Going Against the Grain

To some New Urbanists, Vancouver is the "shining example" of all the good things that are supposed to happen when tall, slender highrise condominium towers are built at the downtown core:

The shining example of Vancouver is just a couple of hours from Seattle; it may be harder for some San Franciscans to visualize, but a city can be both highrise and humane. In fact, a few taller buildings downtown can make it easier to make the whole place more livable.

But is Vancouver really all it's cracked up to be?  An article in Governing Magazine takes a critical view of the Shining City of the North:

In fact, though, there is a compromise. Vancouver has begun to realize that its downtown is such a magnet for urban condo dwellers that it runs the risk of ceasing to serve the other purposes downtowns have traditionally served — as centers of commerce, corporate employment, jobs and overall economic life. It’s not that business has fled central Vancouver: The downtown peninsula still ranks first as an employment center within the metropolitan area, with about 77,000 jobs. But the percentage keeps going down, there have been virtually no major office building projects launched in this century, the amount of land available for new commercial development is almost non-existent, and given the still-explosive demand for high-rise urban living, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see what downtown Vancouver could become in a decade or two: a place where huge numbers of people live but not many work.

Cities that follow the Vancouver model risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg--commercial real estate.  Commercial properties pay more taxes and they require fewer services from municipal government.  Once businesses leave the urban core the wealth and power that once symbolized "downtown" evaporates, leaving...a resort:

”The city we are shaping in the current boom,” says local architecture critic Trevor Boddy, “is something quite different from any notion of what a downtown is, was or will be — more of a resort than a conventional downtown.”

In a series of newspaper columns, in architecture journals and in public speeches, Boddy has challenged almost every aspect of the Living First orthodoxy. He has warned American cities not to copy it. But the arrow that made a direct hit was his “Fool’s Paradise” article in the Vancouver Sun in August 2005. “We may once have dreamed of taking our place in the list of the world’s great cities,” Boddy wrote, “but unless something is changed soon, to preserve and promote our downtown as a place to work, we will instead join Waikiki and Miami Beach on the list of resorts filling up with aging baby boomers lounging around their over-priced condos.”

Ouch!  As a premier vacation destination already, San Francisco could soon be added to that list of resort towns if the plans to Vacouverize the area around the Transbay Terminal take shape.