Vancouver’s Protected ‘View Cones’ Have Started to Melt

This summer, enjoy your “view cones” before they melt.

Vancouver’s view cones, sometimes known as view corridors, are a unique protection created by the city back in 1989.

They are viewpoints that offer an unencumbered vista of the North Shore mountains from specific locations like City Hall, a number of major streets, and parks like Queen Elizabeth and John Hendry by Trout Lake. The city has set height limits to prevent developers from erecting towers in those view cones that would block the mountains for all to enjoy.

The policy was created back when Vancouver began densifying its downtown in earnest. The city wanted to ensure that even as towers were added, residents would still be able to catch daily glimpses of the natural setting that makes the city a special place to live.

However, the ruling ABC party — which currently holds a majority on city council and is spearheaded by Mayor Ken Sim — has a different perspective: view cones are too restrictive and limit the potential for new development that the city needs.

Shortly after taking office, Sim put it this way: “Vancouver does not have a view cone crisis. In Vancouver, we have a housing crisis.”

On July 10, ABC Coun. Peter Meiszner’s motion to overhaul view cones passed, thanks to support from his party’s councillors. In his closing comments, Meiszner said that the decision “balances” the celebration of views with the need for more homes.

View cones are not being eliminated altogether. However, the number of them has been cut down from 38 to 24. And 11 of the surviving view cones will be slightly relocated or reduced in size.

According to city staff, the decision unlocks 108 million to 215 million square feet of space for developers to build projects under current city guidelines.

View cones: the inside scoop

Larry Beasley remembers how the idea of view cones came about in the late 1980s.

This was before he made a name as Vancouver’s co-chief planner, sharing the role with Ann McAfee. Beasley was then the deputy planner for downtown.

“We were having constant struggles with developers because they would propose a development and we’d all see this beautiful view that was going to be lost,” he recalled.

After a conversation with Gordon Campbell, the mayor of the day who went on to become a BC Liberal premier, the city decided to set up a team to solve the view problem. It was composed of staff, councillors and consultants who worked on everything from public engagement to financial impacts on development. Thousands of Vancouverites were consulted.

In 1989, after a year of work, the team presented a view cone policy to city council, which approved the protection of mountain views from various parts of the city — some of which will now be lost as a result of the ABC motion this year.

In the process of drafting the 1989 view cone policy, consultants spoke with 72 other cities and only five of them had protected view corridors. They were created to safeguard views not of the landscape but of buildings such as Parliament in Ottawa and the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

Vancouver proved to be doing something unique.

Sculpting a skyline

One might think that developers would be upset with the restrictive nature of view cones, but they generally did not push back, says Beasley.

The policy provided certainty for developers. In cases where their proposed towers would penetrate a view cone, the city worked with them to redesign their shape to keep the same density or allowed density to be transferred to another site.

It was important for the city to remain “honourable” and not allow any exceptions with regard to the view cones, he says.

“If one developer got through and blocked the view, I would be sorry for all the other developers that we put them through all that.”

As time went by, the city did allow a bit of wiggle room.

It considered permission for tall buildings to enter a view cone if they demonstrated a “new benchmark for architectural creativity and excellence” while making a “significant contribution to the beauty and visual power of the city’s skyline.” Some examples of this include the Living Shangri-La, Vancouver House and the Trump International Hotel and Tower (since renamed the Paradox Hotel).

A more recent example of another allowance comes from 2018, when the council of the day under then-mayor Gregor Robertson permitted a tower to enter the view cone if the developer kept all of the units as rental housing.

“The whole ability to achieve this security has to do with a quid pro quo,” said Beasley. “If you keep your allowances relatively logical, then you can occasionally make an exception.”

Overall, he was pleased to see that the policy was popular with the public, showing off Vancouver’s spectacular setting. Beasley would become known as one of the fathers of “Vancouverism,” a school of city building that aims to do density well, with a mixing of uses, ample green space and none of the starkness that is sometimes associated with towers. The view cones are a key part of this philosophy.

“Part of the gestalt of the city is our connection to the mountains and the water,” he said.

When the cones started to crumble

This month’s municipal overhaul is the most significant change of the view cone policy since its inception.

A number of view cones were discarded because the city said they had been “substantially compromised.”

In the case of the view cones at the Laurel Landbridge across Sixth Avenue, the staff report said it was due to “tree growth in foreground with no safe and accessible alternative view origin point.”

“We don’t know if anyone asked the question, ‘Well, should we prune the trees?’” said Beasley. “To so quickly seem to rule those out just worries me a bit.”

Some of the surviving view cones were reduced in size.

“All of a sudden, a spacious view of the mountains becomes a small view, which I feel very, very sad about.... The idea was to keep it spacious, to keep that evidence of the mountains,” Beasley said. “Even now, when you walk through the downtown, you walk along the seawall and south False Creek, oh my goodness, the mountains and the water are so evident — that is our town.”

As for the rationale that overhauling view cones would open up new density for affordable housing, Beasley says it would have been helpful to offer the public an exact accounting of the affordable units gained.

Also, without policy to mandate affordability, the market will just do what it does, especially on downtown land that goes for a premium.

“If I was a developer with one of those sites, I wouldn’t be thinking about any kind of affordable housing,” he said. “These are going to be the apartments with spectacular views. And you know and I know how much that adds value to an apartment. Now, maybe they will allow taller buildings and get some of the [affordable] units — but they will be down at the bottom of the building.”

Considering how much public involvement there was over the creation of the view cones, what frustrates Beasley the most about the recent changes is that there wasn’t much in the way of public engagement beyond having speakers show up at City Hall.

“When you start playing with people’s rights, their amenities and what they’ve expected they have secure for years... you have to involve people. You have to find out if they believe in trade-offs,” said Beasley.

“Involvement is hard. It’s a little bit time-consuming. It’s costly. But you can get decisions out of it [that] are much more intelligent and much more resilient if you just lay the opinions of a few people on it.”