New Era of Car-Free Buildings is Upon Us
Over the last few years we have seen a big change in the way Victorians move about. Just a couple of weeks ago, a new mobility report from the CRD showed that within the City of Victoria, 46.1% of trips are done without a car. While I think we could significantly increase those numbers through improvements to our transit system, it’s a great start. This shift in mobility had already started a conversation over the last few years about creating homes without parking. The first units that were planned without space for cars were up against significant concern from neighbours, mostly because they can’t imagine anyone living without a car. However, in the same report mentioned above, it states that within Greater Victoria there are already almost 19000 households that do not have a car. So there is already a sizable portion of the population living without a car, though it is likely that they currently have an empty parking spot outside.
Since the new Victoria city council took over last year we have seen an even greater push to increase the amount of car-free homes. The first demonstration of the council’s new vision came to light during the final phase of the Starlight Investments planned project for Harris Green, where council tried to reduce the amount of total parking at the public hearing. Unfortunately, this was a poorly timed motion given that the project had already been fully planned and it nearly cost the city the project. Luckily, the developer came back to council and asked them to return the previous parking allotments for the first phase and council acquiesced (I will say that while I am excited about seeing car-free and car-light homes, we need homes first and foremost).
Given the demonstrated portion of the population choosing to live in a home without a car and the signaling from council that there is a want to see new projects with less parking we are now seeing our first couple large scale downtown car-free projects. I will look at two of them today, 937 View Street and 1702 Quadra Street (The Abbey). Before we get into the details of the projects I should say that I am not really in favour of the city mandating car-free projects. I think we should simply remove any requirements for parking in the building of homes, while also restricting any surface parking in projects. It is generally private developers bringing forward the projects, and we should let them determine how they want to build a project based on their economic analysis. As it stands it costs anywhere from $25k to $50k to build each spot of underground parking. If you are building a garage that holds 150 cars that is an almost 4 million dollar cost to the developer. Not building it means that there is a significant opportunity for the prices of the homes to go down. Obviously when a private developer is building a new project, it doesn’t mean we will see discounts in that specific building. The final prices will be determined by what other units in newer buildings are selling or renting for without a parking space. That said, as the supply of those units increases over time, especially if it increases in-line or in excess of demand for those units, the prices will go down. On the flip side, if they want to build a 10 storey underground parking lot and try and pass that additional cost onto their future residents, they should be able to do it, though I personally think that would be a mistake.
One of the big arguments against car-free buildings is that there is a belief that no one really lives without a car and thus the residents of the building will simply take up parking spots on the streets around the building. For the examples today, as both buildings are in the downtown core, there is little chance of this happening unless the residents want to be walking a significant distance to the closest unrestricted parking areas to retrieve their car, which in the end would defeat the purpose of having the car in the first place. As I have said in a previous article, the best solution to ensuring that there isn’t an option for residents to have cars parked on streets, is a city-wide parking permit system so that each parking space on public property would have a cost. Given current technology you could easily make it so that vehicles also need to be owned by a local resident to a neighbourhood to park there overnight (with paid exception options for guests and service delivery). Or the province could take on the Japanese model for parking which would be my dream. Okay, lets look at the two upcoming examples.
937 View Street
This project is proposed for the lot right across the street from the back of London Drugs currently and is being built by Nelson Investments. There is already a project being built to the east in the lot next door which you can see here. The building that is planned for 937 View doesn’t take up the whole lot, instead only the northern half. We can hope for another project to be proposed soon on the southern half. One of my favourite projects that was never built in Victoria actually spanned both of these lots. You can see some photos still on Vibrant Victoria from back in 2008. I got to sit down with the developers of this project recently to hear about their plans for this building and some of the challenges they have been facing with moving forward with the kind of project that the city should be asking developers to build. The building is fairly tall for the site which is one of the reasons that it has been moving slowly. That said at 23 storeys, it will be shorter than the Starlight project across the street and only a little bit taller than View Towers next door. This development will include around 269 housing units with at least one ground floor commercial unit. The most interesting part of it is that the developer is not including any parking at all. Instead there will be some very large bicycle storage areas that will house around 340 bicycles. The building will include at least the northern portion of a mid-block walkway and the design of it seems really nice and hopefully something we will see mimicked in other projects. This building has not quite cleared the last hurdles of the development process, hopefully we will see it approved soon.
1702 Quadra (The Abbey)
The Abbey is a planned replacement of the current Abbey building on Quadra at Fisgard. This project is being brought forward by Aryze Developments. I will say that I am not completely enamoured with the final iteration of this project. Mostly because the current Abbey building is one of my favourite little residential buildings in North Park. I generally prefer that we build new buildings on vacant or underused land before tearing down already built (and in this case, beautiful) residential buildings that are key to creating the feel of the neighbourhood. I do get that as a developer you can’t choose which lots are available for building, but in any event I do find that aspect of the project sad, especially as Aryze even teased a version of this new project that maintained the current facade. You can see a comparison of the two facades below. To be fair to Aryze, if the project below was proposed on almost any other lot I would love it, though I would prefer the commercial space to stretch further along the Quadra frontage.
The current iteration of this project includes a 12 storey, 92 unit rental building. Again, like 937 View, there will be one dedicated commercial unit along the ground floor. There will also be three additional work / live units along Fisgard. Once more, there is no underground parking for cars in the project but instead there is a significant amount of bicycle parking. The Bicycle parking actually takes up a fair amount of the ground floor as you can see in the application brief on page 33. I am happy to see more commercial space coming to this area of Quadra Street. It does have a little bit already with the wonderful Vinyl Envy record shop, the Artavi skateboard shop, the Mahihkan Tattoo parlour and the currently vacant main floor of the Park Mansions building. The redevelopment of the Abbey building into apartments does make me fear that we are on the cusp of losing Park Mansions as well and possibly even Rosedale Manor. Both of which along with the Abbey building give this stretch of the North Park neighbourhood a unique old urban feel that you don’t get in many parts of the city.
Overall I am excited to see how these first couple of car-free buildings impact our downtown, what the uptake is from a residential perspective and whether there are any externalities from their construction as we have been hearing there will be. Time will tell. What do you think about car-free residential buildings coming to Victoria? What will be the impact? Let me know in the comments.