Council proposal calls for fewer condo towers and revised height limits
Christina Montgomery
Province
The report calls on council to push commercial space in Yaletown. RIC ERNST FILE PHOTO – THE PROVINCE
Faced with a continuing shortage of office space in Vancouver‘s downtown core, the city hopes to increase office-building density, pull residential zoning from areas and push commercial space in Yaletown.
Council will vote Tuesday on sending the plan out for public consultation, which is likely to provoke debate on its proposal to lift height restrictions in some areas and ban new condos in others.
The move is the final step in several years’ work to grapple with the effect of skyrocketing residential prices that have pushed developers to build condo towers in the downtown core rather than office buildings.
This summer, Barclay Street Real Estate’s second-quarter report indicated there were just 400,000 square feet of vacant space included in the 19.4-million square feet of space it monitors in downtown buildings.
The privately owned real-estate broker said the figure represented a 2.06-per-cent vacancy rate — although leasing was expected to pick up by year’s end and bring the figure down to 1.1 per cent.
At the time, other Vancouver-based commercial realtors were less optimistic. Colliers International, which monitors a larger area of the downtown core, estimated vacancy at 1.7 per cent.
A staff report going to council Tuesday notes that the city has been working for several years to promote and preserve “job space.”
The report — which doesn’t mention the sharp international economic downturn of the past month — says there is a “potential shortfall of potential between the amount of job space available under current zoning and the future demand for job space.”
It is not clear how the picture will change should a slowdown in the economy delay construction of many of the projects now under way or commercial activity in general.
The plan’s proposed policy and zoning changes, combined with the job-space potential in northeast False Creek and the central waterfront, “will meet the potential job-space deficit of 5.8 million square feet in the downtown peninsula,” the report says.
It suggests:
– Immediately creating additional job-space capacity through rezoning, because developers can then get faster approvals through the development permit process;
– Requiring new developments in more downtown areas to provide at least a minimum of non-residential space;
– Retaining the commercial capacity of Yaletown by allowing new commercial buildings to be built to the full permitted density of mixed-use buildings and by introducing a minimum commercial-density requirement for all new buildings and heritage revitalization projects;
– Increasing the potential for commercial capacity in the downtown core by allowing non-residential buildings to reach heights and densities up to the “view cones” that the city’s view-corridor policy sets out. Sites without view cones could go higher;
– Dealing with an expected growth in transit use by workers in the new areas by pushing for investment in downtown transit services.
© The Vancouver Province 2008