Daily Score Blog

Editor’s Note: As part of our “Escape to Vancouver” campaign, Sightline talked to Gordon Price--urban design expert and former Vancouver city councillor--to get his take on the changing landscape of Cascadia’s most urban city. Gordon, who has offered a Vancouver walking/biking tour to the winner of the trip, blogs and posts his popular urban design newsletter on his Price Tags website. (Full disclosure: Sightline is also lucky enough to claim Gordon as a board member.)

Sightline: Where would you start your Vancouver urban design tour?

Gordon: No doubt at all: I’d begin with False Creek. From the False Creek seawall you can see 40 years of various forms of cutting-edge urban design, from Granville Island to the south shore of False Creek and the Olympic Village to North False Creek and the West End. You really see a panorama of ideas for how Vancouver attracted people to live in the downtown corridor in a livable way.

Sightline: What’s the background of False Creek?

Gordon: The vision of a residential False Creek came out of the spirit of the 1970’s. It was one of the first experiments in creating family-friendly environments in denser urban neighborhoods—in what used to be a polluted industrial basin in Vancouver. So we planned for lots of green spaces, ground-oriented housing, schools, and childcare, a truly mixed-use neighborhood. Later, the same philosophy of family-friendly housing was applied to the north shore of False Creek, but at a level of much higher density.

Sightline: What are examples of its success?

Gordon: One is that in 2005, Vancouver opened its first new downtown school in half a century, Elsie Roy Elementary, on the False Creek Seawall in the Concord Pacific project. While other cities are closing schools, it’s full to capacity. False Creek really recalibrated the standard for high-rise living. Another example: Ninety percent of residents of False Creek North walk as part of their daily routine.

Sightline: Where else would you take folks?

Gordon: Probably to some of the old streetcar villages all around False Creek that are continually reinventing themselves, such as the West End, Kitsilano, and Mount Pleasant. Mount Pleasant is a good place to see the emergence of the bicycle as a mainstream form of transportation. On 10th Avenue, you’ll see very, very high cycling rates. It’s the Europeanization of cycling in Vancouver. People don’t wear Lycra, they wear street clothes. They’re riding bikes without gears, called “fixies.”

Sightline: These strike me as examples of Vancouver’s success at designing livable, compact neighborhoods that can allow people to get around without a car. I know the city's not perfect, but it's certainly been ahead of the curve in Cascadia. What’s made the difference?

Gordon: You could make a case that it entered our thinking right from the beginning, because we were surrounded by mountains and water and we used up our land base very quickly. Simply because of our geography, we had to find a way to create livable high-density. It wouldn’t be just an option for those who couldn’t afford the house in the suburbs. The other factor that was absolutely huge is we didn’t build freeways. [Editor's note: Read more of Gordon's take on the great Freeway Fight here.]

Sightline: Are there ideas that Vancouver is borrowing from places like Seattle and Portland, these days?

Gordon: Definitely. The Pearl District in Portland has been influential. So many green glass high-rises have been built in Vancouver that people have finally said, “Enough already!” Portland offers another model of how to do good density.

There was a minor hubbub in the office yesterday when the news came in that a piece of the Alaskan Way Viaduct—the noisy elevated highway that affronts the Seattle shoreline—had collapsed. Clark ran down to check out the scene, and it turned out to be a fairly minor incident, as such things go: a car had knocked loose a piece of concrete guardrail onto the sidewalk about 50 feet below. (If you look carefully at the picture to the right, you can see a piece of the missing guardrail.)  Thankfully, nobody was hurt. The driver sped away, so we can’t know how badly the vehicle fared; but it’s quite possible that the Viaduct sustained more damage than the car.

Of course, when the news first circulated – “a piece of the viaduct fell” – we feared the worst. But there were no injuries, and traffic was essentially uninterrupted. Still, it’s an important reminder: the Viaduct is so old and brittle, at this point it just can’t be considered a permanent fixture of the Seattle waterfront. Eventually it will have to come down; it’s just a question of whether it’s an accident or a conscious choice.

That’s what Clark argues in this documentary, anyway. That’s right, fresh off his appearance in the NYTimes Style section, Clark’s featured in a documentary, by David Wheeler of Tall Thought Productions, about the Viaduct controversy. It’s a nice piece of work – if you’re a Viaduct junkie (or even if you're just curious about the issues) it’s definitely worth checking out.

An update on this.

Last week’s national elections in Canada were bad, but not horrible, news for supporters of carbon tax shifting. And they give me a little comfort about the provincial carbon tax shift already in place.

To review for our American readers, Stephane Dion, leader of the center-left federal Liberal Party (not the same political hue as the provincial Liberals), ran on a platform that included a proposal for a carbon tax shift. His plan was similar in its outlines (but not in all specifics) to that now implemented in British Columbia by Premier Gordon Campbell and his provincial center-right Liberal government. It would have levied a small but rising tax on fossil fuels (with rates on the fuels that varied in proportion to their climate impacts) and returned all the revenue to citizens and businesses through progressive reductions in income taxes. A classic tax shift.

The Liberals lost seats in the federal Parliament, especially in British Columbia, and the tax shift was one of the big issues in the campaign. So, clearly, the carbon tax isn’t as popular as I would have hoped in the province.

My three theories about why:

The income gap widens:

In the United States, the richest 10 percent earn an average of US$93,000 - the highest level in the OECD. The poorest 10 percent earn an average of US$5,800 - about 20 percent lower than the OECD average.

Social mobility is lowest in countries with high inequality such as the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy, the report said.

No surprises in the trend, really.  It's been going on for a long time -- as has the decoupling of GDP growth and middle class income. (See the chart to the right, borrowed from Kevin Drum's blog at Mother Jones.)

Still, I'm grateful that the AP article I link to above mentions the connection between income inequality and social immobility.  It's a story that needs to be told more often.

Opponents of policies designed to ease economic inequality often argue that they're unnecessary, since people simply aren't stuck where they're born.  If you want to earn more money, the argument goes, all you need to do is work hard.  Maybe you won't make it into the lucky 10%, but at least your kids might. Inequality, the argument goes, is actually necessary to upward mobility, since it gives people the belief that their hard work can really pay off.

But as it turns out, that's simply backwards:  places where incomes tend to be more equal also tend to be the places where people are more likely to move up the economic ladder. So in practice, income inequality turns out to be an obstacle to (or at least negatively correlated with) pulling yourself up by your bootstraps -- quite the opposite of the standard argument.

We’ve gotten some flak, rightly so, for our “Escape to Vancouver” ad (look to your right) that shows a cyclist not wearing a helmet. So let it be known that Sightline absolutely advocates wearing a bike helmet. (Believe me, I had a recent bike collision with the South Lake Union Trolley tracks in Seattle and was extremely happy to be wearing a helmet.)

I do think, though, that designing helmets to look less, well, geeky, is a welcome trend. Per Matthew Yglesias’ blog, check out this new Danish bike helmet that looks downright fashionable. Not surprisingly, it’s only offered in Europe at the moment.