Westside Backyard

@westside-backyard

just a millennial, standing in front of a city, asking for an affordable home

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Bluesky

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Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 20h

Skytrain (literal coolest thing ever) riding a skateboard and wearing sunglasses, while someone with a thinking cap says "this fucking sucks actually"

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 1d

🥵

A low rise red brick apartment building with a contrasting white arched entryway and decorative elements along the roofline

A portion of a low rise brick building with the balconies inset in a large arch reaching the fourth storey

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 11d

when completing my ballot for Fry

Nino Brown regretfully kills Gee Money in the 1991 film New Jack City

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 13d

Density drops pretty quickly from downtown in the city proper, and from Skytrain stations in the nearby cities. CoV has limited infill densification for decades in favour of high density redevelopment of industrial areas.

Aerial photo of the city of Vancouver. The towers of the downtown peninsula are in the distance of vast low density houses.

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 16d

Homer Simpson's motivational board of photos of Maggie replaced with images from the Vancouver Villages Plan

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 18d

Pretty straightforward graphic from the city. Hard to tell who was being deliberately or ignorantly misleading about the R3 upzoned areas, or a realistic pace of change.

Graphic of the possible options in Vancouver residential zones from R1 (detached house or multiplex) through R5 (high rise)

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 19d

I don't know how ABC thinks they're appealing to anybody instead of alienating everybody

In the Mos Eisley cantina, an alien labelled "NIMBys" stares with slight menace, as someone in the background says "They don't like you". The other character, labelled "YIMBYs" leans in front and says "We don't like you either".

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 20d

This is such a BS framing. The need for more housing is pretty concrete, and many of the worries about infrastructure are not.

Yan said it was interesting that the most common arguments in favour of the plan were less concrete concepts like the need for greater and more affordable housing, while opposition comments tended to focus on specific concerns, like the loss of tree canopy and infrastructure worries.
Article content

“There are clear parts of the city that support the idea of the villages, and then the opposition deals with the people who are trying to work through the reality, the possibility of these villages,” he said.

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· 26d

With just those numbers, some would divide by households and say density is worse. Probably need to combine with where that additional tax revenue goes because of efficiencies.

Comparison of servicing costs for suburban ($3462) and urban ($1416) households in Halifax by Sustainable Prosperity

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jul 14

One character says "I made this", handing an object over to another who asks "You made this?"
The object is labelled 'commercial streets built before modern city planning', and the second character 'city planners'.

The city planner looks at the object, then says "I made this".

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jul 11

Contrapoints recaptioned:
"They don't want compromise, they don't want housing. They want to endlessly 'critique' housing."

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jul 9

Rainbow Dash saying "It should be about 30 percent taller"

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jul 9

Visiting the VanPoli FB group is not good for my mental health

A Facebook comment including the sentence "I prefer organically built cities like Paris that started in the centre and radiated outwards"

Syndrome from the movie Incredibles getting upset

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jul 9

A goose squinting its eyes and asking "What's the neighbourhood's character?"

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jul 2

(The southwest extent of the Broadway Plan does now permit low rise apartments northeast of Vine & 16th)

Zoning map around Arbutus & 16th.
From two blocks west at Vine, going north and east, are now zoned R3-2 for low rise residential. To the south east is the restrictive First Shaughnessy District, and the remainder southwest and further west of Vine Street is low density residential R1-1 which allows multiplexes.

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jul 2

What if new apartments could have been built on any of the rest of this instead? Maybe those new residents would have liked to go bowling? www.vancouverisawesome.com/courier-arch...

Satellite view of the blocks of low density residential houses surrounding Arbutus and 16th, where a theatre and bowling alley were redeveloped into a grocery store

Article from Nov 6, 2012:

Community mourns loss of Ridge Theatre and Varsity bowling alley

The Arbutus Ridge community will soon be mourning the loss of two of its members. Plans to tear down Varsity Bowling and the Ridge Theatre were approved by the City of Vancouver's development permit board on Oct. 22.

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jun 30

Most of the neighbourhood is within a 10 minute walk to multiple grocery stores vancouver.ca/people-progr...

A map of grocery stores within Vancouver's West End Neighbourhood

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jun 27

Bring traditional architecture back to Vancouver neighbourhoods

A two storey apartment with white stucco and brown trim. A wood-shingled eave spans the building above the upper windows.

An older three story apartment building with white stucco and green trim

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jun 17

I think they did a great job of fitting the scale and context of the neighbourhood

The top floors of Senakw peeking from behind a row of mature trees in Kits Point

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jun 17

Just thinking of it now that I should have painted one of the cubes while they were on Yew

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jun 12

The city's own 2022 Housing Needs Report, even if you omit the future demand portion 😬

Graphic from The City of Vancouver 2022 Housing Needs Report

77,000 households living in unaffordable, unsuitable, or inadequate housing
2,000 people who are homeless
7,000 people living in an SRO
50,000 new households in 10 years from a growing and changing population

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jun 11

There's many quotes from her like that

"I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty."

"You can excuse racism?!"

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· Jun 1

bsky.app/profile/mich...

The Downmarket Impact of New Multifamily Housing: Evidence from a Honolulu Condo Tower

Abstract:
We test whether new condominium construction generates vacancies in a local housing market through induced moves. Using detailed address-history microdata, we track households who moved into a newly built 512-unit condominium tower in Honolulu, Hawai'i, which included both market-rate and income restricted units. We identify prior addresses and follow vacancy chains across multiple rounds of moves. The vacated homes were substantially cheaper than the new units and spanned diverse locations and housing types. Income-restricted units produced fewer secondary vacancies, but those vacancies were concentrated at lower price points. Our results show that new condominium construction eases supply constraints and expands affordability in a local housing market, and the contrast between market-rate and income-restricted units has important implications for inclusionary zoning policies.

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· May 30

Would the people who think zoned capacity is enough accept the displacement and rapid change of entire blocks?

A photo of 4th Ave from the north east corner of Cypress Street looking south west. A recently built five storey building on the corner is the tallest on the block.

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· May 30

Some people say "there's enough zoned capacity" to oppose upzoning as if it means their neighbourhood wouldn't have to change. But restricting any change to existing zoning would mean replacing all of this first. I think that's more disruptive than allowing more apartments in surrounding blocks.

A wide angle photo of 4th Ave at Maple in the evening, from the south east corner looking north east. A line sketch of approximately six storey height buildings is drawn over top of the existing row of one and two storey buildings on the north side that would be replaced if the area was redeveloped to its zoned capacity.

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· May 27

Someone should offer to pick his mom up and take her for a ride

A senior citizen riding on the front of a cargo bike

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· May 23

Didn't follow this Vancouver example

Web page for the city of Vancouver's Yew Open Street Pilot in 2023. A photo shows the concrete blocks and only a couple chairs that were added to the street.

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· May 19

Checking which census form I got

Westside Backyard@westside-backyard· May 5