This story coming in tomorrow’s Report on Business section from me and business reporter David Ebner about the application from Telus + developer Ian Gillespie for a massive new office tower on Georgia Street, which has been percolating at city hall for several months now.
Although Telus’s head office has been in Vancouver for many years, the perception has always been that its main centre of operations was the giant boot out on the border of Burnaby and Vancouver — a visible symbol for many of the way big companies had fled Vancouver for the suburbs.
If this Telus tower goes ahead, that perception will be turned around symbolically.
Between Telus, Oxford developing two properties in the CBD, a proposal from Austeville Properties to develop a 19-storey office building on the old Budget site on Georgia, the Aquilini office tower resurrected, and Bentall’s new tower on Thurlow, Vancouver is starting to feel like a healthy downtown.
(Now all the city needs is a project on the Bay parkade site, a decision on Larwill Park, and a decision on the Canada Post building and Georgia will really be cooking.)
Both the Vancouver Board of Trade and city planners, of course, see this as the good result of a policy to shut down any condo development in a wide area around the central business district.
I’d like to hear from my usual suspects on the economics of this. Is it really the condo ban? Or is it the shortage of office space, which according to Bob Levine from Avison Young is driving rents for Triple A space up to $40 a square foot and making office development financially viable?
