Residents in False Creek area are concerned about views, safety and late parties

David Carrigg
Province

The controversial development of a marina in Vancouver’s False Creek got the go-ahead last night despite a last-ditch protest by some residents living nearby.

Norton Youngs, who has lived aboard a boat in a co-op in the creek for the past 30 years, said the amount of boat traffic in the small body of water has increased dramatically over the years.

“There’s 1,200 boats coming and going on a busy day,” Youngs told the City of Vancouver’s development permit board.

Youngs said wayward barges and log booms have caused potentially deadly situations over the past few years in False Creek.

Concord Pacific has planned a marina in front of its Beach Neighbourhood development on the north shore of False Creek since 2001.

Despite city council permission for a 22-berth facility, the developer has been battling residents concerned with water safety, views being blocked by 30-metre monster boats and fear of all-night parties aboard the boats.

Last night was the residents’ last effort to get the development permit board to reject the application on the basis it didn’t meet zoning requirements for the area.

Arn Coleman told the board council’s decision to allow the marina “didn’t value False Creek” and that navigation and boat safety issues hadn’t been addressed.

David Negrin, Concord’s senior vice-president of development, said the biggest danger posed in False Creek is by squatters who often moor in the creek’s small navigation lane.

“We get this all the time. There’s 16 people here [at the meeting] and thousands living in our developments,” he said.

Negrin said it will likely cost $100,000 to buy a 30-metre berth.

Senior city planner Larry Beasley and other board members ultimately approved the marina, subject to several conditions.

© The Vancouver Province 2006

 

Residential use competes with office use for ultra-valuable space

Frances Bula
Sun

In Portland, business groups started fretting a decade ago that the city’s downtown was turning into a party and shopping zone at the expense of real jobs.

In Toronto, people are celebrating this week because the city’s first major office tower is being planned after a 14-year hiatus.

In New York, analysts are warning that a severe shortage of office space may drive people to the suburbs.

Welcome to the new, 21st century urban preoccupation, after four decades of trying to lure people into living and partying downtown: Making sure that downtowns are home to businesses, not just homes, hotels and tourists.

That’s being driven by a new dynamic: businesses that want to be downtown. Just like condo buyers, they’ve decided that being downtown is cool, and convenient.

In Vancouver, the city that has come to epitomize the successful residential downtown to envious planners and politicians across North America, that has produced a crucial crossroads moment during which the downtown is about to be reshaped in a dramatic way

“You can certainly expect the definition of the ‘metropolitan core’ to explode,” the city’s influential planning director, Larry Beasley, said to a sold-out crowd of developers recently, as he described a Vancouver with an enhanced new downtown district that extends out to False Creek Flats, to 16th Avenue and across to Burrard.

Beasley didn’t mention it in his speech, but city planners are also looking at every option to provide space for office-based business. That could include increasing the allowed height of buildings in the core downtown, expanding the “office-only” zone and shrinking or eliminating some of what’s called the “choice-of-use” zones in which developers once had the option of residential or commercial.

“We have a lot of options to create space,” says Ronda Howard, the planner who has been conducting the first phase of the city’s massive metro core study. She’s about to take the findings from the first phase –who is living and working where in downtown Vancouver — on the road to take public feedback before planners make their decisions about which options they should use.

Former Vancouver planning director Ray Spaxman also says the city has reached a turning point at which it needs to make some critical decisions, the way it did 35 years ago, when he and the council of the day established the foundation for the “Living First” downtown.

“This is when Vancouver has to break out. When commercial needs to grow, it needs a downtown,” says Spaxman.

That’s all very different from a mere three years ago, when Vancouver city planners decided to allow two residential buildings in the core business district, the Hudson at the corner of Granville and Dunsmuir and the Shangri-La, at the corner of Georgia and Thurlow.

Both were proposed for long-moribund sites and both came with the enticement of providing the city with valuable perks: heritage restorations, a new wheelchair accessible entrance to the SkyTrain at one, a public art garden at the other.

In keeping with a policy set in 1997, planners commissioned an independent study to assess whether there was a healthy 20-year land supply for offices downtown before it would allow such an unusual use conversion. The report concluded there was.

However, city planner Andy Coupland took a closer look at the background statistics for the report and became alarmed at what he saw. Yes, there was a healthy office supply if a certain percentage of sites in the “choice-of-use” areas were developed as offices. That didn’t seem to be happening. Everything was going to residential, where the ability to sell condos for $350 a square foot and more was trumping office space that rents for $15 to $25 a square foot per year.

Those two projects, along with the conversion of the former Westcoast Transmission building into the residential Qube project and a number of others, also set off alarm bells for another set of people: the commercial real-estate brokers. Added to that, the whole office market destabilized as other owners played with the idea of converting to residential.

“There was a huge uproar about the Hudson,” says Wendy Waters, research director for Avison Young, and commercial brokers have been beating the drum about the need to make sure the city makes room for office space.

“What the commercial sector is saying is that it’s gone too far,” says Waters. Avison’s report featured nine buildings with Xs through them, office buildings lost to residential, a total of three million square feet or four years’ supply at the current high absorption rates. It warns that some businesses will be forced into the suburbs over the next three years because of the lack of supply.

Currently, the only known office space planned downtown is in two mixed-use buildings. The Bentall V is building the second half of its tower at Burrard and West Pender, but that is already 93-per-cent leased.

Howard says the city has been approached by major office builders who appear poised to come in with formal applications, but it will likely take three years before any new building opens.

CBRE analyst Chris Clibbon points out the city has also lost commercial sites to residential in the equally important Broadway downtown, where the vacancy rate is lower than in the hard-pressed central business district.

Those losses are crucial, says Waters, because downtowns are still important.

“EA [Electronic Arts] can operate anywhere; it doesn’t need to leave the building. The reason why you need a downtown is so that companies that need to be in close proximity to each other — resource companies, legal, accounting — can do that. You lose efficiencies if you [divide those facilities].”

Downtowns are becoming attractive even for the companies that don’t strictly need them. EA wants to be downtown, as does Disney-based Propaganda Games and a host of others. While EA’s main operations are still in Burnaby, it leased offices in one of the last new office buildings constructed, sharing space with PriceWaterhouse Coopers.

That kind of blending is a trend in Vancouver offices, as Howard has discovered, as both new and traditional businesses have boomed and expanded or moved into the downtown. West Fraser Timber, one of the province’s major forest companies, shares a Yaletown building with the software developer Pivotal, while Relic Entertainment, TeeKay Shipping, and major insurance and investment offices share the Bentall V. Shaw Communications — purveyors of digital TV and the Internet –moved back downtown, sharing space with the construction company, Ledcor, and the Pattison empire.

“There was the trend to go back to the suburbs in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Now a lot want to move back downtown,” says Waters. “Being in the suburbs can be boring for employees. Companies that could go anywhere in the world are choosing Vancouver. The 24-hour downtown is attracting people. There aren’t very many of those in North America.”

That’s all quite a switch from the pattern of the past 50 years.

North American downtowns started going through profound changes as post-Second World War suburbanization altered the urban fabric forever. People moved out first and for a while, they commuted back to work in the traditional downtown. But by the 1970s, jobs were following them out to the suburbs.

Between 1979 and 1999, cities’ share of metropolitan office space significantly diminished, according to a comprehensive analysis by the Brookings Institute’s Center on Urban & Metropolitan Policy.

In those 20 years, office space dropped from 74 per cent to 58 per cent in central cores. By 1999, only New York and Chicago, of American cities, had a majority of office space in the primary downtown. In some cities, such as Philadelphia or Atlanta, the majority of office space was in the suburbs by the end of the century. Cities such as Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles did a little better, with their office space evenly split between their metropolitan cores and their suburbs.

Vancouver followed the trend. In 1982, the suburbs housed 25 per cent of the Lower Mainland’s offices. By 2002, it was 40 per cent.

The late ’90s dealt more blows to downtowns. Corporate mergers boiled down the business sector. Technology eliminated thousands of clerical workers. The high-tech boom collapsed.

“If you look around the world, the first-level cities are still building offices, London, New York,” says University of B.C. professor Tom Hutton, who has studied central cities for 25 years. “If you look at medium-sized North American cities, most of them have had a pretty slack office market for a while.”

The result was that residential developers flooded in during the 1990s, helped by city planners looking for ways to bring back the vitality downtowns once had.

“There were some people who even argued you could have a central-city economy based on consumption,” says Hutton.

Now the backlash has started with cities from Portland to San Antonio to Toronto publicly debating whether they have gone too far in turning their downtowns into residential playgrounds.

Like many urban analysts, Hutton thinks the predictions that Vancouver is turning into a resort city are hyperbolic. “It was an exaggeration for effect.”

The statistics generated specifically for Howard’s study also don’t paint a picture of a resort downtown where people need to commute to the suburbs to find work.

There are 220,000 jobs –140,000 office jobs among them — in what the city is now calling the metro core, the downtown-Broadway corridor-False Creek Flats nexus. About half of those jobs are held by people who live in the city; the other half are held by people who commute from the suburbs.

Conversely, about 60 per cent of people who live in the metro core work there. Just under a quarter work outside the city.

However, even though the sky is not falling, Hutton also believes it is time for Vancouver to develop a new plan for fostering production jobs in an expanded downtown.

Having a healthy production sector is vital for the city’s economy.

“You have a relatively small proportion of the land base supporting 40 per cent of the tax revenues here,” says Hutton.

That doesn’t mean going back to the old-style downtown of the 1950s that was the centre of the universe.

That can create its own problems. In Seattle, for example, there’s been considerable concern about the “runaway downtown” where too much space has been devoted to offices, stadiums and arts venues. The 15 million square feet of office space added to the city’s core since 1979, the Seattle Displacement Coalition argues, has created 50-60,000 more commuters to the downtown from the suburbs.

That group has argued in favour of the kind of plan the Lower Mainland developed 30 years ago, the Livable Region Strategic Plan, that envisions a central downtown and regional town centres, each with their balance of work and housing.

The problem in the Lower Mainland — bigger than the issue of Vancouver’s downtown — is that that kind of plan isn’t working either because of the competition between housing development and space for jobs.

Concert Properties CEO David Podmore said his company recently tried to buy a couple of sites where they could build office space in Richmond. They were out-bid by residential developers. The same holds true for North Vancouver, Burnaby and other places that were supposed to be regional town centres with satellite downtowns.

“Across the Lower Mainland, there is a trend toward residential uses taking over what once was commercial and industrial,” says Waters.

A recent study for the Greater Vancouver Regional District has highlighted a dire shortage of industrial land that is forcing businesses to go to Calgary because of a lack of space here.

Now that’s something to worry about.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

Gordon Hamilton
Sun

American homebuilders warned Tuesday that they will abandon Canadian lumber for European and Russian products if Canada “knuckles under” to the U.S. lumber lobby and signs a softwood agreement that includes taxes or quotas.

The head of the powerful National Association of Home Builders said Tuesday that Canadian officials have indicated in briefings that a tax or quota system is on the way.

NAHB president Jerry Howard described the homebuilders as a “staunch ally” of Canada in the softwood fight. But if Canada quits now, the alliance is over, he said.

A border tax or quota system would increase the cost of Canadian lumber and disrupt supply, forcing homebuilders to consider overseas imports to re-establish certainty.

The legal battle over softwood is essentially finished and Canada has won, he said. Howard said he is ashamed that his own government has not accepted rulings by North America Free Trade Agreement panels, but he is now concerned that Canada may be giving up.

“If you are going to knuckle under … if your government chooses to pursue another course, I have to ensure to the best of my ability that our members — the American homebuilding industry — do not run into a shortage of lumber or do not run into untenably high costs for their lumber,” Howard said in a telephone interview.

Howard said he is concerned, based on reports he has received from the Canadian embassy and trade officials in Ottawa, that a negotiated settlement to the lumber dispute is likely to include either a border tax or import quotas.

He said one official told him negotiations will begin soon. The outcome, the official told him, would be that “everybody always gets a little water with their wine.”

The trade dispute “doesn’t sound like it is moving in any direction that we are happy about,” he said. “We have been told by people up in Ottawa and by officials here in Washington that they are going to start negotiations.

“And we have all been told that those negotiations are going to lead to some sort of a quota or tax on Canadian lumber that we, as the ultimate consumers, would have to pay.”

He said he met recently with a delegation from Russia interested in introducing Siberian pine lumber into the U.S. market.

The NAHB has 235,000 member companies that consume 80 per cent of the homebuilding lumber sold in the U.S. Canada currently has a 34 per cent share of that market. Imports account for five per cent.

David Gray, co-chair of the Free Trade Lumber Council, which represents Canadian lumber companies, said European imports are a threat, but if a quota is imposed he understands Canada would be assured a fixed share of the U.S. market.

That means European inroads would be at the expense of the U.S. lumber industry.

“So far, their lobby hasn’t been sufficient to overcome the [U.S. lumber] coalition’s lobby, and in the meantime we have to get on with the future,” Gray said. “We take his comments and advice, but we have a lot more at stake. We have to make our future ourselves.”

European imports first began to make inroads into the U.S. market during the 1996-2001 softwood lumber agreement that imposed quotas on Canadian shipments. They have been growing at 30 to 50 per cent a year since.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

Tapping in to house equity works — for some

Kevin Greenard and Keith Greenard
Province

VICTORIA — What are the options for retired people who become house-rich and cash-poor? The first thing that comes to mind is usually a reverse mortgage.

But few people know what they are and when they make sense.

Reverse mortgages are residential first mortgages secured by a specific property and offer individuals older than 60 a means of converting a portion of the equity in their home into cash.

With a regular mortgage, interest and principal payments are made on the original amount borrowed. With a reverse mortgage, individuals may request an amount based on the equity in their homes. No interest or principal payments need to be made until you move out of or sell the home.

Reverse mortgages are offered through the Canadian Home Income Plan Corp.

CHIP began operations in B.C. in 1986, before moving into Ontario in 1996 and the rest of Canada in 1998 and 1999. From CHIP’s website, www.chip.ca, you can obtain the following information:

– You can receive between $20,000 and $500,000 from your home equity. The specific amount is 10 per cent to 40 per cent of the current appraised value of your home, based on your age and that of your spouse and the location and type of home you have.

– Current interest terms are: six months 7.5 per cent, one year 8.25 per cent, three years 8.60 per cent.

– Annual discounts are available after three years and balance discounts are available if the outstanding balance on your CHIP home income plan exceeds $100,000 or more.

– Set-up costs that the home owner pays are approximately $675, which is an estimate of the independent home-appraisal costs and independent legal advice.

– In addition, closing costs of $1,285 are added to your CHIP home income plan.

– You have the option to repay in full at any time. When you repay, an interest differential may apply (limited to three months’ interest). If you repay within the first three years, a prepayment amount will apply. These may be waived or reduced in the event of death or a move to a long-term-care facility or retirement residence.

The CHIP plan is voluntary and provides a unique opportunity for individuals to stay in their homes while enjoying retirement. It may be difficult for some individuals to see this component of their equity diminish.

But a CHIP plan may be a way to have your cake today and eat it, too.

BASIC STRATEGIES TO ASSIST INDIVIDUALS IN STAYING IN THEIR HOMES

1. While you are still working and eligible to qualify for a line of credit, do so prior to retiring. We also recommend you apply for the maximum limit that you can qualify for. Having this in place may provide you the flexibility of drawing only what you need at retirement (i.e. $500 per month). The interest rate charged will likely be more competitive than a reverse mortgage.

2. If you’re older than 60 and cash flow is a concern, you may want to consider the property tax deferment program.

3. If you are running low on retirement funds you may want to consider interest-only payments on certain debts such as your line of credit. Making interest-only payments on debt that has a reasonable interest rate may provide the necessary capital to prolong the stay in your home.

4. Peace of mind at retirement can certainly be enhanced in the absence of financial concerns. Sometimes downsizing into a smaller home may provide the necessary capital to fund retirement expenses.

5. Utilizing a reverse mortgage is always an option. The CHIP plan does provide individuals the ability to stay in their homes longer, but at a cost.

Anyone interested in a reverse mortgage must seek independent legal advice. On a cautionary note, people who are interested in a reverse mortgage should also consult with their investment adviser or accountant to determine if a reverse mortgage is the best strategy and if it makes sense for them.

— Keith Greenard and Kevin Greenard are members of the Greenard Group at ScotiaMcLeod in Victoria

© The Vancouver Province 2006

Outside will retain its heritage character but inside, it’s beyond sleek

Jeani Read
Province

These places are beyond sleek — they’re supernaturally Euro.

Everything’s built-in, including the bathrooms. A Phillippe Starke soaker tub and rain shower are pocketed behind translucent-glass sliding doors that also conceal Starke-designed powder-room pieces right next door.

In the kitchen, the only major appliance visible is the smooth glass-top range and built-in oven — the dishwasher and high-end fridge are disguised behind cupboard doors.

And built-in cabinetry makes up the hallway walls.

“It’s the principle of borrowed space,” says developer Robert Fung of The Salient Group. “It’s extremely tailored. Everything disappears when you want it to.”

The borrowed-space principle means all the rooms are bigger than — well, bigger than they are, if that’s possible. That bed on the floor plan that looks like it’s right up against the hall? When you’re tucked in, looking across that hall to your beautiful built-in cabinets, it will FEEL like a big bedroom.

Everything overlaps. Rooms and halls use each other’s space to make more space. Staggered and vaulted ceilings and recessed lighting also contribute to the airy “Terminus experience,” as the designers call it. “People live in volume, they don’t live in floor plans,” says Fung.

And the best part of this amazingly contemporary design work by Salient, the architects at Acton Ostry and the hot design firm Evoke is that it’s sitting smack in the heart of old Gastown, on Water Street, halfway down the block from Maple Tree Square. In a way, the location’s age dictated the fresh new design take.

Each floorplan (of 46 homes, 619 sq. ft. to 1,619 sq. ft, $350,000 to $1,500,000) had to be so linear because the site was so long and narrow. Salient was limited to the shell of the historic Terminus Hotel plus the wrecked, next-door Grand Hotel.

Restoring the facades and building the Terminus condos is part of three major projects that are going to restore the block up to The Alhambra on the corner, the first building to go up after Vancouver’s big fire of 1896.

And that’s only part of what’s happening in Gastown, which is at a “big turning point,” says Scott Hawthorn, a board member of the Gastown Business Improvement Society (GBIS) and personally involved in two buildings.

The long-awaited Woodward’s redevelopment is expected to bring a stability to the area and more and more developments are in the works to bring the neglected neighbourhood to life.

The idea is, really, that new residents will support more businesses and edgy, one-of-a-kind retailers like Richard Kidd, Modern Kid and Livestock will once again make Gastown a destination spot for Vancouverites.

Why now? “The big reality in the city is the downtown is built-out and Gastown is next,” says Hawthorne. “The economy is pushing east and we’re on the radar.”

Jon Stovell, past president of the GBIS, has been converting warehouses into live-work spaces since the mid-1990s. The turn of the millennium was a low point, he says, but things have turned around big-time. Three elements — the Vancouver Agreement to improve the streetscape, the rise in the real-estate market and new heritage incentives — created the positive push.

“Now there are 25 heritage projects in the queue,” he says. “People used to say, ‘Eeeuw, Gastown.’ Now they say, ‘Wow. How can I get in? What can I buy?”

Turns out, not much any more.

Sean Heather, owner of four Gastown businesses, including Irish Heather and Shebeen Whiskey Bar, says he moved here nine years ago because it was all he could afford.

“I toughed it out and now it’s very competitive. There’s nothing left to buy and, when something comes up, the prices are through the roof. I like to say it’s the new Main Street but the buildings look better.”

“The dynamic is different from Yaleown, which was all warehouses and then synthesized in 10 years,” says Salient’s Fung. “Here you can feel the evolution.”

Terminus starts selling April 13. For reservations or more info, go to www.thesalientgroup.com.

© The Vancouver Province 2006