21 responses so far ↓

• 1 Joe Just Joe // Nov 7, 2010 at 8:16 pm

  It’s not one or the other but both. There is a office shortage, but if the zoning restrictions hadn’t been imposed we probably wouldn’t be seeing these developments come to light either.

• 2 Living in the West End // Nov 7, 2010 at 9:15 pm

  Is Aquilini planning more than an office tower adjacent to the Rogers Arena, three new towers appeared on the City site last week possibly on the other side of BC Place.
  Location: 800 GRIFFITHS WAY
  150 Pacific Boulevard North Zoning:
  Project Type: Rezoning Department: Planning Department
  Application Date: 2010/10/25 No: 2010037
  City Contact: Rezoning Centre 604.873.7038
  Applicant Contact: Barry Savage Aquilini Development and Construction Inc. 604.909.0047
  Description: The purpose of this rezoning is to permit the addition of 2 residential buildings and 1 mixed-use building to the current CD-1 zoning. The 3 new buildings are 104, 100 and 97 meters in height. The proposal will include 58,608 square meters of residential density and 520 square meters of new commercial density. The proposal also includes 755 residential units and 205 parking and 5 loading spaces.

  Posted: 2010/10/28

  Note parking is 205 stalls for 755 units.

• 3 Wendy // Nov 7, 2010 at 9:24 pm

  Agree with Joe, it’s both improved economics for an office building and the city largely removing the condo option (thus sites wait until an office makes sense).

  Assuming TELUS still owns that site, which their current older building is on, this might also be making the economics work on this project earlier than they will at other sites downtown. Theoretically, to some extent, they can charge themselves whatever they want for the land on the proforma, which means not necessarily market value.

  Also relevant to this piece: I was in Toronto last week and a few real estate contacts commented on how happy TELUS seems with their decision to consolidate many GTA operations into their new downtown tower (reducing their suburban footprint). The success of that move may be contributing to this decision to build now.

• 4 gmgw // Nov 8, 2010 at 12:33 am

  Call me dense, but I completely fail to understand the correlation between yet another profusion of (huge yawn) new office towers and a “healthy downtown”, although I’m sure a Freudian could advance some useful comments on the topic. To me the “health” of a city’s downtown derives not from how many towers sprout up like weeds but what’s at the base of those towers. Vancouver, for all its parvenu pretensions, is still a very long way from becoming Manhattan West. Until this city actually takes a greater interest in developing and encouraging a healthy and diverse (and independent) retail and cultural environment down at the bottom of the new canyons, it doesn’t matter how many snazzy new steel-and-glass phalli raise their turgid selves into the skies above– Vancouver will simply continue its haphazard career as the Paris Hilton of North American cities: Not bad-looking, money to burn, but nary a brain in its giggling, self-adulating, party-hearty little head.
  gmgw

• 5 Roger Kemble // Nov 8, 2010 at 1:16 am

  Well at least we have something else to gossip about . . .

  Telus moving a few blocks west . . . big deal!

  Replacing a sliver of condos with a sliver of suits . . . for the birds to bump into . . . just another bit of North American slippage . . .

  Now I would get orgasmic if Telus were to repatriate its call centers, its gadget making from the jungles of the east to the jungles of the condos . . . we need a manufacturing base not a twittering base . . .

• 6 Roger Kemble // Nov 8, 2010 at 5:56 am

  I’m getting persistently spammed by the glorious korparation’s branch offices: SCARP/SALA and the alphabet Twinkies by the sea.

  Jambourees, festivals, celebrations: they are cummin’ on hard for sure . . .

  Drumming up the courage to whistle at the girls across the street (thanqxz Pierre), our Caesars of fun-by-design find safety in numbers to push . . . build on the ALR to preserve the ALR . . . Life, according to alphabet Twinkies, is good but confusing: go figure!

  I digress NOT: on topic . . .

  SCARP/SALA is a feedlot for the august mediators of the urban interests. To wit: figure out to a way to block the view while blind-siding the hoi poloi: you need lots classroom time to pull that off.

  Of the coming onslaught by Telus, the renowned Vancouver architect Jim Hancock, Oxford, and Aquilini by rampant phallus these lost souls are seeking safe havens for their wealth because they cannot figure between gold and tungsten.

  And that dear, dear, DEAR friends is the sub-text of Frances’ super heated downtown renaissance . . . shall I go giggly, giggly?

• 7 Morven // Nov 8, 2010 at 8:48 am

  I do not think we should be surprised. Though the condo ban has some impact, we should look at global commercial real estate investment trends.

  Commercial real estate is a global investment process not merely local in nature. And, at least according to published data by investment firms, Canada, and Vancouver in particular is one of the few areas where commercial real estate values in a financial centre have not taken a great hit over the past two years.

  So it is no surprise that commercial real estate developers in Vancouver have access to global funds that have few viable alternatives (at least until the global economy recovers).

  My view.
  -30

• 8 el chief // Nov 8, 2010 at 9:15 am

  “coming back TO life”?

• 9 Wendy // Nov 8, 2010 at 10:17 am

  GMGW–a healthy downtown has enough jobs to (a) support a variety of retail, restaurant, and other service businesses that also make the area an attractive place to live (proximity to amenities drives many peoples’ home-choice decisions);

  (b) provide a foundation for a more ecologically sustainable region. Having the jobs in suburban office parks not well-served by transit (bike lanes, or walking to work) creates gridlock, smog, and a poorer overall quality of life for people in the region who must breathe smog and spend time stuck in cars rather than enjoying family, friends, or healthy lifestyle activities.

  I agree that the ground level perspective is important, but so are the office towers.

• 10 Jake // Nov 8, 2010 at 10:18 am

  Birds gotta fly…and developers need to develop. Condo market saturated and sales a little sluggish at an acceptable level of profitability? How about an office building? Heck, no one’s built one of those since, what was it, 2007? Anyone recall how long it took Bentall V to go from DP and pre-leasing to completion? The first 22 stories were completed in the early naughts, the remaining 12 five or six years later. Don’t forget that it’s one thing to make a DP application for an office building and quite another to pre-lease it at sufficiently high rental rates to secure reasonable financing.

• 11 Roger Kemble // Nov 8, 2010 at 11:03 am

  http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article14996.html

• 12 Ron // Nov 9, 2010 at 1:57 am

  GMGW – just ask the retail businesses in Yaletown that come and go like a revolving door – thousands of residential suites all around, but nary a customer in sight during the day – they’re all at work. That;s led to a trend where only restaurants (and high end ones at that) can survive in Yaletown with business from the dinner crowd.

  Office workers (of all stripes) are who patronize shops and restaurants during the day create a healthy economy. Office use is far far more “intensive” a use than residential use. That’s why many of the retail units in ground floor retail podiums take so long to be leased out – having a couple hundred residents above the store can’t sustain it – you need many many more customers than that.
  Office towers have maybe a 100 workers per floor. Residential condos have maybe 8-12 residents per floor. Which provides more customers?
  and oh, those office worker customers who are supporting downtown retail businesses – well, they may live in the suburbs, too.

• 13 Ron // Nov 9, 2010 at 2:02 am

  BTW – Living in the West End – see this:

  http://forms.rennie.com/GMplace/Survey.html

• 14 Michael Geller // Nov 9, 2010 at 7:53 am

  From Wendy:

  Agree with Joe, it’s both improved economics for an office building and the city largely removing the condo option (thus sites wait until an office makes sense).

  Wendy, you are absolutely right on your first point, but completely wrong on the second. Yes, the office development is a response to the cyclical nature of office markets in Vancouver…it truly is a feast and famine pattern.

  But the developer is proposing housing in the area where the staff and Council wanted to see it discouraged. In other words, this office building will only be built, in an area where the city staff and council did not want to see housing, only if there is an agreement to rezone the site to allow a 43 storey condominium apartment.

  To my mind, this reinforces the opinion that some of us proclaimed at the Public Hearing during the Stanley Cup Playoffs, namely, it is unrealistic to expect new office development unless it is ‘subsidized’ by increased residential development.

  I would note that the same holds true for the Jim Pattison/Reliance Holdings development. (Although in this area, the zoning was different.) Give us significant residential density, and we’ll build you an office building.

  Let me add that I am in favour of mixed use, rather than single use devlopments. However, now both creative proposals, at densities that are higher than permitted under the current zoning, need to go through a careful planning analysis and review. I’m watching with interest.

• 15 Westender1 // Nov 9, 2010 at 8:16 am

  Thanks Ron for the link. Who knew you could wedge four towers into the remaining 67 square feet of open space on that site?
  (But I think Mr. Rennie needs to update his marketing – it’s called Rogers Centre now.)

• 16 The Fourth Horseman // Nov 9, 2010 at 8:22 am

  What Geller said, @14.

• 17 Wendy // Nov 9, 2010 at 8:50 pm

  Thanks for the correction Michael. Makes sense. But if the city hadn’t slowed the condo process by creating exclusion zones and forcing developers to offer significant office in order to get condos, site might have been long-gone to condos.

  Not sure it’s the greatest location for condos though in that there are not any parks or city amenities around other than the library about 3 blocks away.

• 18 Lewis N. Villegas // Nov 9, 2010 at 10:53 pm

  Condo-shmowndo.

  Our square mile of solid granite that is the downtown peninsula will only succeed in being one of the leading capitals in the Pacific Rim if we build to the max.

  That includes maximum quality and maximum safety.

  There is a lesson to learn from Manhattan (not Hong Kong). It will take “the boroughs” to make our hyper-urbanist downtown work.

  Yes, residential downtown. But, that will only serve to take gentrification pressures off the other neighbourhoods. The resident work force will not be all resident in that square mile. Many, many of the people working there will commute in from the suburbs on rail and cars.

  I believe the key is flexibility.

  We don’t know what the corporate world of tomorrow will really look like. Yet, we can be pretty sure about the basic requirements for a livable neighbourhood or quartier. The corporate office has reinvented itself many times over in the past 200 years. Not so the “livable” quartier.

  So, as long as we are okay with the BC Hydro building going from corporate headquarters to residential housing in 50 years or less, our issues are not with zoning “uses”.

  Rather we must pay close attention to making sure that the buildings, and the resulting quality of the public spaces, are adaptable enough to see another day.

• 19 MB // Nov 10, 2010 at 8:59 am

  @ Lewis 18: “Our square mile of solid granite that is the downtown peninsula …”

  “We don’t know what the corporate world of tomorrow will really look like.”
  ======================

  Actually, it’s largely sandstone. No matter.

  And what do we really know of tomorrow’s economy? Consider that even some of the most intelligent and articulate economists and business prognosticators have a tough time with elementary physics, namely the base role of energy that underpins pretty well every economic transaction. They are more concerend with bailouts and printing money, as if that wasn’t a finite resource like fossil fuels.

  So we are finally getting a few more office buildings, which bodes well for the immediate future and boosts confidence, but the long term prognosis is energy decline as oil depletes, and that means a corresponding economic decline, less globalization (which was perhaps the biggest bubble of all ) and more localization.

  Oil depletion and debt (both public and private) are the major factors that require appropriate responses, and that in turn requires dedicated planning.

  Does anyone know of any government that has starting planning for this?

• 20 Brent Toderian // Nov 11, 2010 at 3:34 pm

  Hi all – we’re indeed pleased to see solid interest in stand-alone office projects downtown, and in other parts of the city. We believe it’s a combination of favourable market conditions, and the clarity the City has brought to the land-use question. To be clear, both of these factors are needed, as illustrated by the years before we brought such clarity … The favourable conditions were there, but the lack of clarity, and resulting residential speculation, kept projects from moving forward. We heard this from many office providers, including the suggestion we might have missed a window in the 7 year office-building cycle, because of this speculation. The suggestion that stand-alone office was non-viable just fueled this, but to be clear, the only develoers we heard this from was mixed-use developers. All stand-alone office developers said the opposite, stressing to us that part of getting the office cycle running again, and bringing viability back by making sure taxes and land prices were properly set, was addressing the speculation. We’re glad to see the myth of non-viability disproved, through the many stand-alone proposals across the city.

  And to Michael, I need to clarify two points. First, the Reliance proposal includes office because they proposed it. We didn’t require it, and it’s not being subsidized by residential. They consider it a viable use. Second, in the Telus proposal, residential is being proposed exactly where the City contemplated it, both before our Metro Core Job Space results, and after. And again, it’s not subsidizing the office – the proponent confirms to me that the office would be viable with or without the residential.

  I hope this clarification helps – thanks for the good discussion.

  Regards,
  Brent

• 21 Michael Geller // Nov 12, 2010 at 6:36 am

  Brent, Thanks for the clarifications. I didn’t think residential was a permitted use on the Telus site. If so, why is the developer making a rezoning application?

  I hope I didn’t imply that the city asked Reliance to build office uses, since I know that was not the case.

  Let me conclude by saying I am pleased to see new office developments, and new residential buildings in the downtown. While I remain to be convinced that the zoning changes in April 2009 are a major factor in these decisions, I do believe that market forces, and the success of the Canada Line are contributing to the new initiatives.

  And if a number of developers come forward to say that the zoning changes were the deciding factor in proposing new office developments, I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong!

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