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Billionaire Singapore owner of Plaza of Nations property promises housing for locals, art museum, a green development

June 27th, 2017 · No Comments

There’s going to be a lot of conversation in the next year (and more) about Northeast False Creek, the last big piece of False Creek waterfront that’s going to be developed.

Every piece of the creek’s development has generated debate, starting in the 1970s when the TEAM council of the day decided to convert former industrial land into family housing — a proposition that many thought was dubious and that would create an “instant slum.”

Vancouverites have debated the look, cost, ownership, marketing, and usefulness for city residents of each new development: Concord Pacific lands on the north side in the ’90s, Olympic Village on the south side in the ’00s, and now this.

I did a story a few weeks ago about the overall plan for Northeast False Creek. This recent story, about the specific plans for the Canadian Metropolitan Properties land around Plaza of Nations, came about because Oei Hong Leong was in town and willing to talk to media.

I’m documenting the utopian ideas everyone is bringing forth so that we have a record of what was planned originally. Then we can compare, at some later date, with what actually ends up being built.

I did ask Mr. Oei about any plans to market the 1,400 units planned for the area overseas. I see that Ian Young posted a question on Twitter over the weekend about his answer on that.

Hey Frances, when you say he won’t be selling overseas, does this mean he won’t allow condos to be bought overseas?
1 reply 3 retweets 9 likes

I asked him only about marketing overseas, since that was the topic du jour at the time I interviewed him. Later in the week, the evolving Twitter snowball on this issue started parsing this issue into more complexities. One is the whole murky issue about whether developers are ACTUALLY marketing their units overseas, whether they’re getting offshore realtors to sell some of their units, or whether it’s a case that offshore realtors are just screenshotting pictures of a development and putting out advertising that claims they are selling units in the project.

So, to answer the question, no, I didn’t start interrogating him about all the ways in which units in his project might be sold overseas, largely because I was not clued in to this at the time of the interview.

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