B.C. in the lurch as promised $1.5-billion fund left out of budget

Frances Bula
Sun

The disappearance of a promised new $1.5-billion housing program from the federal budget is very bad news for B.C. and especially Vancouver as they prepare for the Olympics, Vancouver politicians and housing advocates say.

“We cannot rebuild our cities and we cannot prepare for the Olympics without money for housing,” Coun. Jim Green said Friday after an emergency conference call with other representatives from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities on the issue. “It’s a real problem for B.C. and Vancouver.”

This week’s budget shocked housing advocates nationally. The federal Liberals had campaigned on a promise of adding $1.5 billion in housing money over the next five years; two of the three opposition parties had supported that. But there was no mention of any new programs in the budget.

Labour and Housing Minister Joe Fontana’s explanation to housing groups has been that it was hard for him to get any extra money, because there is still $800 million left from the previous housing program initiated in 2001. Only B.C. and Quebec took advantage of that program, which required provinces to put up matching money in order to get federal housing dollars, and obtained the full share allotted to them from that program.

Green says that leaves B.C. in the lurch.

“It penalizes British Columbia and Quebec that have been using the program. This is totally unfair to the places that want to deal with the issues and are prepared to put up their part of the ante.”

Not only should there have been a new program, but B.C. should have received a special allocation to help get ready for the Olympics, Green said.

He said the city signed on to the Olympics on the understanding that it would not mean displacing the poor or creating a homelessness problem, as has happened in other cities.

Green said he is going to advocate that the municipalities’ federation push for a couple of alternative strategies.

One is that provinces that are willing to build housing should simply be able to take money from the allocations of provinces that aren’t.

“If there are provinces unwilling to use their allocation, then British Columbia and Quebec and any others should be able to take those out of the pool and apply them. They shouldn’t be penalized because those others aren’t doing their job.”

Green said politicians also need to work with provincial municipal associations to put pressure on other provinces to get on board.

The absence of new money for housing came as a complete surprise to many.

Green said he had been in meetings at various times in the past few months and Fontana and the minister of state for communities, John Godfrey, had never indicated there was any thought of wavering from the $1.5-billion promise, which many were counting on. Fontana and his staff recently criss-crossed the country, holding meetings to solicit people’s ideas on future housing needs and programs.

NDP MP Libby Davies, who represents Vancouver East, said her party was stunned by the news.

“I thought that they would make at least the minimum commitment of $1.5 billion. This was not about a lack of capacity to provide the dollars,” she said.

The NDP won’t be supporting the budget, in part because of the housing issue.

Davies said it looks to her as though the Liberals decided that housing was an expendable issue, one that wouldn’t cost them too many political points.

Vancouver advocate Linda Mix, of the Tenants Rights Action Coalition echoed that.

“It says to me that homelessness is not a priority.”

Vancouver‘s housing centre director, Cameron Gray, said the federal decision is a blow for Vancouver, which had been hoping to create 800 units a year of social housing for the next several years as part of its housing plan.

Although B.C. just got its $42-million cheque from the federal government for the second phase of the old housing program, that will go fast and it’s now unclear how long B.C. will have to wait for more money while other provinces catch up.

“What happens in the next couple of years while those provinces are coming onstream?” he asked. “Every year, we just dig ourselves a bigger hole in the social deficit.”

B.C. Housing Minister Murray Coell was unavailable for comment. However, staff in his office said it was a disappointment, but the province does have the $42-million, phase-two money this year, and people are hopeful that the federal government will pull things together next year and come up with extra money.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

Michael Sasges
Sun

Living with élan downtown means never living with ‘Kita’

Presentation centre address: 1295 Seymour (at Drake), Vancouver

Presentation centre telephone: 604-696-9030

Hours: 12 p.m. – 5 p.m. daily, except Fridays

On offer: 229 apartments and townhouses

Prices: Studio, 472 – 630 sq. ft., $199,900; two-bedroom apartment + roof deck, $499, 900; ”cityhome,” about 1,000 sq. ft., $519,900

Developer: Cressey Architect: Paul Merrick

The terms of endearment used by builders and developers to woo the downtown new-home buyer took a decidedly passionate turn this week with the launch of the marketing campaign for the $80 million elan residential tower.

Costing about $500,000 to build, decorate and furnish, the elan presentation centre features three “lifestyle pods” to transform visitors into prospects.

A “morning” kitchen (facing page, top left), an “evening” scheme (facing page, bottom left)) and a “night” kitchen (top middle) demonstrate that, indeed, new-home temptation and seduction, like the devil, is in the details.

Each has been individualized with fittings and finish.

“Morning,” for example, tops the island sink with a gooseneck faucet; “evening,” with a single-lever faucet; “night,” a single-lever, gooseneck faucet.

The millwork in the “morning” kitchen is cherry; in “evening” it’s white; and in “night” it’s teak.

One constant in the three kitchens, besides the obvious, like the location of the cooktop and oven is behind the lower double doors on the left: They open on a front-loading washer and dryer.

The presentation centre’s designer, Kari Henshaw at Insight Design Inc., said her goal with the elan assignment was to create generally “an experience” for visitors and specifically with the pods “three completely different vibes.”

“Morning is classic, timeless, clean lines,” she dares you to deny. “Evening is a more modern, contemporary, minimalist feel ready for that kind of person who likes simplicity and the clean edge of the colour white.

“And the third pod is more hip and funky, a bit risque, not for all.”

Developer representative Hani Lammam says the presentation centre is an acknowledgement from Cressey that the metro Vancouver new-home buyer generally and the downtown buyer specifically is an extraordinarily astute consumer.

“It’s a brand signalling the individuality and urbanity of the downtown new-home buyer.

“Nowhere in Canada do we see this level of sophistication utilized to sell a home.”

The project’s marketer, MAC Real Estate, generated early publicity last summer, by inviting the public to name the project.

The website campaign generated hundreds of candidate names, with Kita, Spira and Meta among the more tempting considered and not used.

“Why just live, when you can live with elan,” the marketing campaign’s slogan soundly trumps “Why just live, when you can live with Kita.”

The developer introduced the centre Thursday with a “club” affair headlined by somebody called Kyprios (below) (“Parental Advisory: Explicit Content; Content Explicite . . . ,” his CD reads.)

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

George Wong will be moving into the third floor of One Harbour Green

Malcolm Parry
Sun

Realtor of The Year George Wong sold out the waterfront One Harbour Green to, among others, himself.

GEORGE WONG, 49, has a special reason to look from his 18th-floor office window in West Hastings Street‘s Guinness Tower and watch the One Harbour Green project rising two blocks away. And it’s not just because the Macdonald Realty Realtor of the Year and his 25-member Platinum Project Marketing Group sold out the 57-unit development in a little over a month.

In October, the Hong Kong-born, Vancouver-raised Wong will actually move into the building, where his third-floor, 2,200-square-foot unit (plus 3,000-square-foot deck) set him back “a lot less” than the penthouse. That’s the one for which Wong got a record $6.02 million from a Texan couple, for whom it will be a “recreational” — and fourth — home away from home.

Wong won’t have to move his furniture and clothes quite so far. He lives 13 floors higher in the nearby Anila, which is the first in ASPAC Developments’ alphabet of Coal Harbour projects — Anila, Bahania, Casina, Denia, Escala — which only changed sequence with One Harbour Green.

The new naming rule will hold for at least one more development, the 71-unit, $180-million Two Harbour Green. Its 5,800-square-foot penthouse and 3,000-square-foot “sky garden” will fetch “over $8 million — closer to 10” when sales begin in April, Wong said.

That project will easily take Wong past a career sales total of $1 billion — still small spuds beside ASPAC brother-principals Raymond, Thomas and Walter Kwok’s reported joint net worth of $13.7 billion.

As for the size and cost of the gestating Three Harbour Green, “That depends on what we get from buyers at Number Two,” Wong said. But he does expect them to maintain their current composition of 60 per-cent local, 20 per-cent American and the remainder from Britain, Germany and elsewhere.

“Very few Asian are buying here now,” he said. “And those that do are already local residents.”

Some may also be brushing up on their meditation, which Wong began as a University of B.C. commerce and accounting student and now practises twice daily.

He gets more than psychic and academic rewards from the Point Grey campus nowadays. He sold out Orca West’s 95-unit Galleria project there in one week last month, but expects to take three months moving Brenmor’s upscale, low-rise Esse, where Latin scholars may clamour for unit 2B.

Looking into his five-year crystal ball, Wong sees “a lot more world travellers coming here to buy for recreational purposes in Victoria, Kelowna and Vernon.” Meanwhile, Vancouver working couples “are setting aside their capital for weekend getaways in place like Agassiz,” where, coincidentally, he represents a property near the Sandpiper golf course.

As for Wong in 2010, “I want to spend two months a year in Bali, two in the Caribbean, six in Vancouver, and the rest I’ll fill in — maybe Tibet.

“I told you I’ve started meditation again.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

Vancouver’s winning combination draws meetings despite oversupply of space

Bruce Constantineau
Sun

44 conventions have already signed on to use the Vancouver Convention Centre expansion, shown in an artist’s rendering.

U.S. cities from Hickory, N.C., to Fort Wayne, Ind., are falling all over themselves in a “type of arms race” to build new convention facilities even though attendance at major trade shows has dropped in recent years, according to a study from U.S. think tank The Brookings Institution.

News about too many convention centres chasing a static market comes as the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre prepares to more than triple its convention space by opening a $565-million expansion project by the summer of 2008.

The Brookings study noted the convention space available for the top 200 U.S. trade shows has increased by 40 per cent since 1990 but attendance at those conventions has declined, even in major destinations such as Chicago, New York and New Orleans. Total attendance currently languishes at 1993 levels.

“With events and attendance sagging in even the hottest destination spots, few centres are even able to cover basic operating costs and local economic impacts have fallen far short of expectations,” the study said.

It also states that with the possible exception of a handful of major cities, the grand promises of convention centre investment are unlikely to be realized, “the strategy doomed to failure.”

But VCEC general manager Barbara Maple said Vancouver won’t face the same problems that have hurt some U.S. cities that built new convention centres for the wrong reasons.

“Some facilities were built in smaller communities that expected more national and international business but didn’t get it because they didn’t have enough hotel capacity or airline capacity (to complement their convention centre),” she said. “That’s not a problem here.”

Maple noted Vancouver routinely turns away 30 to 50 convention events a year because the current facility already operates at full capacity and is too small for some events. She expects the expanded centre will attract a lot of new business from large groups that couldn’t consider Vancouver in the past.

Maple noted 44 conventions already have been booked for the new convention centre between 2008 and 2016.

She said a lot of U.S. convention centres focus entirely on the U.S. market but Vancouver has a more diversified client base, split almost evenly among Canadian, U.S. and international customers.

While new convention centre expansions are being planned in places such as Peoria, Ill., and Des Moines, Iowa, Maple said Vancouver enjoys a competitive advantage in having a strong global brand with a certain cachet.

“Our clients see us as being a great international city but there’s still lots of work to be done in that area,” she said. “We rate very highly as a leisure destination but we need to improve our reputation as a meetings and convention destination. We have fallen behind in that area but the expansion will put us back on the map.”

Maple said convention clients are tough negotiators because they know a lot of facilities are after their business. But she said nothing is given away for free to attract new convention business to Vancouver.

“Savvy clients know there isn’t anything for free. If you’re not paying for something at the front end, then you’re paying for it somewhere else.”

Tourism Vancouver meeting and convention sales vice-president Dave Gazley said winning the 2010 Olympic bid validated Vancouver as a true international destination, making it easier to sell the city to prospective convention clients.

He said groups that held conventions in Vancouver last year reported that attendance at the events was, on average, 12 per cent higher than their 2003 conventions because Vancouver is a popular city.

“We’re a little shy about it sometimes but we have an incredible destination that people want to visit and expansion of the convention centre just opens up so many more doors for us,” Gazley said.

© The Vancouver Sun 2005