SpongeG
Sep 14, 2007, 8:38 PM
cool article in the paper....
Two streets, two routes to development
TREVOR BODDY
September 14, 2007
Cambie and Main are sister streets with different histories, and even more different futures. One street is popular, friendly, and given to funky street fashions; the other is stand-offish, pretentious, and shopped at malls even before starting her current radical makeover surgery. How Cambie and Main got to be so different tells the story of our changing city.
Both run from downtown to the banks of the Fraser River, but their character is established in the stretch from Broadway to 41st. Lying between these two key north-south axes are streets named after Canada's provinces west of the Maritimes (poor Saskatchewan gets left out, being B.C.'s rival for political power in the West when the streets got named, but Yukon gets in because they had the Klondike, which our merchants liked provisioning.) The two streets had diverging personalities even before Canada Line Public-Private-Partnership contractors surprised residents and merchants by substituting immensely disruptive cut-and-cover construction over the previously-promised tunnel under Cambie to south of Oakridge.
Main Street was first named Westminster, being the start of the trail to a city laid out by the Royal Engineers, and much older than Vancouver. When tidal flats separating what is now downtown Vancouver from the rest of Canada were filled in, these less desirable lands were decreed as Chinatown, and civic laws compelled those of Asian origin to live there, and there alone. The commercial vitality and relative social order in Main Street's blocks around Pender and Keefer are tribute to Chinatown's lingering stability in the face of drug-induced desperation all around it.
When bylaws restricting Chinese-Canadian homes and businesses to solely those blocks were abolished early in the 20th century, there was a natural expansion of this community south along Main Street. This southward flow of Chinese-Canadian shop owners and restaurateurs along key stretches of Main right up to 33rd Avenue continued between the World Wars and into the 1950s, soon followed by immigrants from the subcontinent founding what is now known as Punjabi Market around 49th Avenue. Whether for Chinese-Canadian hardware store owners, Pakistani-Canadian fabric merchants, or the hip female entrepreneurs now making Main a fashion hub, this street has been a superb incubator of new businesses.
The major reason why Main Street from Broadway to 33rd Street is one of the funkiest, diverse and chain-store-free zones in the entire city is historical: retail frontage is widely held in small parcels by Chinese-Canadian merchants and their descendents. As an urbanist, I find it astonishing that there is not a single national chain drug or clothes store on this entire run. Doubtless, it will not be long before the big boys want to join the party.
Cambie could hardly be more different. Long before a transit line was proposed there, much of its length from the bridge up to King Edward was assembled into larger, development-friendly packages by investors, especially entrepreneurs newly arrived from Hong Kong and Taipei. They expected higher rents than their colleagues on Main, who had bought land much earlier and much cheaper. These higher rents are one reason why so few local designer clothes, record shops, and innovative restaurants have set up along Cambie, and why the street experienced a lot of churn by lease-holders even before construction. With the assembly of land into larger parcels, this is also why big box retail behemoths have clustered along lower Cambie. The big retail character of Cambie is solidified by an ever-expanding Oakridge Shopping Centre, and a thriving City Square Mall near city hall. With all this, Cambie has become the place to find national brand name stores and fashions straight out of the latest TV shows.
Because the Canada Line construction has ripped up the street and diverted shoppers, even some of the best of locally-owned Cambie businesses have suffered. Yes, there are a few new arrivals like Edmonton-spawned Da-De-O Restaurant (in the former Tomato Restaurant location), but there are now dozens of empty storefronts from City Hall to Marine Drive. This is not a happy street.
This situation will present both opportunity and liability when the Canada Line starts shuttling passengers to downtown and the airport. More than any other street with the City of Vancouver's boundaries, Cambie is ripe for reconsideration. The street's first two urban makeovers - first by impatient investors, then by klutzy provincial transit schemers - have failed, and the patient is a mess.
With transit users set to start flocking to stations at Broadway, King Edward, 41st and 49th in just over two years, very little indeed has been done to rethink this hurting street. We have no detailed urban design or re-zoning plans for the station areas, no proposals for increased housing densities, no public realm improvement plan.
It took developer Art Cowie five years to get a modest six-unit townhouse proposal for 33rd and Cambie through city hall, and given the new realities of the street -especially nearer transit stations - this format of housing is pathetically under-density even before it starts construction.
Single family bungalows along a major boulevard next to a mass transit station? I rent a house on Cambie 100 metres from the King Edward station, and could not be happier if this stretch got redeveloped as six-storey continuous rental apartment buildings - built green, and built affordable.
What we do have here is a squabble between city and province over who will get to do station-area planning. The province has proposed legislation that will give it vast powers to usurp municipal powers in order to determine on their own what gets built around transit hubs province-wide.
By contrast, in Toronto, land use planning and subway construction went hand-in-glove (in fact, hand long before glove), and today you can look down from the CN Tower viewing platform and see mounds of high-density housing skirting every transit line.
Unless things get moving soon, Vancouverites will stand on the top of Mount Pleasant and see only a street that failed.
tboddy@globeandmail.com
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070914.VANBODDY14/TPStory/National
Two streets, two routes to development
TREVOR BODDY
September 14, 2007
Cambie and Main are sister streets with different histories, and even more different futures. One street is popular, friendly, and given to funky street fashions; the other is stand-offish, pretentious, and shopped at malls even before starting her current radical makeover surgery. How Cambie and Main got to be so different tells the story of our changing city.
Both run from downtown to the banks of the Fraser River, but their character is established in the stretch from Broadway to 41st. Lying between these two key north-south axes are streets named after Canada's provinces west of the Maritimes (poor Saskatchewan gets left out, being B.C.'s rival for political power in the West when the streets got named, but Yukon gets in because they had the Klondike, which our merchants liked provisioning.) The two streets had diverging personalities even before Canada Line Public-Private-Partnership contractors surprised residents and merchants by substituting immensely disruptive cut-and-cover construction over the previously-promised tunnel under Cambie to south of Oakridge.
Main Street was first named Westminster, being the start of the trail to a city laid out by the Royal Engineers, and much older than Vancouver. When tidal flats separating what is now downtown Vancouver from the rest of Canada were filled in, these less desirable lands were decreed as Chinatown, and civic laws compelled those of Asian origin to live there, and there alone. The commercial vitality and relative social order in Main Street's blocks around Pender and Keefer are tribute to Chinatown's lingering stability in the face of drug-induced desperation all around it.
When bylaws restricting Chinese-Canadian homes and businesses to solely those blocks were abolished early in the 20th century, there was a natural expansion of this community south along Main Street. This southward flow of Chinese-Canadian shop owners and restaurateurs along key stretches of Main right up to 33rd Avenue continued between the World Wars and into the 1950s, soon followed by immigrants from the subcontinent founding what is now known as Punjabi Market around 49th Avenue. Whether for Chinese-Canadian hardware store owners, Pakistani-Canadian fabric merchants, or the hip female entrepreneurs now making Main a fashion hub, this street has been a superb incubator of new businesses.
The major reason why Main Street from Broadway to 33rd Street is one of the funkiest, diverse and chain-store-free zones in the entire city is historical: retail frontage is widely held in small parcels by Chinese-Canadian merchants and their descendents. As an urbanist, I find it astonishing that there is not a single national chain drug or clothes store on this entire run. Doubtless, it will not be long before the big boys want to join the party.
Cambie could hardly be more different. Long before a transit line was proposed there, much of its length from the bridge up to King Edward was assembled into larger, development-friendly packages by investors, especially entrepreneurs newly arrived from Hong Kong and Taipei. They expected higher rents than their colleagues on Main, who had bought land much earlier and much cheaper. These higher rents are one reason why so few local designer clothes, record shops, and innovative restaurants have set up along Cambie, and why the street experienced a lot of churn by lease-holders even before construction. With the assembly of land into larger parcels, this is also why big box retail behemoths have clustered along lower Cambie. The big retail character of Cambie is solidified by an ever-expanding Oakridge Shopping Centre, and a thriving City Square Mall near city hall. With all this, Cambie has become the place to find national brand name stores and fashions straight out of the latest TV shows.
Because the Canada Line construction has ripped up the street and diverted shoppers, even some of the best of locally-owned Cambie businesses have suffered. Yes, there are a few new arrivals like Edmonton-spawned Da-De-O Restaurant (in the former Tomato Restaurant location), but there are now dozens of empty storefronts from City Hall to Marine Drive. This is not a happy street.
This situation will present both opportunity and liability when the Canada Line starts shuttling passengers to downtown and the airport. More than any other street with the City of Vancouver's boundaries, Cambie is ripe for reconsideration. The street's first two urban makeovers - first by impatient investors, then by klutzy provincial transit schemers - have failed, and the patient is a mess.
With transit users set to start flocking to stations at Broadway, King Edward, 41st and 49th in just over two years, very little indeed has been done to rethink this hurting street. We have no detailed urban design or re-zoning plans for the station areas, no proposals for increased housing densities, no public realm improvement plan.
It took developer Art Cowie five years to get a modest six-unit townhouse proposal for 33rd and Cambie through city hall, and given the new realities of the street -especially nearer transit stations - this format of housing is pathetically under-density even before it starts construction.
Single family bungalows along a major boulevard next to a mass transit station? I rent a house on Cambie 100 metres from the King Edward station, and could not be happier if this stretch got redeveloped as six-storey continuous rental apartment buildings - built green, and built affordable.
What we do have here is a squabble between city and province over who will get to do station-area planning. The province has proposed legislation that will give it vast powers to usurp municipal powers in order to determine on their own what gets built around transit hubs province-wide.
By contrast, in Toronto, land use planning and subway construction went hand-in-glove (in fact, hand long before glove), and today you can look down from the CN Tower viewing platform and see mounds of high-density housing skirting every transit line.
Unless things get moving soon, Vancouverites will stand on the top of Mount Pleasant and see only a street that failed.
tboddy@globeandmail.com
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070914.VANBODDY14/TPStory/National