the-month” architecture with a short “shelf-life”.

Instead, Toderian suggested more risk-taking in local architectural design, increasing the diversity of architecture in the city by “punctuating” the pattern of our urban fabric. He compared the city’s fabric to a piece of prose in which punctuation marks, used carefully, can create a “clarity and legibility”.

“As the architecture of the city evolves, like a piece of prose, some special buildings can be commas, dashes, periods… and every once in a while, an exclamation mark where emphasis is truly needed or warranted.”

Toderian indicates that there is room in this “pattern and punctuation” lexicon for signature buildings that speak to the building’s use and landmark buildings that are part of the “mental map of the city”.

I share Toderian’s nervousness with iconic architecture or architecture that simply makes a statement. Instead of making a statement, architecture should make a place.

Toderian’s concept of pattern and punctuation is an intriguing one because it offers an opportunity to think about all the different opportunities for punctuation, while ensuring that we follow his caution that “the overuse of the wrong punctuation type in a city can be as wrong as it is in a piece of prose”.

Up until now, so little attention has been paid to the architecture of housing in our suburbs. A huge opportunity exists to apply this approach of pattern and punctuation to the architecture of our suburban neighbourhoods in the city and the region. Imagine applying this concept and truly leveraging the art, science and craft of architecture to the new homes that will replace the aging stock of largely nondescript single-family dwellings that still make up most of the developed areas of our suburbs.

U.S. new urbanist architect Andres Duany recently suggested to a Vancouver audience that standard plan books used to build so many cookie-cutter style suburban homes need to be updated with the great works of local architects popularizing outstanding design that would be normally commissioned only by the wealthy and making it available for repetition on a mass scale.

I’ve often wondered why we haven’t we been successful in creating an architectural “language”, if you will, that speaks with a uniquely rain coast dialect influenced by the cultural nuances that are unique to Canada‘s West Coast.

Some would argue that West Coast Modernism, which emerged among a small group of local architects in the early 1950s, including Ron Thom, B.C. Binning, Fred Hollingsworth, Barry Downs and Arthur Erickson, was born to respond to our local uniqueness. I am not a skilled architectural critic, but I understand that style to have been largely inspired by both the California modernist movement and by the organic architectural theory of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The West Coast Modernism movement may have spawned elements of a vocabulary, but the overall design spoke more to Modernism than it did to the West Coast. I believe an opportunity still exists to look at how the roots of traditional architecture — responding to man’s use of a building combined with that building’s response to its setting, climate, etc. — might be applied to the challenges facing a building in a raincoast region.

For example, in a rainy climate, a building should have large overhangs to protect the walls from pelting rain. Using indigenous materials for roofing, such as cedar, would dictate that the form of the roof should be pitched to easily shed water. However, a pitched roof is not in keeping with the Modernist style.

Therefore, the challenge remains to create a West Coast architectural language.

That language should speak explicitly to a commitment to sustainable design and eco-friendly building technology as applied in a residential form. Indigenous materials conducive to our temperate rainforest should be used to demonstrate how we have addressed the challenges of sustainable development and green building techniques and technology.

Perhaps an opportunity exists to adapt the arts and crafts style that is so prevalent here in the single-family home style and meld it with minimalist Asian influences to attend to our yearning for light, our need to shed and protect against constant moisture and to blur the boundary between sensitively functional indoor space and spectacular natural outdoor space.

In short, rather than concerning ourselves with the pursuit of iconic architecture in our inner-city, we should be developing an architectural language that reinforces our unique sense of place and makes that place special.

Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with COUNTERPOINT Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land use issues. E-mail: [email protected]

© The Vancouver Sun 2008