Developer of the Bay’s city core facility offered more density for more commercial room
Frances Bula
Sun
The Hudson’s Bay parkade, a key building site in downtown Vancouver, is about to become the test case for aggressive new city efforts to ensure the downtown area has enough space for jobs.
It’s the first building to come before council in the aftermath of a city analysis released last week that said Vancouver could run out of job space within five years in the downtown peninsula.
Planners recommend the developer of the parkade, a prominent site at the corner of Georgia and Richards, be required to make half of his building commercial space, more than double what he had proposed.
A report released today, which council will vote on next week, outlines the deal planners are proposing for developer Simon Lim. They say he should be allowed to build to the maximum height allowable there, 291 feet, and that he should get a density of what’s called in planner language 10 FSR — 10 times the square footage of his lot.
That’s double what the normal zoning allows, but the catch is that planners Trish French and Michael Gordon are recommending that council require Lim to build half of that as commercial space.
They are recommending he get the extra density partly as compensation for his restoration of Dunsmuir House on the same block, a 167-unit residential hotel that used to be operated by the Salvation Army. Part of the deal is that Lim will preserve the building and continue to rent it out as single-room housing for low-income people.
The business community has been watching the parkade site closely since developer Lim bought it, waiting to see what the city will ask him to do.
The city’s new planning director, Brent Toderian, acknowledges that council’s decision on the building will send a signal to the development community.
“If council sends the message that they take the metro-core results seriously, this will affect our negotiations for other sites. This is giving us a chance to test council’s will.”
He believes if Lim is allowed to build more than half of the building as residential, “it will be perceived as a missed opportunity.”
The report says that if the city sticks with the existing policy for that area, which borders the commercial-only central business district, it will lose a quarter of the potential commercial space in future developments. The existing policy says developers have to build 40 per cent of the space as commercial.
Lim said he believes the city has offered an attractive compromise, since it would allow him to have twice the density the zoning normally allows. But he also would like to some flexibility on height, since loading that much density on the site without allowing the building to go higher could result in a “very massive, ugly building.”
While Lim says that pension fund office developers have called him with offers to finance an office tower on his site, he is not interested in building more office space than he has to.
He owns some office space downtown and “no one is beating down my door throwing big fat rent cheques at me.” He also believes the demand for office will slow after the 2010 Olympics.
His plans for a hotel and possibly some retail in the commercial space that he builds. He will also provide 500 parking spaces to accommodate the Bay’s needs.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
