To Brent and everyone else who want to see more office development in the downtown….I don’t disagree. What I do disagree with is the notion that allowing 3 FSR residential will ‘use up’ the required capacity.

But if I am wrong, then why not increase the commercial density from 2 to 6 FSR, and still allow up to 3 residential? Surely that would achieve both of our goals! It would also concentrate more jobs and housing next to the CBD.

Brent

City, developers differ over Marine Drive Canada Line site
Cheryl Rossi, Vancouver Courier
Published: Friday, April 17, 2009
A new neighbourhood proposed for the Marine Drive Station of the Canada Line will soon force council to decide if it wants to retain Vancouver’s critical supply of industrial land.

“It’s probably one of the most complex and important questions we’re facing as a city right now,” Brent Toderian, the city’s director of planning, said. “There’s a finite amount of job space within the city and once you give it to some other use like residential, you can’t get it back.”

Earlier this month land owners PCI Group and architectural firm Busby, Perkins and Will submitted a rezoning application to the city for the land, which is zoned industrial.

The plan for Marine Gateway on Canada Line includes more than 330 condominium suites, an office building, movie theatre, fitness centre and daycare on a 4.8 acre site that includes a new Canada Line station and bus loop between Cambie and Yukon at Southwest Marine Drive. A two-storey retail podium is proposed to surround a covered plaza. PCI and Busby, Perkins and Will say they could construct 245 rental units in a 23-storey tower to appeal to city councillors desperate to expand the city’s rental housing stock.

But Toderian said for ecological reasons the city must preserve low-cost industrial land to create local jobs easily accessible by transit. Job density generates higher ridership than residential density, he said.

Toderian noted residential land generally has four times the value of commercial land, let alone industrial. And the city isn’t keen to see condo dwellers so close to the city’s sometimes pungent waste transfer station at Yukon and Kent because it doesn’t want complaining residents to push industry out.

The developer and architect have offered to install equipment at the waste transfer station to mitigate odours which would benefit the surrounding community, said Andrew Grant, president of PCI Group. He added residential development would provide eyes and ears on the Canada Line station. “This is transit land now,” he said. “You’re not going to locate a factory on a $2 billion transit line. Once the transit lines have been put in, it changes the dynamics of the location dramatically.”

Grant said the former ICBC office at the site employed only 70 to 90 people. He sees the potential for more than 2,300 jobs with the proposed 300,000 square feet of office space, plus shops and services.

Toderian said the city could approve a higher concentration of office development on the site.

City staff intends to present a report in May to council on land use that encourages transit ridership along the Cambie corridor. Staff will recommend council not permit residential use on the site near the Marine Drive Station.

It’s all very well to discuss how we should preserve AAA office space, or allow multi-million dollar condos in the Metro Core, but if we were truly interested in making a sustainable, inclusive city, there would be discussion about how to preserve light industrial space (or, heaven forbid, even increase it).

There might even be discussion that maybe a residential culture of >$500k condos downtown isn’t really such a good thing for the long-term health of the city.

Really, if you’re going to push all the middle and working class workers and jobs into the suburbs so that you can make this cool award-winning central core for yuppies, are you doing anything to make the region greener and more sustainable?

Sorry if I got that wrong about Jameson House. I’m not trying to misrepresent your position but I do distinctly recall talking to Dave Park back in the day about how unhappy the Board was about some of the other buildings that intruded. I believe Shangri La and Hudson were specifically mentioned, unless I’m wrong about that too. And I have done research in the files back to the 1980s, where the board was expressing concern back then about too much encroachment of residential. I don’t think anyone ever thought your position was no residential on the peninsula, but there has been a pretty steady level of concern about encroachment into the CBD and immediately surrounding areas.

Happy to have your comments here and please add other subtleties I may have missed.

Proper planning for the central business district (CBD) is critical to the city, the region, and the province. Its isn’t just downtown Vancouver… Its downtown B.C. The CBD makes up, currently, only 15% of the downtown peninsula. To be clear, residential isn’t being proposed to be taken away from the CBD – it hasn’t been allowed there for at least as long as the Central Area Plan (CAP) has been around (passed by Council in 1991). Further, the CAP always anticipated an expanding of the CBD, and it was the recognition that such office expantion sites were being taken up by much more valuable residential development, that led Council in 2004 to pass interim policy for the CBD expantion area. This policy allowed residential in the expantion area only in limited circumstances (on large sites, or to preserve on-site heritage or SRO uses), to protect the capacity and give us time to study how much office/job space we would need for a balanced downtown in the future. Again, to be clear, it’s not proposed to take more residential potential away than the interim policy had already taken away since 2004 – rather, its proposed to make such residential limitations permanent, adding some new possibilities for mix, while adding more density for job space. There is no “over-swing” of the pendulum proposed.

The downtown contains the largest concentration of job space in the province by far, and the vast majority of triple A office in particular (the “5 star hotel” of job space). It’s where triple A space in the province wants to be. Despite some occational mythology out there, jobs have been consistantly growing downtown and across the city over many decades. Our analysis has confirmed that if we don’t take appropriate planning steps though, both to protect job space potential, and to grow it, we will run out of such job growth potential in the downtown in a surprisingly short time frame. After the most comprehensive economic and space analysis the City has ever done, we calculate we need to not only protect existing job space downtown, but to grow it by an approximate 5.8 million square feet. This is needed to maintain a strong CBD and a healthy, truly mixed downtown over time.

15% of the downtown peninsula – such a small area of land, but unique land, and perhaps the most strategic land in the province for our economy. Its also critically important to our social and environmental sustainability when you consider all the dynamics of the work-to-home relationship.

Some who support even more residential development in the CBD, hold this up as an issue of mixed-use (and isn’t that always better?) and vitality (won’t it be homogeneous without residential?). They position it as a choice between mixed use and homogeneous places. This is a false choice – not what we’re really discussing. I encourage readers to listen to the staff presentation to Council on the web, hear what’s really being proposed, and what’s at stake if we don’t properly address the need for CBD job space as part of a sustainable city.

To be clear, with these proposals there remains room in the downtown peninsula for almost 40,000 more residents even without any new rezoning, and even in the proposed expanded CBD we will continue to have real opportunites for residential. Enough for vitality, in combination with the thousands of people living a very close walk to the CBD. Add to that all the other uses that will add to the CBD mix – restaurants, clubs, social and cultural uses, etc, etc. This is mixed use. This is far from homogeneity. But we will have clarity and stable land values (without residential speculation and higher taxes pushing out job-space potential), and that is what office providers need to be ready for the 7 year development cycle of office space construction. Office development is about being patient, and having land available when the 7 year cycle comes around.

As Vancouver city planners, mixed- use is usually our “default setting”. The vast majority of the downtown peninsula is, and will remain, just such a vigourous mix, although the significantly higher value of residential development has made the acheivement of such a mix challenging at times (some have spoken about the “homogeneity of residential streets”).

For a CBD though, the mix must be special, and artful. For a downtown, the mix can be over a larger area (the whole peninsula), and doesn’t have to be the same on every block. It can’t be over-simplified.

I look forward to further discussion on all aspects of the future of our downtown, as this is a big year for downtown planning!

Regards,
Brent Toderian

Mixed use to the Nth degree . . .

Having said the PD often recognises need for changes then does nothing.

A case in point: NEFC report acknowledges city wide excessive noise transmissions emanating from BC Place. Then laments, it is no place for families.

Byker UK and St Lawrence Toronto, have successfully deployed excessive noise containment buffer buildings. Why not BC Place?

That is but one example . . .

Let us hope, this time, they listen! Ojala

First Lord of the Admiralty Gerald Sutton brown was the first.

George Fountain was, is, forgettable.

Bill Graham was stupid.

Ray Spaxman didn’t have a clue and, still doesn’t: I’m talking view corridors.

Tom Fletcher . . . Huh! No footprint: no fingerprints, no lingering fragrance.

The great triumvirate, Breasley and McAffee: the greatest trio. Yes, yes I know they are only two, but they had GOD on their side. But definitely a lingering fragrance . . .

and now . . .

Brent Toderian. So far, if he were a cricketer he’d be LBW.

My first Vancouver project was Percy Norman Swimming Pool, 1958: C$500,000 (Wow, is that all it cost?).

As I recall we dealt exclusively with Parks Board: Admiral-of-the-Fleet Sutton-Brown didn’t seem interested.

Which brings me to my point: labyrinth creep: the invasion of the moles.

Verbosity, control, meddling experts have so perverted the system only an epiphany and save the city . . . paz