Is there a more NIMBY place in Western Canada than Oak Bay?
In the letter, Oak Bay residents living in fear of densification, the writer complains about the possible negative impacts of a three-storey apartment/condo building in a residential neigbourhood. This sounds like someone who's never lived in a real city. Three storeys is nothing. Studies have shown that in low-rise apartment buildings, people still build community and get to know their neighbours. Tree canopies remain intact. Walkability becomes paramount. Along with townhouses and multiplexes, low-rise apartments are the perfect, gentler fix to our pressing urban housing issues. Why do so many places in North America still have this obsession with a post-war suburbia-style lifestyle? It's elitist, unsustainable, and ultimately a failed 20th-century experiment.
Low-rise density is so much better than the alternative. If cities protect all single-family home lot areas, the result is high-density: monstrous 8- to 15-storey condo towers full of tiny units at major intersections.
Growing up in Vancouver, I saw the power of wealthy single-unit lot homeowners in certain western areas of the municipality continue to delay permitting of gentle densification (basement suites, multiplexes, townhouses, and low-rise apartments) so long that the city had no choice but to instead greenlight huge condo towers to try and meet development desires and housing targets. Most of these units are not ideal places to live. They've become a commodity instead of homes. Now, Vancouver is trying to play catchup and the growing pains are awful.
If we want Victoria to avoid that kind of rapid and lifeless highrise condo growth near residential neighbourhoods, then (combined with townhouses on major roads), these low-density apartment complexes sprinkled throughout residential streets are the way to do it. Oak Bay needs to get on board. Kerrisdale in Vancouver managed a similar feat from the 1960s-'80s.
That way, young families and working people can have their own space, connected to the street they live on, without living in a glass box in the sky.
The major cities of this province need more housing. If an older couple wants a nice, quiet one-level rancher with a garden and more space, there are plenty of communities in the suburbs or up-island to settle into.
C. Brandt
Victoria
