Vancouver is literally where they paved paradise and put up a parking lot
yea I grew up there in the 80's and 90's it was pretty special, great sense of community that has since been sadly replaced with flaky urbanites and their gentrified white people "mexican" food places
Vancouver, to its credit, is the only NA city that I know of without highways plowing through the city center. Plus its got one of the best urban parks in NA. But yeah when left to their own devices Anglos will always make single family housing just outside of whatever urban metro you plan for. It's like a law of nature.
What about SF? It's been a minute since I've been there but I don't remember anything too bad
I mean that's most cities, right? Except with Vancouver I see densely gridded urban neighborhoods, and other North American cities aren't usually so lucky to have that kind of infrastructure.
Vancouver has an urbanist trend named after it (Vancouver-ism) for creating dense, walkable, mixed use areas with a particular form of tower development, but as you can see from the meme, it only applies to the downtown core while majority of the Vancouver metro area is still zoned for SFH
Minneapolis is famous for its skyways that allow pedestrians to go from building to building without having to go outside... and that are restricted to the 1 sq. mi. downtown area
oh yeah it's not like there's anything going on in there, mostly (now nearly empty) retail space. but they're cool structures and i want more density and it's insane to me how most of residential housing is duplexes and single family buildings. i would also like an end to private property tbh
In my dreams MPRB takes control of the skyways and keeps them open past business hours. Add some public restrooms and maybe even some rec areas like a basketball court.
Shanghai, famous for having the most utilized transit systems in the world, is surrounded by massive tower blocks isolated by 6 lane highways.
Having just moved from there to a classic suburban sprawl hellhole with a once-an-hour-if-youre-lucky bus system I have to say this meme really makes Vancouver look like a less transit/car-free friendly city than it is (although the new city government is doing their best to walk back every bike and transit development of the last five years to appeal to the wealthy people who drive downtown once a month that voted for them). But now I'm paying significantly less rent for a three-bedroom house with a yard and a garage so I guess transit isn't everything when it comes with the highest housing costs on the west coast behind SF...
Ah I see. I just figured Vancouver had already done a lot of upzoning, but it looks like definitely not. Yikes.
It's interesting because just out of the frame of this picture are the suburbs that consist of high rise development on top of multiple transit stations. Not too say that anyone can afford to live in those, nor that the pace of building them is anywhere near as fast as it needs to be (pretty quick though, by NA standards), but it's in the right direction.
"The reality" is eating shitty $30 ceviche at Cactus Club with your real estate bros.
To be fair, Vancouver has one of the best rapid transit systems in North America :train:
Which means nothing since Toronto won best public transit in NA some years ago and anyone who lives in Toronto will tell you that shit sucks, but I guess compared to the rest of North America, where public transit consists of 5 buses and a tram line the TTC is kinda ok.
Visiting Vancouver and getting around the downtown area was quite good. It might not cover all the suburban areas for commuters though
