Stakeholders want to revitalize the scruffy downtown street from harbour to bridge
Sun
CREDIT: Mark van Manen, Vancouver Sun City planner Jeffrey Patterson with some of the new cafes and business in the 900-block of Granvlle.
CREDIT: Mark van Manen, Vancouver Sun The Kitten Theatre in the 1000-block where adult businesses are located.
There’s no denying it now. Downtown Granville Street, a blemish on the face of the city just a decade ago, is on the rebound.
Driven by soaring pedestrian traffic, retail rents in some blocks of Vancouver‘s grand old thoroughfare have tripled in just four years, and redevelopment activity is taking off.
And if a group of Granville stakeholders meeting today reaches a consensus, it could soon have a new look at street level, too.
A project team from city hall is meeting with landlords, merchants and transportation interest groups in a closed session at the Chateau Granville to discuss three options for improving the transportation mix and streetscape, from the waterfront on the harbour to Granville Bridge.
“We concluded two years ago that the street was very tired and needed to be updated,” said senior planner Jeffrey Patterson. Among other issues, merchants and property owners had repeatedly asked the city to look at the possibility of re-introducing cars to the pedestrian mall portion from Smithe to Hastings, but not at the expense of transit.
One of the proposals to be presented today would involve keeping roughly the same transportation layout in place today, only “making it work better,” downtown transportation engineer Doug Louie says. The other two options include increasing car access to the mall segment.
“We’re trying to come up with concepts to make Granville Street and the Granville Mall work better for everybody,” Louie said.
Assuming the stakeholders agree on a preferred option, the design will be unveiled to the public as a concept plan in the fall. The city is consulting landlords and business operators first because they will likely pay for at least part of the Granville redesign through special tax assessments.
The public streetscape is just beginning to catch up to what’s been happening on private land. In the four years that Patterson has been working on Granville, street-level retail rents have risen in the mall portion from $25-30 per square foot to as much as $110, he said.
The number of properties changing hands on the strip rose to 11 over the past year and a half, compared to 12 over the previous four years, according to Peter Pedalec, Vancouver research manager for Realnet Canada Inc., a real estate information service. And eight of those represent renovations or redevelopments.
Most prominent among the new arrivals were Future Shop, Winners, Sleep Country Canada, Bedo and others in a new building at Granville and Robson last year. But now that looks like just the tip of the iceberg.
Construction is under way on The Hudson, a combined live/work tower and retail development at 610 Granville. One of the partners in that project, Macdonald Development Corp., plans a similar mixed-use tower and podium on the site of the Capitol Six cinemas in the 900-block, which Famous Players will close once its Paramount Place multiplex opens at Burrard and Smithe.
Meanwhile, a series of low-rise development sites in the 800- through 1100-blocks are attracting interest from national retail chains. Bonnis Properties Inc., which developed the Future Shop building, has proposed a two-storey building at 958 Granville with a store and restaurant or cabaret at street level and a neighbourhood pub above.
In a transaction emblematic of the street’s evolution, the Kitten Theatre in the midst of the porn and pawn shops at 1026 Granville was bought in November by a developer proposing a double-height, single-storey retail building — typically occupied by high-end shops.
“That’s the past of Granville Street leaving us behind,” said Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Area executive director Charles Gauthier. “We’re seeing some great transformation in the area.”
Gauthier said Granville has been quietly moving up-market for the past six to eight years.
“It’s just now you’re seeing it,” he said. “If you pick any other street in the city I would challenge you to find as many new developments going on.”
Most of the new interest is coming from retailers. But the long-established entertainment venues are flexing their muscles too, judging by the rise in evening pedestrian traffic.
“The street is very intensively used, especially on weekend evenings,” Patterson said.
While transit use of Granville remains heavy — 85 to 90 buses at peak hours and around 60 the rest of the day — the real change in recent years is in the foot traffic. Pedestrians passing along the 1000-block number in the thousands per hour on weekends, Patterson said.
While the growth in population in nearby Yaletown and the rest of the downtown peninsula is often cited as a factor in the turnaround, Patterson says most of the pedestrians seem to be suburbanites out for a night on the town.
“It’s the invasion of downtown by people seeking entertainment,” he said.
One member of the Granville redesign project team recently accompanied the police on their rounds on a weekend evening, and every one of the people ticketed lived outside the city, he said.
One possible explanation for Granville’s newfound popularity is the longer opening hours for bars and nightclubs in Vancouver compared to other municipalities, he noted.
Pedalec puts it down to City Hall’s long-standing effort to revitalize the entertainment zone, which is at last bearing fruit.
© The Vancouver Sun 2004