Vancouver’s downtown development has shifted overwhelmingly towards new condos while fewer office towers that provide jobs are being planned or constructed
Trevor Boddy
Sun
With a rapidity that has caught our planners and politicians unprepared, downtown Vancouver development has shifted overwhelmingly towards condos. Figures released last fall by CMHC and the city’s housing centre starkly chart a trend in downtown development away from rental and non-profit housing, and a decrease in new office tower applications.
First the office story. In the new century starting Jan. 1, 2001, there has been a total of more than eight million square feet of new buildings constructed on our downtown peninsula. Of this total, nearly 90 per cent is housing, and less than 10 per cent highrise offices.
When we look closer at those office towers that were actually built, the situation gets even more worrisome. Some of those constructed in the new century are zoned live-work–like portions of Westbank’s Shaw Tower, an excellent development I named ‘building of the year’ for 2004.
“Live-work” means that the spaces can be used for either housing or small businesses, but are usually unsuitable for large tenants like corporations. Touring most of them, I estimate three quarters are residences only, while one quarter host some, often nominal business or consultancy.
I remember walking along Dunsmuir Street in the late 1990s, and seeing that rarest of Vancouver sights — a huge illuminated sign topping an office tower, announcing a new corporation taking up premises downtown.
“A flicker of corporate life,” I thought to myself then, but think so no longer. That logo I saw was for “360 Systems,” an early victim of the dot-com bust. There have been no new signs since, surely a sign of change for the worse.
Some of those few new downtown office buildings were planned and initially approved in the 1990s, like the current completion of Bentall’s five tower complex.
Indeed, downtown planners confirm the last application for an all-new office tower in downtown Vancouver came in October, 2001, for the Price Waterhouse/Electronic Arts tower at the foot of Granville, next to the Sun and Province’s newsrooms.
According to city planner Andy Coupland, “No building permits were sought for offices from 2002 to 2005, because over a million square feet were completed earlier in the decade, pushing vacancy rates up.”
But a drive past the rows of sparkling new corporate office buildings constructed at such emerging corporate addresses of record as Burnaby’s Glen Lyons Drive shows where the action has gone. Ill-served by public transit, these and many other suburban office parks are proof that millions of square feet of offices were being constructed in the Lower Mainland, just not on our downtown peninsula.
The office construction business is very cyclic, and there has been a strong revival of office construction in Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa recently, but not in downtown Vancouver, despite falling vacancy rates. Huh?
The simple fact is that our current city planning regime is so biased towards condominium housing that it is killing downtown as a place to work in conventional offices.
Leading developer Ian Gillespie of Westbank Corporation estimates the economic return from building condos has now become five times that from new office towers. This skewed ratio and the fact that council effectively rezoned most of the downtown peninsula in 1991 as “housing optional,” have converged, now making it “housing mandatory.”
Not just any kind of housing, either, but condos and condos only. A further set of figures released by city hall starkly document the re-jigging of our downtown as a condo haven.
Data from CMHC and the city’s housing centre show that each year since 2001, the ratio of condos to all forms of housing constructed in downtown Vancouver (the larger total also includes rental units and social housing) has steadily and dramatically increased.
In 2001, 45 per cent of downtown housing constructed was condos; in 2002, it was 55 per cent condos; in 2003, 75 per cent; in 2004, 87 per cent; and for the latest data available for a portion only of 2005, an astonishing 100 per cent of all downtown housing approved was for condos, and condos alone!
Our planners and politicians have stood by while these dramatic shifts have occurred and, in their silence, concurred. So then why is turning the downtown peninsula into a condo zone a problem?
First and foremost, it is a problem because our downtown is a land-limited peninsula. In other cities without such geographic boundaries, land uses can shift and their downtown cores realign with them. Not so here. Hong Kong continues to build out from Victoria Island, but we are not adding new land to our core.
A related problem is B.C.’s condo legislation itself. We were the first jurisdiction in North America to enact laws for buying legal titles to boxes in space, but the framers of these laws did not pay enough attention to how we might one day “un-condominiumize” buildings that are ripe for renewal. The West End is filled with decaying wood frame walkups, but getting an entire building full of condo owners to agree to sell is nearly impossible, effectively blocking downtown redevelopment west of Burrard.
The 1991 land use changes permitting condos through much of the downtown was made by public fiat. This is no eternal law, but policy, so it can and should be revised, most urgently to reserve the triangle north of Robson and west of Richards for core downtown retail and office functions, not more condos.
Good planning means balance and an anticipation of future needs, something we have lost in the dizzying glamour of the condo boom.
Well then, if people want to live downtown so badly, why can’t retail, office and public building functions just migrate elsewhere?
In part to deal with embarrassing statistics such as those cited above, planners are now claiming that our downtown actually runs east around the False Creek basin, then west past VGH along Broadway; this is one way to generate data showing commercial construction. More such sophistry will doubtlessly fill their upcoming Metropolitan Core Jobs and Land Use Study.
But I, for one, have a great difficulty in imagining the area around Broadway and Willow as the vital downtown for a megalopolis of three million people: heck, the whole area reeks of rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde!
Then there is Metrotown, the next candidate for the Lower Mainland’s new downtown hub if we Vancouverites remain determined to go mondo condo. Does anyone really think this rag-tag zone around a mega-mall is a worthy replacement for our sadly under-appreciated downtown?
The most likely location to supplant downtown Vancouver’s office functions is actually in Richmond, where the area west of No. 3 Road and north of Cambie is being reconceived by planners and land owners as a major urban node.
Sparked by an Olympic skating oval that will more often function as a convention centre, this zone has ready airport and RAV line access, so handy for taking future workers back to the dormitory suburb that is the fate of our former downtown — if we do not intervene soon.
But downtown Vancouver represents a huge investment of public funds and shared passions.
It is the symbolic centre of this province and Western Canada’s only world city. Wasting its urban diversity for temporary benefit as a residential zone alone would be an urban tragedy of the highest order.
Generations of Canadians spent billions on the courthouses, parks, theatres, libraries and other elements of the public domain that now make downtown Vancouver so desirable a place to live. If the vitality that only comes with downtown jobs and large scale retail relocates to these other hubs, there will have to be an expensive round of replacement of many of these urban institutions and infrastructure elements.
In adopting so unbalanced an approach to downtown development, we are effectively privatizing this prior public investment onto the ledgers of wealthy new downtown residents and condo developers.
Undeniably, there also lurks an intellectual dimension to Vancouver’s shift towards mondo condo and away from the balance of living and working we sought up to the early 1990s.
Our downtown buildings have been subject to ridicule in the architectural press for their continuing use of the fake historical flourishes of post modern architecture, at a time when this ‘anything goes’ revivalist style is in decline nearly everywhere else. City policies all but mandate “chateau chapeaux,” mock Georgian tops, and Art Deco decoration in designs before downtown towers get the discretionary approvals crucial for extra density.
If you wonder why the buildings lining the north side of George Wainborn Park gently curve over two blocks, it is because a number of our senior urban designers took a liking to England’s Georgian squares in general, and to Bath’s Royal Crescent in particular, the source of its forms, resulting in its shape with none of its elegance.
Vancouver‘s urban design policies might as well have been written with quill pens.
Planning policies promote further historicism through promoting terrace houses, stoops for suites, sash windows and continuous cornices–you would think this was a New England courthouse town, and not the place that spawned Canada’s most heroic modernist architects in Ron Thom and Arthur Erickson.
Indeed, our finest architects have been discouraged from doing downtown buildings by these and other “crank the handle) rules based on the subjective taste of planners, not the preservation of the public good. With the welcome exception of the “Erickson” now under construction for Concord Pacific, you will look in vain downtown for any works completed in the last decade by such internationally prominent Vancouver designers as Peter Cardew, Richard Henriquez, or John and Patricia Patkau.
Downtown’s planner-mandated PoMo fripperies will fade into history–thank God for our quick-growing trees and shrubbery. Far more dangerous is a tilt towards post-modernism as a philosophy that underscores the plans and actions of those who would shape Vancouver.
One of post-modernism’s central ideas — as demonstrated in the works of such French critical theorists as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard — is the warm em-bracement of the simulation that marks our era, be it simulated buildings, simulated economies, or in the case of their own convoluted writings, simulated intellects.
Vancouver‘s top planners are convinced that office towers are horse and buggy, the corporation is passe, the idea of salaries and workplaces is redundant, and consequently, a downtown with conventional jobs is no longer needed.
We have mortgaged downtown’s future on the promise of a lot of flaky cultural and economic analysis.
Downtown Vancouver is currently subject to an enormous bet, one that proposes that previous city-building patterns are now redundant, that those countless condos are not filling with retirees and global hot money investors, but the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of some new golden age.
On the other hand, The Economist has described the current global real estate boom as “the biggest speculative bubble in economic history.” Economic air is no longer pumping out that bubble, and Vancouver, Dubai and American coastal cities will pop the loudest, and we will talk of little else in the next decade.
The largest industry in downtown Vancouver — in terms of the square feet it occupies and the number of people it employs — is the teaching of English to young graduates from around the world, occupying one fifth of our “Class B” office space. The second-largest downtown industry is the food, beverage and hotel business.
Our lessened role as a resort and not a real metropolis is not some distant fate, but nearly here, and a fight is on for the fate of the last 20-odd city blocks that would give us any chance at all of turning things around.
Jack and son Rob Leshgold’s Reliance Holdings has been a long-term developer and owner of downtown Vancouver buildings, pioneering the adaptive re-use of Water Street’s under-used heritage structures. Touring their fine projects recently, the Leshgolds talked about their largest underdeveloped downtown property, an entire block out where Pender Street meets Georgia.
“10 years ago, I would have never imagined it would go for housing,” said Jack, somewhat sheepishly. The Leshgolds imagine this because planning policy since then has told them to think this way.
To turn things around we will first have to stop trusting the fantasies of success that we have heard ad nauseum from our postmodern urbanists.
Even more difficult, we will have to tell our land owners and developers that balanced development is to everyone’s long-term benefit, and that we will have to stop pouring gasoline on the condo fire that burns through downtown, week by week.
I would love an opportunity for my children to create wealth in a dense and diverse downtown Vancouver, and not be obliged to take such resort-oriented jobs as waiters, dog-walkers for the monied elderly, or teachers of English to the children of those places that still make and invent things, like Korea, Taiwan and Finland.
A downtown is a terrible thing to waste.
Architecture critic Trevor Boddy welcomes reader feedback at [email protected]
© The Vancouver Sun 2006