Showing posts with label urban building style. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban building style. Show all posts

Saturday, May 14, 2022

What Is the Real "Missing Middle" in Housing?


 The real "missing middle" in Victoria is not mid-priced housing for an influx of more people, it is the green space between the houses these people are to live in. And it goes missing even faster, when multi-unit developments sprawl along city blocks that have to be paved.

The GREEN Middle is where people tend gardens, kids play, trees have space to grow large, bird habitat and crucially, insect habitat, is preserved. This is the "missing" space where crop-pollinating, soil-making, waste-consuming and bird-feeding insects are going 30% extinct. 

See the dire data here: Oliver Milman says 'The Insect Crisis' is bad news for humans, too : Goats and Soda : NPR



"... three-quarters of the world's flowering plants and about a third of the world's food crops depend on pollinators at some stage. And so it's not just bees .... Flies are huge pollinators."

"There's been a ... 300% increase in the volume of agricultural production dependent on animal pollination in the last 50 years. So we're losing pollinators at a time when we're demanding more and more pollination. We have more mouths to feed. We need more farmland" -- plus we need space for urban agriculture and for private urban gardens.

It's not only the middle space between buildings that is crucial, but also the green corridors that link them up. Bees, squirrels and other small species need to move from one green area to another for mating and feeding. Birds move through tree canopy, frogs and insects in wet-space like ponds.

Cities need to create housing policy about more than just "more housing". Ultimately, what the planet needs is lower human population, so that Earth retains resources for the other life forms -- including those, paradoxically, that the human hordes depend on in order to eat.

So municipal "housing" is not only about housing, and municipal councilors need to do their part in making cities sane. They need to listen to more than the development industry. We can't build our way out of this quandary. Nor can the rest of the overpopulated world.

Monday, July 26, 2021

How much tree canopy is enough? Who gets to decide?

 Analysis of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data shows vegetation canopy in victoria increased by 45 hectares, which is about the size of 60 soccer fields, from 2013 to 2019, according to a Media Release the City sent out in June of this year: 

https://www.victoria.ca/assets/City~Hall/Media~Releases/2021/2021.06.03_
MR_Victoria's%20Urban%20Forest%20is%20Growing.pdf

This is news which tree-watchers like to hear, since it includes the planting of over 500 new trees in parks and on boulevards. We aren't told however how many trees have been removed from private  property (and from boulevards) as a result of the increased development which has raced ahead during that time period. As a whole, within the City proper, we're left with 28% coverage. This leaves a lot of baking and impermeable concrete, off which seasonal rain water is lost -- a lot of unshaded "heat island" space radiating dry air into the atmosphere. In fact, it seems that concrete covers over almost 3/4 of the city-scape. 

Tree-watchers and bird-lovers are greedy for more trees; we would like shade everywhere,  except on the rocky Garry oak meadow hilltops where it does not naturally occur in the native habitat.

We are glad though that in 2020 the City joined the United Nations Trees in Cities Challenge, and now counts about 150,000 trees in its parks, natural areas, boulevards, residential gardens and backyards. Roughly one quarter of the urban forest is managed by the City, while the remaining 75 per cent is on private and public non-park land. 

There are Tree Protection Bylaws, but obviously they fail to protect enough trees, because any standing in the way of paving, building, densification and development are summarily removed. Tree planting is great, but two more measures are required: 

1) trees need to be watered. In a drought, such as we are experiencing right now, we have to decide whether to "save water" or save trees. This year and in every recent year, we notice many trees shrivelling up and dying off. If they don't water them, the officials have wasted public money on their purchase. (And this while the reservoir remains 3/4 full.)

2) the City, and the rest of the CRD, needs to plan development that preserves green-scape, i.e. make a "garden city" with no monster houses and no mega-multi-unit condominium or public housing behemoths. We need to stop blaming housing shortage and housing un-affordability on garden preservation. We have failed to preserve our leafy heritage gardens, but housing shortage has happened anyway. Don't blame trees.

Let's be the city of tiny homes and big gardens. It's a matter of choice, and what sort of building we permit. We need to decide what we value (urban nature or urban blight) and choose the personality we want our town to have.
  



Awaiting "development" in Fernwood 
-- a.k.a. green-space degradation-by-construction 


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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The green, the brown, and the ugly boxes







Why the current fashion for big box houses? To hold all the stuff people buy at big box stores? Long gone are the cute cottages, surrounded with flowers and shade trees. What does the box-y brutal fortress style of house design say about our current public mentality? Could different zoning/design standards get us back into a better "zone"?