Quote:
Originally Posted by jollyburger
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The article title (now) is "Vancouver’s suburbs are not sprawling. They’re growing up". The only reference to Broadway Plan offices is the quote "
Christina DeMarco, former head of planning for Metro Vancouver regional district, says councillors’ move flies in the face of how Vancouver had earlier agreed to a more inclusive plan to make Surrey Centre the region’s “second downtown” and allow more people to work closer to home.
DeMarco said adding scores of office towers to the Broadway corridor contradicts regional efforts to reduce commuting times, cut carbon emissions and distribute jobs more equitably throughout Metro’s town centres."
Todd has a comment on jobs "
Vancouver’s decision on the Broadway plan, which aims to make 500 blocks of the Broadway corridor into a massive “second downtown” of commercial office towers, rental and condo highrises, home to an oversized total of 129,000 jobs." This is one of a series of anti-development, anti-Broadway Plan stories he's written.
If you look at the projects in Mount Pleasant there are already at least 10 office buildings (although none are towers). They will contribute to more jobs in the Broadway Plan area, as will new office buildings near VCC like Hive, an expanding VGH, and if it's ever built, the new City Hall complex. There should be more retail and service jobs as more retail (like City Market for example) opens to serve the expanding residential and empliment population.
DeMarco would be concerned about the switch from industrial to office because she wrote the City's policy on protecting Industrial Lands (before she moved to Metro). She doesn't seem to appreciate that there still has to be 'industrial' space underneath the office buildings (in the Industrial Area), so if there's demand, there's a continuing supply of space.
Letting significant residential into the area would be a huge threat to some of the businesses there, both in terms of what they do (breweries for example), and as land values would be rachetted up even more than they already have been. (Clubs are already allowed).
There are valid criticisms of municipalities like Surrey and Burnaby that they've been willing to convert requirements for commercial space in their station area mega-projects to residential. There's very little office actually being built. Brentwood Mall, once it's finally become the fully built out Amazing Brentwood, may well have amazingly reduced the area of retail space, and built no office space at all. But there's also less office space in the Broadway Plan than there might have been - office projects on East Broadway, and by Main St SkyTrain station have been switched to residential too. So far the City of Vancouver has been more cautious about wholesale swiching of employment land to residential, so it doesn't have the bedroom high-rise communities, without much employment space, that most other municipalities are allowing.
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