Wrapping up the summer break, we were invited up to the sky lounge of Two Gilmore Place in City of Burnaby by my niece's boyfriend, who lives there, making s'mores with downtown Vancouver in the background. Earlier we'd used the bowling alley and karaoke room.
It's Greater Vancouver's tallest residential building, 64 storeys, 216 m. In Swiss terms: the 34th-floor sky lounge where we sat is already as high as the roof of Switzerland's tallest residential tower (113 m, Dübendorf), and we were barely half-way up.
A pattern struck me. My uncles and aunts live in single-family homes; the younger generation chooses the towers, and not just for affordability. Gilmore Place, by Onni Group of Companies, shares a gym, pools, bowling, karaoke, cinema and that sky lounge among the ~3,000 residents of its three towers; Whole Foods, restaurants and jobs a short walk away; downtown a SkyTrain ride.
And yet, even her boyfriend, who lives there and loves it, isn't sure it needs to be THIS tall. The classic missing-middle question. So I ran the numbers for the Brentwood corridor (70+ towers, ~32,000 homes, ~70,000 people). No winner.
Towers win on land: for the same population as just the three Gilmore towers, 6-storey timber needs roughly 6x the ground area. That tiny footprint is why the towers fit onto the old mall and industrial land, leaving Brentwood Park's ~500 single-family homes standing.
Timber wins on cost: wood frame builds about a third cheaper, and even adding land it's lower per home (~$482k vs ~$584k). The tower isn't cheaper per home, its edge is land efficiency, not unit cost, and its amenities return as higher strata fees.
Height's real superpower is finance and politics. Bonus density cross-subsidizes below-market units (more affordable requirement at Amazing Brentwood literally meant more towers). And stacking density on old commercial land sidesteps the fight that just killed missing middle elsewhere: on July 28, City of Vancouver Council rejected the Villages Plan 10 to 1, the upzoning I flagged last post, after a "tsunami" of homeowner opposition. Spreading density across single-family streets is politically hard; a dead mall isn't. But that's process, not form: discuss scenarios with residents early enough, and acceptance is findable, a Swiss reference project in Gemeinde Flawil shows exactly this, with the Federal Office for housing FOH reporting shortly. More soon.
The honest caveats: Burnaby is cutting its affordable quota (20→15%), the walk-ups torn down rented under $1,000 (cheaper than any "affordable" replacement), and schools lagged, not from height, but from project-by-project planning with no big picture. Burnaby 2050 is meant to fix that.
In Brentwood it's not even either-or: the towers are already hybrids, high-rise for density, a 6-storey podium and townhouses for street-level scale.
The question isn't "tower OR timber." It's where each is the right tool.
How do you see it?
Original-Beitrag auf LinkedIn ansehen
