Photos by Kayla Isomura
Looking at my house fills me with a quiet joy. She is painted in turquoise with a bright yellow door. Vines gives her a winsome hairdo that changes with the seasons.
She is also at the core of a successful walkshed — the radius of a life lived in motion.
Vancouver’s Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood, right off Commercial Drive, isn’t perfect, but it has almost everything we could want, right at our doorstep: public institutions, recreation, office space, shops, and professional services, and even light industry in the form of green building supplies and micro-breweries.
The Drive also has many different housing styles — making it a home for people from different walks of life — and puts us within 15 minutes of everything we need, a worthy city planning goal.
And more than just my physical neighbourhood, my walkshed is also the space that invites me to engage with my surroundings up close.
As a city planner, I’m thrilled to live in a vibrant area that keeps me looking, learning, and asking: what makes cities work for everyone?
I invite you to walk with me through my walkshed, to see what I experience here as a planner and a neighbour, the good and the bad.
Along the way, I hope you’ll not only notice what stands out to me but also find new ways of looking that you can carry back to your own neighbourhood.
What catches your eye? What feels welcoming or out of place? By the end, maybe we’ll both see our walksheds a little differently.
First, let’s cross the street.
Co-op housing, key to solving the housing crisis
The building kitty-corner to our home is a three-storey co-op housing project. Residents host community events together and go on annual co-op camping trips.
The nearby traffic circle garden, which is under the co-op’s care, is full of some of my favourite plants — fountain grass, euphorbia, crocosmia, delphiniums and late-blooming dahlias. I’m greeted by a sign reading, “This street garden is ADOPTED.” The traffic circle exemplifies the spirit of cooperation among residents, and neighbourliness towards us all.
The co-op’s porches and patios are home to houseplants and nasturtium, a rusting bird cage, trellises and vines, a pride flag, and a wrought-iron sign proclaiming “INSPIRATION.”
Co-op housing is key to solving the housing crisis, with the potential to offer both housing quantity and quality while addressing the pressing need for stable, affordable housing.
And yet, co-op housing is a precarious housing form in Vancouver and elsewhere.
Like the great majority of co-ops in the city, this one is over 35 years old. This points to the need to develop and fund new models for co-op housing, and to renew and support existing, aging co-ops to ensure preservation and maintenance, retrofit subsidies, regulatory protections, and technical assistance.
I turn on my heels and walk south.
A bustling home to renters
At the end of my block is a two-storey-plus-basement apartment block, stuccoed and painted a deep blue. It dates from about 1930, which accounts for the high-ceilinged units and panes of original stained glass. Moss surrounds the building. Mismatched garden boxes squat on the boulevard.
This block has attracted a succession of creative people, including the talented Canadian rapper Shad when he lived in Vancouver — mainly the artist-plus-student or artist-plus-job-that-pays-the-bills-types who can’t afford to live off art alone.
As I walk by the building, residents are visible to me through their windows, cooking meals. At the entryway is a hodgepodge of doorbells, handwritten notes, and a cat door installed at one of the ground-floor windows.
On sunny days, tenants lounge in the large side yard. I think of them as younger versions of me; people who need affordable rental housing but who might not feel stable in secondary suites and condo apartments, where tenancy is unsecured.
The building also provides an example of the densities and market housing choices offered within several blocks of The Drive in every direction.
We know that rental units are more affordable than homeownership for most households. Incentivizing the construction of new rental housing is part of solving the affordable housing crisis, certainly, but so too is retaining the rental buildings we already have.
As of 2020, only nine percent of City of Vancouver residents lived in purpose-built rental housing. We need to protect these tenants.
One important caveat about this building, and it’s a caveat shared by many legacy residential buildings: its units, even on the ground floor, are not wheelchair accessible.
At the end of my block, I turn left and head east to The Drive. There are useful curb cuts at all the intersections I cross by — meaning they’re accessible to people using mobility devices or pushing strollers.
My favourite local shops
At the corner with Commercial Drive sits my favourite bakery. I can see a number of delicious pastries in the window, and people sitting and laughing outdoors on cafe seating that wraps around the building. This bakery has high prices and occupies what was once the home of an affordable family bakery.
Fifteen-minute cities need to offer a variety of housing and transportation options, and a mix of commercial floorspace — including affordable floorspace for small and locally run shops.
Looking down the block towards the North Shore Mountains, the buildings vary from one to three stories, with small commercial retail units offering cheap and fancy food, chiropractic services, tattooing, and retail sales — books, flowers, eyeglass frames, and vintage clothes.
The shops’ and cafes’ front doorways are sometimes too narrow to allow all mobility devices but have all been retrofitted with ramps to the sidewalk.
Sitting above the storefronts is a mix of offices and residential units. It’s all there. But is the retail floor space affordable?
Commercially, the Drive offers conflicting examples, but an overarching trend, of gentrification. Decades ahead of current patterns, it was once home to several manufacturers and repair shops, and petro fuelling stations.
Now, while it is still home to family-owned dollar stores and decades-old businesses, it is clear that gentrification is happening, and public policy, both municipal and provincial, has enabled it to happen more quickly.
I walk to the end of the commercial block and turn west.
Grandview Park, my unofficial backyard
Across the street, flanking me as I walk down the hill, is the neighbourhood’s centre — Grandview Park. As I descend the hill, I appreciate the truly grand view of the downtown, with a backdrop of mountains.
This park operates as my unofficial backyard, and it holds a special place in my heart.
Fun fact: it sports the world’s first bike polo court, evolving out of the former spontaneous use of a run-down tennis court. I watch a whip-fast bike polo tournament underway as I walk by.
Vancouver leads North America in many ways, including on greenspace, but East Vancouver has much less greenspace per person than the West End. East Vancouver also has fewer recreational facilities per capita compared to the city’s more affluent neighbourhoods.
To achieve a 15-minute city, residents need access to green spaces as well as playgrounds and other recreation.
When I get to the corner, I turn south. I walk down my block ten metres or so and I’m back home. I look up at my colourful house.
‘Their chickens are our chickens’
Our backyard is the size of a typical side yard and our front garden essentially belongs to the city. No matter. We have a nearby park and school playground.
Our lot and the neighbouring lots pre-date the imposition of zoning constraints in the city. In other words, our lots have a density equivalent to low-rise apartment buildings and townhouses.
Sure, we see into each other’s homes, can hear each other’s music when our windows and doors are open, and have a courtside view of each other’s summer barbecues. Their chickens are our chickens. You get used to it. If you need privacy, draw the curtains.
Most detached houses in Vancouver are allowed densities significantly lower than ours. In Vancouver, a single-detached house is permitted only a 0.6 Floor Space Ratio, or FSR, a planning calculation that measures allowable floor space in relation to the size of the lot. Our 1.0 FSR home is almost twice the density that’s typically allowed.
That’s a shame given the livability and neighbourliness of the small-lot housing option. It also makes it harder to create 15-minute neighbourhoods.
B.C.’s new housing regulations, adopted in late 2023, don’t allow lots to be shaved off existing properties to accommodate small-lot non-strata homes.
While multi-family options can provide a good range of housing choices, affordability options, and some energy efficiency benefits with new construction, allowing more small-lot housing options could provide another piece of the housing puzzle.
What can you notice in your neighbourhood?
On this short walk, I got to reflect on my own neighbourhood — the precarity of some housing forms and small shops, the centrality of green spaces as oases for city dwellers, and the importance of housing supply for people of all incomes and abilities.
Best of all, I learned it was easy to love my home and neighbourhood even as I looked directly at the problems we need to solve.
I encourage you to take a moment to truly observe your own neighborhood — its rhythms, its spaces, and how people move through them.
Notice where sidewalks feel welcoming and where they fall short, where crossings prioritize safety or where they deter pedestrians, including people with mobility devices or strollers. Pay attention to how streets, shops, parks, lighting, and greenery all shape your experience.
As you uncover these details, think about the changes that could make walking more inviting: wider sidewalks, safer crosswalks, better lighting, or traffic-calming measures.
By sharing these observations with your city — through surveys, public meetings, or neighbourhood associations — you can advocate for thoughtful interventions that make your community more walkable and vibrant.
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This story originally appeared at The Tyee.
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Emilie K. Adin is the President of the Planning Institute of British Columbia, and an Adjunct Professor at the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning. In 2023, she was named one of the 500 most influential leaders in British Columbia by BIV Magazine, and she’s patiently awaiting the opportunity to influence her kids and dog. You can find her at linkedin.com/in/emiliekadin/.
