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As Vancouver’s old industries leave “Mount Pixel,” city struggles to define new meaning of industrial

April 6th, 2016 · 11 Comments

Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant industrial area is undergoing a profound transformation.

For years, the old steel-plating, gadget-manufacturing, and garment-producing businesses had been leaving slowly.

But that speeded up three years ago when two things happened. Hootsuite, the city’s bigfoot digital company, moved into a building in the area. (It was a building zoned for office use, at 8th and Quebec, across the street from the conventional industrial zone.)

And the city tweaked the zoning to allow some office uses, as long as one floor of a building was retained for industrial.

Tech companies started to flood in and prices went up.

My story last weekend looked at the changes and the struggle going on in the city, and the region, to figure out what industrial actually means these days and how to keep office users looking for cheap space from invading.

In Vancouver, where council is particularly anxious to foster a tech industry, the debate is even more pointed.

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  • Tiktaalik

    Councillor Reimer’s position on this is pretty odd. The point of industrial zoning should be to preserve uses of land that are incompatible with other zoning types (ie. activities that would generate huge amount of noise/smell complaints). What products are produced on the land should be largely irrelevant.

    Handing over industrial land to game developers and tech companies is essentially the same as handing it over to commercial office development or even real estate developers. It potentially limits the amount of space available for genuine industrial use.

    I’m not opposed to increasing the density of our industrial spaces by adding commercial uses ontop of existing industrial space, but the city has to be careful here to not ruin the ability to use the land for genuine industrial use.

  • Kirk

    Andrea Reimer usually gives smarter answers. Oh well. I guess when ideology comes into play, stuttering excuses start flowing. Software programming is not “industrial”. If this is the game she wants to play, then any office space is industrial. They should just rezone it to allow both and let the free market between air hammers and keyboards continue to battle it out without the nudge-nudge wink-wink crap.

    It’s a sad to lose this area. But, not a surprise. The land is just too valuable, so there’s probably an enormous pressure to better capitalize on it than things like plating steel. They don’t fit into the Greenest City plan either, which means bye-bye.

    I’m even fine with removing the industrial zoning completely and allowing residential. The “core jobs” thing doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Baking bread is important, but those loaves of bread are not worth $1000 per sqft. We’re in an endless housing crunch, and this is prime real estate near the heart of the city where people would love to live. I still can’t believe that we’re using it to warehouse clothing. Stuff like that can move somewhere more ugly (for lack of a better term), even out to different municipalities.

    Maybe they can model it after Portland’s Pearl District or something. That’d be nice.

  • penguinstorm

    > It’s a sad to lose this area

    Why? The city needs jobs and manufacturing/industrial jobs aren’t exactly on the upswing. Isn’t it better to have jobs that ARE current and relevant to the people who live here?

  • Kirk

    Point taken. Maybe it’s nostalgia? Some people were probably sad to see the last False Creek sawmill shut down too. End of an era, I suppose. I remember reading that this area was one of William Gibson’s favourite parts of the city too.

    I live nearby, and it’s a strange feeling walking through and not seeing anyone for blocks on the weekends, even though it’s so, so close to the city core. It feels so under-utilized and inefficient in terms of, well… just a really prime location.

  • Tiktaalik

    > I’m even fine with removing the industrial zoning completely and allowing residential. The “core jobs” thing doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Baking bread is important, but those loaves of bread are not worth $1000 per sqft. We’re in an endless housing crunch, and this is prime real estate near the heart of the city where people would love to live.

    The vast majority of Vancouver area is already zoned for residential use. If we want to build more residential supply, then before we consider decreasing the limited amount of industrial space available any further we should be having a look at the huge areas of sparsely developed single family residential land. Of course we know NIMBYs will turn that into an epic fight so that’s why there’s such great reluctance from Council to confront that topic.

    The problem with rezoning industrial land and moving industrial businesses “somewhere else” is that other municipalities are thinking the same thing, and removing their industrial land in favour of residential. I think reducing our industrial supply would go against the regional plan and hurt Vancouver’s greenest city goals. Transportation of goods would increase, and you’d be creating longer commutes. I am under the impression the region wants to create compact and complete communities where everyone lives and works in the same place. Every municipality needs to have industrial for that to work.

  • Kirk

    I think Vancouver’s greenest city goals involves moving all industry out and replacing it with condos. There’s an elitist mindset that industrial blue collar workers drive pickup trucks and live in the burbs. The “Vision” the mayor is pushing is that of young millennialis riding fixies from their LEED condos to their “green” tech jobs.

  • penguinstorm

    I’ve always suspected that as downtown became more

    residential it would slip into this area. I think that’s part of why Gordon Campbell announced that art gallery location out there.

    That perspective has shifted a bit now that I work in a tower (all of my previous jobs in Vancouver were is low rise offices) but still–the area could certainly welcome more life. I have friends who work over there and they don’t go out much.

    Here’s hoping it’s in a liminal state and continues to evolve well.

  • Kirk

    Anyone have any thoughts on the Molson – Concord deal?

    My thoughts are: “Duh! I can’t wait until the mayor does his photo op. Maybe the premier will show up too.”

    I think we should start a pool to bet on what other parcels of land will be bought/rezoned for condos next. We could start with an IC zoning map of Vancouver and go from there.

  • AdamFitch

    Take a look around in any suburban single-family housing area at night, (especially an area of new or near-new housing) and you will see at least one big pickup truck parked in the driveway, sometimes two or three. I doubt that the people who drive those trucks are commuting to Mount Pleasant.
    The answer to saving jobs region-wide is to encourage densification of suburban industrial parks that work, and add better transit and housing nearby. It is not to fight to keep industrial in Mount Pleasant against overwhelming market trends.

  • AdamFitch

    Tiktaalik, I definitely agree about the NIMBY effect and resistance to densification in residential areas. This is one of Vancouver’s (and other regional cities’) biggest local political challenges.
    But if trends continue as they are, Vancouver will end up as a hollowed-out ghost town of vacation homes, with no schools and no local shopping or working options.

  • peakie

    Another dexter-wing editorial in the Vancouver Sun declaring that killing industrial land for fly-by-night digital cubicle factories is better than renewing industrial land rather than sending such light industry to the Outerlands.
    vancouversun.com/opinion/opinion-redefining-industrial-real-estate
    Opinion: Mount Pleasant a prime example of redefining industrial real estate. by Brent Sawchyn
    Published on: September 7, 2016 | Last Updated: September 7, 2016 6:00 PM PDT
    (Brent Sawchyn is a real estate entrepreneur at PC Urban Properties Inc, Suite 880m 1090 West Georgiain Vancouver. His company re-imagines and repurposes urban properties to help establish sustainable communities.)