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Posted Aug 15, 2009, 9:02 AM
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Vancouver Moderator
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Join Date: Mar 2007
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A few selected articles from CBeat's Van Sun link:
Quote:
On Cambie Street, big box stores co-exist with mixed-use retail outlets and condominiums.
Vancouver developers wait for city to act on density issue
BY DERRICK PENNER, VANCOUVER SUN AUGUST 14, 2009
Photograph by: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
While urban planning around the Canada Line in Richmond is largely complete, in Vancouver much of the planning is just getting underway.
Vancouver city officials have begun the process that will result in rezoning for the high-density development that TransLink wants to see along the line.
However, Jane Bird, CEO of Canada Line Rapid Transit Inc. (CLCO), said developers have already offered a positive response to the new piece of transportation infrastructure, particularly with developments at Broadway and Cambie near city hall.
That location has turned into an intensive mixed-use zone with large-format retail stores at the base and live-work condominium residences on top.
The Crossroads development, on the southwest corner, houses a Whole Foods supermarket and a London Drugs beneath office space and several storeys of condominiums.
Across the street and up the block, The Rise includes a Home Depot and a Save on Foods next door to a Best Buy store and a Canadian Tire.
“Clearly, again, this is an opportunity to add density to some [of the development] that we see there already,” Bird said. “The Crossroads development is a good example of a mixed use, dense, esthetically pleasing building near transit.”
Vancouver planning director Brent Toderian said those developments were exciting for the city because they took what has typically been a suburban amenity — low-rise big-box stores — and brought them into an urban setting in a way that isn’t car-dependent.
“I call this area of Broadway and Cambie the first truly urban power centre in North America,” Toderian said.
He said the new development added to what was already B.C.’s second-biggest concentration of urban job space outside of downtown Vancouver.
However, for the rest of the Canada Line corridor within Vancouver, the story remains somewhat of a patchwork with planning underway only for some spots, one of them the 28-acre Oakridge Centre mall site.
Vancouver city council adopted a new policy statement for Oakridge in 2007 that contemplates a considerable increase in residential density, raising it to a maximum potential 1.2 million square feet, from about 150,000 square feet established in a previous policy statement.
Now the city has kicked off an accelerated planning exercise for the remainder of the line, which it hopes to wrap up by the end of next year with a comprehensive policy statement and urban design to guide development along the entire corridor.
“Often you have planning for land use, and you wait with bated breath for the infrastructure to come,” Toderian said. “In this case, we’re fortunate to have the infrastructure about to open, and a great opportunity to to do very progressive land use planning and urban design along that corridor.”
Initially, Toderian said, the city intended to do the planning work station by station, which would have taken up to eight years.
“If we had done it on the six-to-eight year time frame, we would have been significantly far behind,” Toderian said. “But I think we’ve got an opportunity to go from being behind a bit to, compared with other progressive North American cities, being out in front.”
However, the development community, while appreciative of the city’s newly accelerated planning time line, sees some lost opportunities because the planning didn’t begin when the Canada Line was first approved.
“We wish they had done so sooner,” Jeff Fisher, deputy executive director at the Urban Development Institute (UDI) said in an interview. “It is at least going ahead. The key thing is they have to plan those areas.”
The UDI’s advice for Vancouver is to develop as many dense mixed-use communities as it can along the corridor to help maximize the Canada Line’s ridership and increase payback for the overall system.
However, in a city that is starved for development land, a clear policy for density along the Canada Line could have gone a long way toward encouraging developers to begin assembling land, which will be a considerable task in neighbourhoods that are predominantly single-family housing, according to Neil Chrystal, president of Polygon Homes.
Chrystal said that to date, Burnaby and New Westminster have done a better job of accepting and accommodating density around their stations on the SkyTrain system.
He said that might be due to the fact that sites around stations in those communities were more suited to such development.
“My frustration when I look at the City of Vancouver, particularly the Cambie corridor, is that there has been a long time to plan density along this line [yet] everyone’s still talking about it,” Chrystal said, “and there’s no plan in place.”
Chrystal said the development community’s advice has been for the city to take some risks and approve some blanket densities so developers can proceed.
If such decisions had been made sooner, Chrystal said, some development proposals might have already come forward.
Regardless, Metro residents can expect substantial changes in development along the Canada Line, and probably within the next five years, according to Lawrence Frank, the Bombardier chair in sustainable transportation at the University of B.C.’s School for Community and Regional Planning.
Frank, who is studying land uses along the Canada Line with some of his students as part of the city’s planning process, said even Main Street the next major corridor to the west, is being affected by its proximity to the Canada Line.
“I expect to see significant changes,” Frank said, “and not just at the station areas, but all along the length of the corridor.”
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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Quote:
Richmond riding TransLink into future
BY DERRICK PENNER, VANCOUVER SUN AUGUST 14, 2009
600 hundred apartment units are under construction in five projects within walking distance of the Canada Line's Brighouse Station.
Photograph by: .., Vancouver Sun
One of TransLink’s great challenges is to build up ridership on the new Canada Line so it can minimize the subsidies it has to pay the line’s builder and operator.
In this, it has no stauncher ally than the City of Richmond, which is planning to triple the population of its city centre, mainly around Canada Line stations.
“When you get a Canada Line, you don’t [take] a $2-billion gift and do business as usual,” said Terry Crowe, Richmond’s manager of policy planning.
“From Canada Line’s point of view, the name of the game is ridership,” Crowe said in an interview.
Richmond, he said, intends to deliver it.
When the fate of the Canada Line project, then known as the RAV Line — for Richmond-Airport-Vancouver — hung in the balance, Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie, TransLink’s chairman at the time, pushed hard for its approval.
Richmond took the opportunity to project its community plan out 100 years and envisioned what the city might look like fully built out.
Crowe said some 40,000 people live in Richmond’s city centre now, in the area where the Canada Line branches off to the airport.
The city wants to accommodate another 80,000 residents, he said, and plans to do so by creating high-density urban villages around its four Canada Line stations where it is appropriate, and flesh out the commercial potential around other stations.
Within 400 metres of every station, Crowe said, the city wants to maximize the height and density of development, including residential, office and retail uses.
The beginnings can already be seen from the windows of Richmond City Hall: Construction cranes toiling away over condominium buildings rising around Brighouse Station.
All five buildings, set on the retail strip of No. 3 Road at Saba, right across from the Richmond Centre Mall, started construction after Canada Line development began.
It is what planners call “transit-oriented development,” nodes of high-density housing alongside offices and shopping centres near parks or public plazas.
You can see existing examples of transit-oriented development along SkyTrain’s Expo and Millennium lines, such as Metrotown and Brentwood Town Centre in Burnaby.
“Brighouse is the most impressive,” said Brian Jackson, director of development-permit applications for Richmond. "There are 600 [apartment] units under construction in five separate projects, all within walking distance [of the station].
“And there are another 1,300 units approved or in the planning process.”
The Canada Line will have 16 stations when it opens, including four in Richmond and three at the airport on Sea Island, with potential for up to four more stations to be built later.
Richmond’s focus is on the three southermost stations. Crowe said residential development will be concentrated around Brighouse and Aberdeen stations initially and eventually the future Capstan Station.
Bridgeport and Lansdowne stations will see more intense concentrations of commercial development, adding to what is already there. Crowe said such uses are necessary to build complete communities in the city’s downtown core.
“Imagine Richmond as a cube, or a box,” Crowe said. “In the box, you put land where you live, work and play, and you do that in a balanced way.”
Within that balance, he added, “you have to put some land aside for jobs and business too.”
Jane Bird, CEO of Canada Line Rapid Transit Inc. (CLCO), said she believes municipalities and the public in general understand that “if you’re going to make an investment of this significance on a corridor,” you have to maximize its potential by putting as many residents as you can in homes close to the infrastructure.
Bird said Richmond has taken a comprehensive view of its planning, with some businesses along the route buying in to the project as well.
CLCO is the TransLink subsidiary overseeing construction of the line and all its facilities.
Bird said Great Canadian Casinos partnered with CLCO to build a 1,200-space parking garage adjacent to its River Rock property on River Road. It will serve as a park-and-ride facility for TransLink during the day, and be open for use by casino patrons at night.
CLCO contributed land it had acquired for the planned park-and-ride, and Great Canadian built it, with a promise that TransLink would be able to use its spaces during the day and would eventually be permitted to build a new hotel on top of the structure.
Aberdeen Centre Mall, on Hazelbridge Way near Cambie Road, Bird said, is another example of early capitalization on the new infrastructure.
Aberdeen’s owners, Fairchild Development Ltd., purchased a piece of property from CLCO that was surplus to its needs for the Aberdeen Station.
Danny Leung, Fairchild’s senior vice-president and general manager, said the company plans to build an extension of the mall that will bridge from its existing location to the station on No. 3 Road.
“Definitely [the Canada Line] is an asset for our development,” Leung said in an interview. He expects it will bring a lot of traffic to the mall that wouldn’t find it convenient otherwise.
Leung said the company has plans for another $100 million in eventual expansion, but will wait until after the 2010 Olympics to decide when to proceed.
“Market conditions keep on changing,” Leung said. “The market seems to be bouncing back from six months ago. I think [Metro] Vancouver is still growing and I think the future will be good.”
However, there are signs of some growing pains.
Ward McAllister, president of the development firm Ledingham McAllister, said Richmond is weighing down development projects with too much of the costs for community amenities that it wants to see built in transit-oriented neighbourhoods.
“Richmond has been too greedy,” McAllister said. “They are imposing so many costs on developers that it makes it impossible to go forward. It’s just not economic.”
McAllister said municipal demands are to blame for a substantial development at the proposed Capstan Way Station being put on hold. One demand was that developers finance construction of the station.
Peter Webb, vice-president of development at Concord Pacific, one of the developers involved on the site, declined to discuss Richmond’s demands, saying the company is still in discussions with the city about its future.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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From the Vancouver Sun
Quote:
Rotating art will brighten the stations on Canada Line
BY KELLY SINOSKI, VANCOUVER SUNAUGUST 14, 2009
Musqueam artist Susan Point's cedar sculpture will be a permanent fixture at the YVR station for the Canada Line.
Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, Vancouver Sun
Canada Line passengers waiting for a train will have something to pique their interest: a series of public art pieces installed at stations along the 19-kilometre line.
The artwork is part of a Canada Line Public Art Program, which aims to engage the public and liven up the stations with “playful” pieces, said Jane Bird, CEO of Canada Line Rapid Transit Inc.
The pieces include a sculpture entitled La Chaise by Seattle artist Marie Khouri, which will likely be installed at Olympic Station.
The bright colourful work by artists Victor Cicansky and Joe Fafard, both of whom are represented by local galleries, and a train design by Yayoi Kusama, one of the Biennale partnerships, will also be featured.
The artwork will be rotated around the rapid transit line and changed over time.
“The theme is they’re all temporary,” Bird said. “This was meant to be a first splash on opening day to get people thinking of art.”
Only the YVR-Airport station will have a permanent fixture: a first nations sculpture by Musqueam artist artist Susan Point. Entitled Cedar Connection, the 10-foot high, 10-foot long and 11-foot wide sculpture made of western red cedar is designed to reflect what the area once looked like.
The sculpture aims to depict the first nations people and their relationship with the great rainforest and the Fraser River.
The main body of the artwork represents an old-growth tree stump, with a flowing water-line motif representing the river. Inside the sculpture is a tufted weaving pattern that represents the tapestry of life.
An owl and a human face within the tree stump relate to the oral tradition within Salish culture. The owl is the keeper of wisdom and a messenger within the story of life, while the human face is a tribute to Musqueam storyteller Dominic Point.
InTransitBC is partnering with the Biennale for the public art project.
It has also asked the City of Vancouver to waive its City Retail Compensation fee, which allows it to lease retail operations in Canada Line stations, in exchange for dedicating the money to the public art program.
[email protected]
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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From The Vancouver Sun
I actually haven't seen this anywhere yet... I wonder where it will be placed.
Last edited by deasine; Aug 15, 2009 at 4:10 PM.
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