Category: Housing

Secondary suites report finished, more discussion coming

The Secondary Suites Review Committee has finished its long and quite extensive consultation and has handed in its final report (PDF) to council last night. Predictably, council opted to talk a little bit more about it. Leading off the talking was Councillor Jensen, chair of the committee, who started by thanking everybody that participated, especially the committee itself (which, as far as I could tell, didn’t have a single renter on it) and the average person. He emphasized that this was just the start of the process, something echoed by other councillors. For example, Councillor Cassidy felt that the current conversation (that led to the report) wasn’t “balanced” as it “pre-supposed that council was going to legalize secondary suites”. Personally I think that the report is quite balanced and that the questions asked followed in that vein. Apparently Cassidy and I don’t see eye to eye on this on.

So where do go from here? Council has asked Mark Brennan, the Chief Administrative Officer, to report back on the report and next steps. Perceptive readers will note that Mark led the Town of View Royal’s staff as their CAO during its process to legalize suites. He noted that Oak Bay is a little different as the council there was mostly focused on the masses of new construction in View Royal. In contrast, Oak Bay currently builds about a dozen new houses a year. They also gave all the existing suites a free pass as far as building codes went, requiring only the extra parking and maximum square footage requirements to be met. Anyway, stay glued to the television sets my readers. Secondary suites will be legal in Oak Bay before I am retired.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside makes the Beeb

On the eve of the Olympics, right on the front page of BBC News is a story about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The story is lovingly titled Vancouver: ‘Drug Central’ of North America and recounts many of the horrors of the DTES including rampant drug use, homelessness, and prostitution. It also brings in the gang wars in the suburbs of Surrey and other places, quite correctly tying those drug wars into what is happening in Vancouver proper. With that little show known as the Olympics coming to town, expect a great deal of stories like this in the near future. And on a hopeful note, the BBC story ends with this little tidbit:

Vancouver’s problems will last long after the Olympic spirit has left.

It occurs to me that if Vancouver were a politician or a sports celebrity, right about now is when they would be making their tearful apology to the world, as we realize they are not so holy than thou after all.

From the CBC’s archives: White-picket Dreams

“Out of the monotony of unplanned suburbia…”, so starts White-picket Dreams, a clip from this Nov 21, 1954. Even back in 1954 they knew suburbia was a bad idea, if only unconsciously.

Mentioned in the story is the planned community of Don Mills, when in the early years of suburbia, promotion of walking was still seen as something to you needed to do, as well as Regent Park in Toronto, where the apartments mentioned in this story are being torn down and redeveloped.

Ironically, housing the aged is seen as a problem even then, despite Canada’s population being the youngest it has ever been, due to the post-war baby boom.

This clip, part of a series called So long city! Hello suburbs, is just one of a great number of videos from the CBC’s archives. It gives a facinating insight into places and times we can’t or don’t see.

Toronto seeks way to temporarily stop demolitions

7 Austin Place (Photo credit: Suzanne Long)
7 Austin Place (Photo credit: Suzanne Long)

The City of Toronto, or at least one of it’s councillors, Joe Mihevc, was publicly wondering in the Toronto Star about the need for a way to temporarily stop the demolition of historically important buildings after a developer from the melodiously named 1626829 Ontario Ltd all but demolished a heritage home in that city.

The property, 7 Austin Terrace, was designed by John Lyle, a fairly well known Canadian architect, for John Maclean, founder of  a little magazine called The Business Man’s. Said magazine has changed names more recently and is now known as Macleans. Both Heritage Toronto and the Community History Project (PDF) have weighed in on the issue and apparently as late as Sept. it wasn’t even known what the owner was going to do.

Closer to home, the Oak Bay council recently used its authority to temporarily stop the demolition of a house for 90 days (PDF, page 6) after there was concern around council about the potential heritage value of the property. In the end, the demolition permit was granted after a report to council by the Heritage Comm. determined that the house had little historical value.

Demolitions aren’t exactly a new problem here in Oak Bay, with its large stock of historic homes. Excluding University Woods just north of Camosun, the last major building boom in the municipality was the 1960s. Demolitions are a particular bugaboo of Coun. Cassidy, although the whole council usually shares his opinions.

One of the problems both Oak Bay and Toronto face is the lack of a complete heritage register, listing buildings historical and heritage values, whether or not they are officially designated or not.

Also fairly unique to Oak Bay is the use of differentially priced demolition vs deconstruction permits, in an attempt to make them more attractive to developers and home owners, although the $50-$200 price difference (PDF, page 31) is more about making a statement than actual financial incentive. Interestingly, moving a building is the same price as demolishing it, even though the stated purpose of the deferential pricing is reduction of material going to the landfill and climate change.

Of course, heritage designation against a property owners wishes can get quite expensive, as the City of Victoria discovered last year with the Rogers’ Chocolates interior, although hopefully there will be some compromise there.

Followup on the ethical purchasing workshop

Greening the Inner-City has picked up on my blog post on the ethical purchasing workshop. He correctly takes me to task for not mentioning the Community Benefits Agreement that was put in place as part of the Olympic Village construction. It had some truly amazing results, training more people than originally planned with a great retention rate. It is a good example of where a city can leverage a large amount of money into large benefits for not only the local community but also the businesses, as they are getting more trained construction workers which are always needed in this part of the world, bust or no bust.

So in my defense, I was there at the tail end of about 12 hours straight of volunteering, having started at 6am and there was just so much interesting information in the workshop, it is really hard to capture it all in around 750 words.

The pending Jordan River disaster

The long struggle over the future of Jordan River is nearer to a conclusion after a court ruling in favour of Western Forest Products, the development company masquerading as a forestry company. Gordon O’Connor, forest campaigner with the Dogwood Initiative quite rightly says,

a step backwards for this area and everyone who cares about the future of our wild coast.a step backwards for this area and everyone who cares about the future of our wild coast.

WFP is already restarting plans for 319 subdivisions in the area, with public hearings in the fall. However, all is not lost, as the CRD can still reject the developments on an individual basis, but this is going to cost a lot of money, something that Geoff Young, CRD Chairman and City of Victoria Councillor, would love for the province to help pay for.

Beyond the loss and degradation of habitat through the building of new homes and roads, any new development is going to be low-density sprawl, furthering car use and unsustainable living. The best part is that because these developments cannot pay for themselves due to low tax base, we, the residents of the core municipalities are going to be subsidizing them while watching our roads, schools and sewers crumble.

6 story wood building survives test earthquake

Given we live in an earthquake-prone part of the world and have recently approved the construction of six story wood buildings, you would think it might be good to test whether or not these shiny new buildings, designed to make apartment buildings cheaper and thus more attractive to build, are going to survive the big one.

Thankfully, we are not the only people in the world with a hankering to learn this information. A team from NEESWood Project out of Colorado State University decided to build a six-story wood structure on a shake table in Japan and have a go. Take a peek:

More videos on the project site, including that of the big test. Of course, these little shakes, estimated to be a 7.5 magnitude, are a far cry from the Big One, estimated at 8 to 9 with shaking lasting into the minutes.

(Hat-tip to Wired and Gizmodo)

Renters! Your voice is needed on secondary suites

Oak Bay has been considering legalisation of secondary suites for most of this year already and they have recently sent out a form asking for opinion on secondary suites as part of the tax notice. But us poor renters don’t own the property and thus don’t receive the tax notices (although we do pay the property tax, just via our rent).

Fear not, as the municipality has taken us into consideration. As Councillor Nils Jensen points out, 25% of Oak Bay residents are renters, so our opinion is important. You can pick up a form during business hours from the municipal hall at 2167 Oak Bay Ave. The deadline for it to be returned in July 10th, although this might get extended, depending on responses. You will need to show proof of residency to get a form.

The next meeting of the secondary suites committee is currently TBA, but I will announce it here when that date does get decided.

A daily grab-bag of links

The world keeps turning, even if I have been crazy busy with various non-bike relating things. So I present a grab-bag of fun links and commentary on news stories:

  • Packed in like sardines. It is a cliche and yet our buses (and public transit across the world) often feel more like a can of fish than a pleasant way to travel. To drum up political support for fixing the problem, a couple of Swiss decided to ride around dressed literally as sardines.
  • After dropping off my grandmother at a ferry today I got caught by this accident on Cordova Bay Rd. Apparently the cause was an 82 year old man having a heart attack. Why are we still building cities that require 80+ year old people to drive?
  • Speaking of my grandmother, two Saanich workers scared the crap out of her the other morning by walking into her back yard, looking for a storm drain cover. Turns out they were looking for the source of this oil leak into Douglas Creek, a salmon-bearing stream which runs through Mount Doug Park right behind her house.
  • Arthur Erickson, Vancouver architect, has died. He had a bit a love for concrete and brutalist buildings but also did a lot of good work including a building in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

There has also been a whole host of news about community planning today:

And lastly,Transportation Alternatives, a bike and ped advocacy group in New York City that has gone from guerilla activism to advising the city’s Department of Transportation, has launched “Biking Rules: A new street code for NYC Bicyclists” campaign that is coupled with a slick website that also allows users to show safe biking routes they have found (via Streetsblog). The map is driven by data from OpenStreetMap. More of that free data empowering people and communities again.