Daphne Bramham
Sun
Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun / Dennis Law, one of four Denver brothers who bought the former Ford Centre, now renamed The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts.
Richard Lam, Vancouver Sun / Vancouver boasts seductive scenery and lifestyles — but is in danger of becoming just another haven for the haves, in which the rest of us get to look after them.
Vancouver has had an urban rebirth that is the envy of many cities around the world.
But it’s time to start thinking about the next 30 years before the city becomes a victim of its own success.
The popularity of Coal Harbour, Yaletown and False Creek has proven that living downtown in a high-density neighbourhood isn’t a penalty paid by the poor. Rather it’s a lifestyle actively and aggressively sought by the very rich.
Surrounding the bristle of glass apartment towers are ribbons of bicycle paths, parks, playing fields, schools, restaurants and bars.
More than 19,000 people moved downtown in the past 10 years. There has been a 215-per-cent increase in population and the density on the downtown peninsula is 299 people per acre.
But it’s not just the number of people that has changed. Average Vancouverites have changed the way they live. Now, 67.3 per cent of all homes in Vancouver are apartments.
Even though the economy sucks, Vancouver‘s population growth is averaging 6,000 per year and is expected to grow to 635,000 by 2021. Most of the newcomers are moving into homes on land that once housed industries, factories, warehouses and other kinds of commercial activities.
So it’s time to think about what next even as demand for condos is still so high that developers are selling out before they break ground.
Vancouver is becoming a huge draw for Europeans, Americans and Asian who are purchasing second or third homes where they can spend a few weeks or even a few months each year. They come, dine out at much reduced prices compared to other international centres and enjoy what the city and the nearby mountains and ocean have to offer.
But what they’re not coming for is to establish businesses and it’s leading people like architect Bing Thom to wonder whether the downtown peninsula could become a rich enclave of retirees and foreigners.
“Will Vancouver people be happy being servants to the rich and retired?” Thom asks, rhetorically. “Will they be happy exporting jobs to Burnaby and Surrey?”
Worse still, Vancouver could become a kind of Aspen without the ski resort — a city where real estate is so expensive that most of the downtown workers with jobs in retail, hospitality and tourism will have to commute from the suburbs.
And that would be the antithesis of Vancouver‘s livable city plan, which is intended to cut down on commuting time and its attendant pollution.
Vancouver is already at a point where condo developers are bidding up the price of raw land to the point that Thom says it’s difficult for anyone wanting to build anything other than condos to compete.
Part of the reason the condo developers can do that is because about 60 per cent of the available land downtown is zoned for some sort of residential — including the live-work spaces that raised some controversy last month — and only 40 per cent is for commercial.
But the deeper problem is that there is very little economic activity downtown or anywhere in the province. Vancouver has lost all but a very few head offices and anyone who isn’t building condos has to be concerned about the lack of tenants.
Ever since Dennis Law and his brothers bought the old Ford Centre and renamed it the Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts, he has also been asking a lot of questions about what Vancouver might look like in the next couple of decades.
Law has a vested interest. The Denver-based brothers want to buy the city-owned parking lot behind the theatre to add to what they already own. They’d like to expand the theatre’s cramped lobby and administrative space by building a new cabaret-style theatre across the alley and a hotel, connecting it all together with a glass-encased bridge over the lane.
But it’s hard to compete with the condo developers who are interested in every scrap of downtown land.
“It’s good for the city to have condos built and they are being snarfed up at an incredible rate. But how do you sustain economic growth with no infrastructure for jobs?” says Law. “If all of the best land downtown is only being used for second, third and retirement homes, what kind of a city do you have?”
And as he points out: “With the rate of return you can get on performing arts space, it’s not possible to pay the same price for land as somebody who is buying it for condos or commercial space.”
Which is a bit a dilemma not just for the Law brothers, but for the city.
Law naturally favours cities with strong performing arts traditions. Not only are he and his brothers all very active in Denver‘s cultural scene, their parents are strong supporters of the arts in Hong Kong.
And as everybody knows, Vancouver is not a city known as a cultural hub even in Western Canada. But Law raises an interesting point: Why couldn’t Vancouver become one, and more specifically given the ethnically diverse nature of the city, why can’t Vancouver become a cultural centre where East and West blend?
Not only would a lively arts scene make Vancouver more attractive to its residents, Law cites a study done last year by the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts that found Denver’s cultural facilities employed 7,700 people, generated $1.8 billion US in 2001 and attracted close to 860,000 visitors from outside the state. Metropolitan Denver has about the same population as Greater Vancouver.
What the Colorado study also found is that throughout the 1990s, attendance rose steadily. A person who went to the symphony once in the early 1990s, went more frequently by the end of the decade, suggesting that entertainment dollars are not necessarily finite. Good performances and outstanding exhibitions at theatres and galleries bring people back.
Maybe Vancouverites aren’t interested in the arts and don’t want a cluster of cultural facilities downtown.
But it’s interesting to think about what that might look like and contrast it with a vision of what Vancouver will be if the current condo boom continues unchecked.
Maybe the current plan is the best one. But building great cities requires constant attention and frequent tweaking of plans. Now with the Olympics coming and all that construction set to begin, it is as a good a time as any to think about the future.
© Copyright 2003 Vancouver Sun
