How do you think your city will change in ten years time?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > How do you think your city will change in ten years time?

Femtosecond: Aug 2, 2003

Vancouver BC

In the immediate future the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, the remnant of a never fully constructed highway system, will be torn down and in its place will be a giant park and all sorts of new condos. The predicted carmaggedon will never appear.

The Vision Party which has won the last two elections will continue to easily win elections, and they'll continue on their current trajectory of building separated bike lanes and marginally densifying existing residential areas of East Vancouver where they face less NIMBY resistance. Various "road diet" initiatives begin and the city begins to reclaim space from roads for added space for pedestrians and cyclists. Granville Island and Water St become pedestrian only. Massive areas of the city remain untouched low density single family housing.

The Evergreen Skytrain Line to Port Moody/Coquitlam is finally completed and those cities start densifying dramatically with all sorts of dull cookie cutter condos. The Broadway line is also completed and the scale and rate of redevelopment of Broadway is intense. Broadway becomes Vancouver's 2nd downtown with added commercial construction. All of these rapid transit lines are incredible successes but this doesn't change anything politically, and transit remains poorly funded, with Translink being the whipping boy of the Province and further expansion politically difficult. The Province approves expansion to Langley, but mandates that the line be Skytrain technology instead of the light rail favoured by Surrey. It is still not completed 10 years from now. The Township of Langley starts to redevelop Willowbrook Mall with condos all around it similar to what is currently occurring in Brentwood. Squamish becomes a significant suburb with many calling for rapid transit options out to there, but the provincial government is uninterested.

Downtown skyscraper construction in Vancouver has become solely ultra luxury buildings marketed entirely to the global elite and to a lesser extent boomers cashing out on their multi million dollar Vancouver bungalows. The housing bubble never bursts but merely eases off and despite the recent introduction of a 15% tax on real estate purchases by foreigners the city continues to be a favoured place to park money and/or retire for foreign (mostly Chinese) capital and persons.

As the older generation of Chinese Canadians die off, Chinatown is increasingly taken over by new yuppie businesses. Condo marketers bend over backward to try to find a way to market this area as a part of "Gastown."

The overall Canadian economy will be so mediocre that Vancouver along with Toronto will continue to be relatively economically vibrant bright spots that will continue to attract young people and new immigrants. The skyhigh cost of living however will result in most people eventually moving on after a few years. Entrepeneurs and artists in particular are driven out and Vancouver will become even more of a soulless domain of the established super rich.

Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Sep 3, 2016

# ¿ Sep 3, 2016 21:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 17, 2024 02:06

Femtosecond: Aug 2, 2003

Corny posted:

Denver

Denver is going to become San Francisco and the Bay Area as it existed in about 2009 - filled with startups and a burgeoning tech scene amongst a tremendous gain in population. From July 2015 to July 2016 we added 100,000 new people via migration in the united states and immigration, this trend will only expand in the next ten years. I predict the population of Colorado as a whole will increase by 1.25 million people. This will make our housing crisis even worse, though I doubt we would ever approach San Francisco levels of house pricing, housing costs will still be growing and growing in 2026. Areas of the city that are currently being gentrified (RiNo, everything in the highlands outside of LoHi, Five Points, Lincoln Park) will have been completely gentrified by 2026, and neighborhoods that are still now considered to be "bad" will start being gentrified as well (Montbello, Globeville, anything south of Federal and Alameda and anything east of Colorado)

Is Denver already building lots of new condos and apartment buildings? A big part of SF's problem is that they simply never built any new supply on the scale necessary and they continue to not really build anywhere near enough. Last time I was in SF two years ago I only saw one new condo showroom and I found this just shocking considering the scale of employment gains the city had been having.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2016 23:17

Femtosecond: Aug 2, 2003

Corny posted:

The answer is complicated - yes, there are new condos and apartment buildings being built, there are a large number of developments that have gone up in Denver in the past six months and we only have more on the way. The issue however, is that they are marketed as "Luxury Apartments" and geared towards people looking to buy luxury apartments. There isn't enough affordable housing being built at a fast enough pace in Denver to offset the rise in housing prices caused by these developments being built. Thankfully; unlike SF, Denver and the Metro area has no shortage of land space to build upon, so that constraining factor isn't an issue here.

Let me contrast this with Boulder. Boulder is famous for having an ordinance within the city charter that limits the amount of new building within the city to be 1% of population growth in that year, meaning almost no new housing ever gets constructed in Boulder. Not only that, but Boulder also has another ordinance that prevents the cities borders from ever expanding, in order to prevent the open space areas around Boulder from being developed. That second one isn't so unreasonable, Boulder is a very pretty city, but the first ordinance means that Housing prices in Boulder only skyrocket and will continue to only skyrocket. Google is coming to Boulder and bringing about 1000 new tech jobs to the city, and there simply isn't enough housing to house Google workers. Not only that, but Boulder is also a college town, so that means that a good portion of the housing in Boulder goes to students; who need to have easy access to the University and environs. In short, its a perfect storm for ever increasing housing prices within Boulder. I lived up there a couple years ago, and I payed $550 a month for a room in a house that was about a mile from campus. If I were to live in that same house now, I would be paying $800 a month. You could have bought a 3 Bedroom/2 Bath family home for $700,000 at one point (which is already absurd!) at that same point, now it would set you back about $850,000 to $900,000

"Luxury apartments" is probably 90% of what gets built in Vancouver as well. There's an argument often made that these luxury apartments shield existing low income housing from competition and helps keep rents low. I'm not entirely sure I buy that argument, but in an environment with good renter protections and regulations, I think maybe this effect could exist. It would exist for a little while anyway. In the long term it's likely that the effect of new developments will incentivise redevelopment/renovation of existing low income apartments enough that everyone gets evicted.

Certainly not building anything doesn't help. In that case you get what we see in SF where highly paid tech workers directly compete with working class people for the same super limited amount of apartments. The result is landlord shenanigans where they will make every attempt to evict people in rent controlled apartments and there are multi thousand dollar rents everywhere.

That situation in Boulder does not sound sustainable. I'm in favour of keeping urban borders limited to prevent sprawl, but the natural result of this is that you simply must densify and build compact communities. In the long term you can't have both a firm urban boundary and low density single family homes. If Boulder keeps on this path they'll end up like Vancouver where the average detached home costs ~C$1.3 million. Sounds like it's already well on the way to that.

Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Sep 4, 2016

# ¿ Sep 4, 2016 02:33

Femtosecond: Aug 2, 2003

pesty13480 posted:

I've been wondering about that myself while trying to decide who has been buying them, and at what rate to justify the prodigious number of the things going up all over the place all the time. It seems like those are the only things being built at all in the town. It boggles the mind. Surely, there can't be that much influx of people into the city who are grabbing them. It might actually become worth it to buy one once the market crashes. I think St-Henri is going to gentrify East of Lionel Groulx on a lesser than Griffontown but fairly quick rate as well. Griffontown I think had a lot of extra space conveniently located near the downtown core that was just easy to grab and turn into condos. I am hoping that a lot of the rest of the city remains the same in the next ten years, and it might, given that it seems like more and more places are trying to put into place measures to prevent apartments and bigger triplexes from switching into condos as part of the craze.

Montreal has an absurd amount of apartment supply so it wouldn't seem to me to be nearly as good of an investment as other places.

quote:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-does-montreal-maintain-its-enviably-low-rents/article31285810/
...
This, in miniature, is the story of Montreal�s improbably cheap rent: ample but antique housing stock; a sluggish economy; and a language barrier that puts a soft cap on population growth.

The bad news for the rest of Canada: It�s a brew that may be easier to envy than to replicate.

In large part, Montreal�s funhouse-mirror rental market comes down to two familiar factors: supply and demand.

As anyone who has visited the city can attest, it�s full of three-storey walk-ups festooned with spiral staircases. The numbers bear this out. The greater Montreal area boasts about 500,000 rental apartments, compared with just 100,000 in the Vancouver area, which has about half Montreal�s population.

That glut of supply can be traced back to the city�s 19th-century roots. When Montreal was being built up, decades before most of Canada�s urban areas, apartments were the standard housing unit of city life. Mortgages were virtually non-existent at the time, notes Marc Choko, a historian of Montreal housing and emeritus professor at the Universit� du Qu�bec � Montr�al. Through the 1920s, even Montreal�s upper class rented apartments on the city�s Golden Mile.
...

I guess maybe Montreal condo developers have to compete harder with more of a focus on quality product and they're going after people that are tired of living in old apartments with silverfish and slanted floors.

Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Sep 8, 2016

# ¿ Sep 8, 2016 04:37

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > How do you think your city will change in ten years time?