Rezoning changes and the new Canada Line are helping to boost density, particularly in the area where Broadway and Cambie meet
Derrick Penner
Sun
On Cambie Street, big-box stores co-exist with mixed-use retail outlets and condominiums. Photograph by: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
While urban planning around the Canada Line in Richmond is largely complete, in Vancouver much of the planning is just getting underway.
Vancouver city officials have begun the process that will result in rezoning for the high-density development that TransLink wants to see along the line.
However, Jane Bird, CEO of Canada Line Rapid Transit Inc. (CLCO), said developers have already offered a positive response to the new piece of transportation infrastructure, particularly with developments at Broadway and Cambie near city hall.
That location has turned into an intensive mixed-use zone with large-format retail stores at the base and live-work condominium residences on top.
The Crossroads development, on the northwest corner, houses a Whole Foods supermarket and a London Drugs beneath office space and several storeys of condominiums.
Across the street and up the block, The Rise includes a Home Depot and a Save-on-Foods near a Best Buy store and a Canadian Tire.
“Clearly, again, this is an opportunity to add density to some [of the development] that we see there already,” Bird said.
“The Crossroads development is a good example of a mixed use, dense, esthetically pleasing building near transit.” Vancouver planning director Brent Toderian said those developments were exciting for the city because they took what has typically been a suburban amenity — low-rise big-box stores — and brought them into an urban setting in a way that isn’t car-dependent.
“I call this area of Broadway and Cambie the first truly urban power centre in North America,” Toderian said.
He said the new development added to what was already B.C.’s second-biggest concentration of urban job space outside downtown Vancouver.
However, for the rest of the Canada Line corridor within Vancouver, the story remains somewhat of a patchwork with planning underway only for some spots, one of them the 28-acre Oakridge Centre mall site.
Vancouver city council adopted a new policy statement for Oakridge in 2007 that contemplates a considerable increase in residential density, raising it to a maximum potential 1.2 million square feet, from about 150,000 square feet established in a previous policy statement.
Now the city has kicked off an accelerated planning exercise for the remainder of the line, which it hopes to wrap up by the end of next year with a comprehensive policy statement and urban design to guide development along the entire corridor.
“Often you have planning for land use, and you wait with bated breath for the infrastructure to come,” Toderian said. “In this case, we’re fortunate to have the infrastructure about to open, and a great opportunity to do very progressive land use planning and urban design along that corridor.” Initially, Toderian said, the city intended to do the planning work station by station, which would have taken up to eight years.
“If we had done it on the six-to-eight-year timeframe, we would have been significantly far behind,” Toderian said. “But I think we’ve got an opportunity to go from being behind a bit to, compared with other progressive North American cities, being out in front.” However, the development community, while appreciative of the city’s newly accelerated planning timeline, sees some lost opportunities because the planning didn’t begin when the Canada Line was first approved.
“We wish they had done so sooner,” Jeff Fisher, deputy executive director at the Urban Development Institute (UDI) said in an interview.
“It is at least going ahead. The key thing is they have to plan those areas.” The UDI’s advice for Vancouver is to develop as many dense mixed-use communities as it can along the corridor to help maximize the Canada Line’s ridership and increase payback for the overall system.
However, in a city that is starved for development land, a clear policy for density along the Canada Line could have gone a long way toward encouraging developers to begin assembling land, which will be a considerable task in neighbourhoods that are predominantly single-family housing, according to Neil Chrystal, president of Polygon Homes.
Chrystal said that to date, Burnaby and New Westminster have done a better job of accepting and accommodating density around their stations on the SkyTrain system.
He said that might be due to the fact that sites around stations in those communities were more suited to such development.
“My frustration when I look at the City of Vancouver, particularly the Cambie corridor, is that there has been a long time to plan density along this line [yet] everyone’s still talking about it,” Chrystal said, “and there’s no plan in place.” Chrystal said the development community’s advice has been for the city to take some risks and approve some blanket densities so developers can proceed.
If such decisions had been made sooner, Chrystal said, some development proposals might have already come forward.
Regardless, Metro residents can expect substantial changes in development along the Canada Line, and they will probably happen within the next five years, according to Lawrence Frank, the Bombardier chair in sustainable transportation at the University of B.C.‘s School for Community and Regional Planning.
Frank, who is studying land uses along the Canada Line with some of his students as part of the city’s planning process, said even Main Street, the next major corridor to the east, is being affected by its proximity to the Canada Line.
“I expect to see significant changes,” Frank said.
“And not just at the station areas, but all along the length of the corridor.”
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