Sun

When decorating small spaces, reduce any contrast of colors in the design elements and accessories to help expand the room.

Condos, apartments, and smaller homes all offer unique design challenges: will everything fit, which colors should be used, and how can spaces be multi-functional and still beautiful?

COLOR

When choosing a color scheme for a small space it is best to stick to maximum of three colors and patterns. Solid colors and tiny patterns work best. Too many colors or designs in a small space can create a look of chaos. Do not add more than one item, color or pattern not in your scheme to maintain better synchronization.

When painting walls, use light, bright colors. Save bolder and darker colors for furniture and accessories. Light colored walls and white ceilings are more reflective and amplify the effects of natural light. Choosing a trim and molding color that is lighter than your walls will also make your room appear larger since darker colors appear further away and lighter colors appear closer.

If you wish to use darker colors, or you are not able to change a darker wall color, move darker colors to the background by emphasizing whites and very light neutrals.

DECOR

A large mirror in a small room serves many purposes. In addition to looking attractive, mirrors reflect light, brightening the room day and night. Mirrors also reflect images of open space, making the room appear larger. This effect can be increased by slanting a mirror slightly upward and reflecting more of the ceiling or by placing a mirror opposite of a window with an outdoor view. Glass-front cabinets and reflective surfaces can be used to mimic the reflective qualities of mirrors and help keep small spaces looking clean and open.

Mirrors can also be used to increase the impact of decorative items without taking up addition space. By placing items such as flower arrangements or collectable figurines directly in front of a mirror, you can double the appearance of the items’ size or number.

FURNITURE

Keep furniture in scale with the room. Large, overstuffed furnishings can overpower a small space. Choose instead smaller, dual purpose items such as a chest of drawers that can serve as an end-table and a storage area, or chairs and items that can be easily stacked and placed in a corner when more space is needed. When selecting furniture, look for open, airy designs such as sofas with no arms or open back chairs and bed frames.

A line drawn diagonally across a room from corner to corner is the longest straight line in any room. Arranging larger pieces of furniture at an angle can give a room a larger appearance by drawing attention to the room’s diagonal length. Keeping the view at eyelevel unobstructed and placing tall items furthest from the main entry also increases the visual depth of a room.

For in-depth design information and links to a host of useful online tools visit www.myspacedesigners.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Once ridiculed ICBC property development nets profit of $39 million

Michael Kane
Sun

Surrey‘s award-winning Central City development has been sold for $245.75 million in what is believed to be British Columbia‘s biggest real estate deal in history for a single property.

Once dismissed as a monument to the incompetence of the province’s last NDP government, the development has been bought by a consortium of unidentified pension funds.

The sale dwarfs last year’s biggest transaction, the $150-million sale of the Telus headquarters on Kingsway in Burnaby, and the sale of Burrard Street‘s Park Place office tower in the $160-million range a few years ago.

“It is certainly one of the largest sales ever in British Columbia history,” Central City’s realtor Kevin Meikle, a vice-president of Cushman & Wakefield LePage, said in an interview Wednesday.

The deal brings a net profit of about $39 million to the sellers, the Insurance Corp. of B.C., which had previously written off $141 million of the property’s value due to loss of tenants and poor market conditions.

Today the development’s 1.5 million square feet of offices and shops are virtually fully let to long-term tenants and Surrey is acknowledged as one of the fastest growing municipalities in Canada.

“Certainly buyers bought into the wave of Surrey growth and the successful rebranding of Whalley as its city centre,” Meikle said.

“There are lots of young families moving into the area, which is especially good for retail, and from an office point of view, it’s a strong A-class building just 35 minutes from downtown Vancouver by SkyTrain.”

The property attracted more than 10 purchase offers from around the world. In 2004, it was the winner of an international real estate association’s special jury award as the world’s best overall new development for its combination of stunning architecture and building innovation.

The sale is the culmination of a remarkable turnaround story for ICBC which spent $182 million to build Surrey Central’s 25-storey office tower atop an existing mall which it purchased for $49 million in 1999.

ICBC had intended to occupy the tower, along with Tech BC, a new university planned by the previous government, but when ICBC downsized by about 1,000 people, and the Liberals pulled the plug on Tech BC, the tower was left vacant in a slow market.

In 2001, an independent appraisal prompted a writedown of $100 million, followed by a further $41 million.

The NDP-initiated development was described by former provincial finance minister Gary Collins as a scandal on the same scale as the fast ferry fiasco.

“No cost was spared,” Collins scoffed. “The only difference between this and the fast ferries is that this one doesn’t move.”

But two years later the Liberals were back at the same location to shell out $70 million to acquire 305,000 square feet of the property as the Surrey campus of Simon Fraser University.

ICBC decided to offload the rest of the development, including 570,000 square feet of office tower and podium space, and 490,000 square feet of retail mall space, because it represented too much money tied up in a single investment, said Doug McClelland, media relations manager.

He said the proceeds will be reinvested to help keep ICBC’s rates low and stable.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Coquitlam opposes Riverview plan, but city’s inaction is telling

Pete McMartin
Sun

In the course of doing this job, and in the course of living in a suburb, I have heard, uttered in various degrees of disgust, the following comment hundreds of times about the Downtown Eastside.

IT GOES SOMETHING LIKE:

“Awful, isn’t it, what’s happened down there? All those street people and crack addicts wandering around! Why don’t police do something? Doing drugs out in the open and begging for change! Pity the poor tourists! It’s Vancouver‘s shame.”

This is the accepted wisdom across the Lower Mainland. It’s probably the accepted wisdom across Canada.

It is also wrong.

The Downtown Eastside is not Vancouver‘s shame. If it is anything, it is testimony to the city’s humanity. It is testimony to its citizens’ limitless patience.

Almost alone, the City of Vancouver and its residents have borne the burden of the intersecting scourges the Downtown Eastside breeds — the drug trade, the homelessness, the HIV-AIDS epidemic, the property crime and, most criminal of all, the disenfranchisement of the mentally ill.

Led by consecutive city councils and an enlightened social planning department, however, the city has supplied or made provision for the vast majority of social housing units and emergency beds in the Lower Mainland. It has done the same in the area of emergency health services. While it can be argued that the concentration of those services perpetuates those problems, there can be no argument about who is doing the heavy lifting in dealing with them. And that is the City of Vancouver and its residents.

Which brings me again, this week, to Riverview.

Coquitlam’s government has let it be known that it opposes the provincial government’s idea of putting thousands of market housing units on the 98-hectare site to subsidize the construction of a smaller number of social housing units for the homeless, the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled.

The idea is to integrate those smaller groups within the larger population — a philosophy that has been tried successfully time and again in Vancouver. Moreover, the market housing would pay for the social housing — again, a philosophy already being applied in Vancouver in the redevelopment of Little Mountain.

Coquitlam council, however, is adamant in its opposition to market housing on Riverview, because its leafy, arty vision of the 98-hectare site is different than that of the provincial government. Thus, thousands of social housing units may not be built, at least, not at Riverview.

In light of that opposition, I thought it would be instructive to look at some figures supplied by the Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan’s office and the Greater Vancouver Regional District.

According to the GVRD’s Homeless Count 2005 report, Vancouver, with 27 per cent of the GVRD’s total population, provided shelter for 700 homeless people.

That worked out to 74 per cent of the GVRD total of homeless people who successfully found a place to sleep in emergency shelters or safe homes.

The northeast sector, which includes Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, and which comprises 10 per cent of the GVRD’s population, provided shelter for eight people, or one per cent of the GVRD total. None of those eight were housed in Coquitlam.

According to the report Greater Vancouver Shelter Strategy 2006-2015, the City of Vancouver provided far and above the great majority of permanent shelter and safe house beds in the GVRD, with 490 spaces, or 76 per cent of the entire GVRD total.

The number of shelter beds and emergency shelters in the northeast sector?

Zero.

Coquitlam, and it sister communities Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, have no emergency shelters, according to the report.

Now, Coquitlam’s resident homeless population is nowhere near Vancouver‘s. According to Rob Innes, manager of community planning in Coquitlam, the latest count done in the northeast sector identified about 170 homeless people.

But that total has been growing. And Coquitlam’s response to that growth has been slow off the mark. Only recently did council provide for a small shelter on city-owned land for single moms and children who are currently homeless or at risk of homelessness.

The point is, the problems of the homeless, the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled are no longer confined to the Downtown Eastside. They are in every community in the GVRD, as every report on homelessness has said, and those problems are growing. And those communities outside of Vancouver have to start shouldering their share of the burden.

Thus, the Downtown Eastside isn’t Vancouver‘s shame. It is anything but. The shame is much more diffuse, and should be shared by local governments that have either been too complacent to address the problems, or too willing to let the problems coalesce into a neat compact ghetto in downtown Vancouver, far away from their tidy subdivisions.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

B.C. government shows it’s serious about helping people who are mentally ill, but the details have to be worked out

Sun

Last November, Vancouver Sun reader Sandra Latreille wrote a letter to the editor in which she suggested redeveloping the Riverview psychiatric hospital as a homeless facility and treatment centre for drug addicts and the mentally ill.

It seems someone was listening.

B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman has proposed an ambitious redevelopment of the 98-hectare site of the century-old facility that would include housing for the poor, the disabled and the mentally ill as well as market units. Just how big the development will be is unclear, but Coleman rejected a plan put forward by his staff that called for 6,000 to 7,000 housing units because he said that wasn’t enough.

The announcement follows a number of provincial initiatives intended to deal with the persistent problem of homeless people, including the provincial government’s purchase of several Downtown Eastside single-room occupancy hotels and the acquisition and proposed redevelopment of the Little Mountain social housing project in Vancouver.

The Riverview project is notable for many reasons, especially the tacit recognition by government that shutting the hospital in the first place and releasing its patients into the mean streets of the city without adequate support was a monumental mistake. About 40 per cent of Vancouver‘s homeless population is estimated to suffer from mental illness. One can’t ignore the irony that the mentally ill may be returning from whence they came. But this time the facility will be a state-of-the-art housing and treatment complex, with assisted living units and institutional beds within an integrated community of residents from all socio-economic strata.

The project being contemplated puts homelessness, addiction and mental illness high on the political agenda, something the so-called “homelessness budget” last February failed to do. The government has now uncorked this genie and will not be able to put it back in the bottle.

However, these are early days and the project is still a vision, not a blueprint. An official request for proposals is still a long way off and the price tag is unknown. There’s no prospect that it will be completed before the Olympic Games in 2010. The best guess for an opening is 2012.

While the city of Vancouver has welcomed the project, Coquitlam is the municipality that will call the shots since that is where Riverview is located. Coleman indicated the government would not force the project on Coquitlam, but would consult with the community to build a consensus.

In announcing the Riverview project, the government has sent the message that it is serious about dealing with the issue. This is an opening gambit in a conversation — let’s call it a negotiation — about what will be built when and who pays how much.

We have finished talking about ideology, playing the blame game and wringing hands. There’s no debate now about what needs to be done, only about how to do it.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

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