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Wow, Vancouver is an amazing looking city, from scenery to high rises. This is not a flame and I'm not downgrading the city at all. I've never been to Vancouver and I really don't know much about it but why does it have so many high rises? Compared to it's relatively medium sized population? It really amazes me!
Hopefully one day I can get out there and visit and see it! I love urban looking cities and I think being in the USA it puts a lot of our bigger cities to shame!
In Vancouver the high-rises are mainly on the downtown peninsula.(there are clusters around Skytrain stations, including the suburbs ) It's not a large area, and yet very desirable to live, so the only way to meet demand is to build up. The neighbourhoods are walking distance to beaches, parks...well everything, with great mountain views as well. Good transit etc.
It started with rental towers in the late 1960's and early 1970's in the West End part of downtown. What is now the Coal Harbour and Yaletown neighbourhoods where not residential back then. Yaletown was mainly warehouses which have been retained and redone as shops, restaurants, and condo's. The low - rises are surrounded by the newer much taller high-rises. Those started being built after the 1986 World's Fair. The land that the fair was on, was bought by a Hong Kong billionaire and with his company Concord Pacific, started the first high-rises in Yaletown.
That, mixed with China taking over Hong Kong and a lot of wealth coming this way helped the boom along.
All those towers in the forefront of your photo are residential. You can see a view of the office towers in the background, from the middle of the photo and right. To the left almost all will be residential.
It makes for a very vibrant downtown.
The newer neighbourhoods of Yaletown and Coal Harbour feel more " urban " in the sense that the buildings come right up to the sidewalk. They usually have shops on the bottom floors and there are a ton of parks interspersed between them.
The West End being an older neighbourhood still has a fair number of low-rises, but even the high-rises are usually surrounded by grass and gardens, giving it a more leafy feel.
I concur with all that Nat said. Excellent post, Nat.
I wanted to add that if you come to Vancouver to visit and get a chance to visit other areas of the Metro-Vancouver area you'll find that in other locations highrises are few and far between. The further out into the suburbs you get from the downtown core the less highrises there are because there is more room to spread out. An example would be the town that I live in (about a 40 minute drive away from the downtown core) there are only a total of 5 highrise buildings in the town and all of them are less than 14 stories high. The general consensus throughout the lower mainland is that people prefer to see tall trees and mountains than to see tall buildings.
The foggy photo below (not a great photo, I know, because of the fog) is taken from the top of Burnaby Mountain looking west towards the Vancouver downtown highrises and the harbour. Click on the thumbnail twice to get an enlarged view of the picture. You'll see it's only the downtown core that has a lot of highrises.
I concur with all that Nat said. Excellent post, Nat.
I wanted to add that if you come to Vancouver to visit and get a chance to visit other areas of the Metro-Vancouver area you'll find that in other locations highrises are few and far between. The further out into the suburbs you get from the downtown core the less highrises there are because there is more room to spread out. An example would be the town that I live in (about a 40 minute drive away from the downtown core) there are only a total of 5 highrise buildings in the town and all of them are less than 14 stories high. The general consensus throughout the lower mainland is that people prefer to see tall trees and mountains than to see tall buildings.
The foggy photo below (not a great photo, I know, because of the fog) is taken from the top of Burnaby Mountain looking west towards the Vancouver downtown highrises and the harbour. Click on the thumbnail twice to get an enlarged view of the picture. You'll see it's only the downtown core that has a lot of highrises.
In Vancouver the high-rises are mainly on the downtown peninsula.(there are clusters around Skytrain stations, including the suburbs ) It's not a large area, and yet very desirable to live, so the only way to meet demand is to build up. The neighbourhoods are walking distance to beaches, parks...well everything, with great mountain views as well. Good transit etc.
It started with rental towers in the late 1960's and early 1970's in the West End part of downtown. What is now the Coal Harbour and Yaletown neighbourhoods where not residential back then. Yaletown was mainly warehouses which have been retained and redone as shops, restaurants, and condo's. The low - rises are surrounded by the newer much taller high-rises. Those started being built after the 1986 World's Fair. The land that the fair was on, was bought by a Hong Kong billionaire and with his company Concord Pacific, started the first high-rises in Yaletown.
That, mixed with China taking over Hong Kong and a lot of wealth coming this way helped the boom along.
All those towers in the forefront of your photo are residential. You can see a view of the office towers in the background, from the middle of the photo and right. To the left almost all will be residential.
It makes for a very vibrant downtown.
The newer neighbourhoods of Yaletown and Coal Harbour feel more " urban " in the sense that the buildings come right up to the sidewalk. They usually have shops on the bottom floors and there are a ton of parks interspersed between them.
The West End being an older neighbourhood still has a fair number of low-rises, but even the high-rises are usually surrounded by grass and gardens, giving it a more leafy feel.
I concur with all that Nat said. Excellent post, Nat.
I wanted to add that if you come to Vancouver to visit and get a chance to visit other areas of the Metro-Vancouver area you'll find that in other locations highrises are few and far between. The further out into the suburbs you get from the downtown core the less highrises there are because there is more room to spread out. An example would be the town that I live in (about a 40 minute drive away from the downtown core) there are only a total of 5 highrise buildings in the town and all of them are less than 14 stories high. The general consensus throughout the lower mainland is that people prefer to see tall trees and mountains than to see tall buildings.
The foggy photo below (not a great photo, I know, because of the fog) is taken from the top of Burnaby Mountain looking west towards the Vancouver downtown highrises and the harbour. Click on the thumbnail twice to get an enlarged view of the picture. You'll see it's only the downtown core that has a lot of highrises.
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Yeah, I cannot wait to visit. So most of the high-rises are residential?
Yeah, I cannot wait to visit. So most of the high-rises are residential?
Yes, the majority are residential. In my town all 5 of the highrises are residential and they are all for seniors 55 and older. Each building has gardens, recreational facilities and organized social activities and is rather like a tightly knit little community in its own right within the larger community as a whole. There is only one office building in my town that is a taller than usual building and it is only 5 storeys tall so doesn't really classify as a highrise. All other office buildings are 2 storeys or only have a ground floor.
Several of the other towns in the Metro-Vancouver area have no highrise buildings at all. But there are a lot of very big trees everywhere and they are not permitted to be taken down. If somebody's home property has big trees on it they can't take them down without a special permit and without a good reason, and if they do take a big tree down it usually is required for it to be replaced with other trees.
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