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Originally Posted by officedweller
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Vancouver councillor Andrea Reimer, whose mayor, Gregor Robertson, has made encouraging high-tech a key part of his agenda, says sometimes people working at computers are doing manufacturing-type work. If they create a mass product – a digital video game, a social-media tool – that they put out on the market for people to buy, that is industrial.
That is different, she maintains, from people who produce law briefs or tax returns or marketing reports for specific customers. Those are services, and not industrial. That is how city zoning can differentiate, she says.
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As someone working in software in the heart of Vancouver's commercial downtown core in a building full of lawyers and other types of white collar workers I can tell you that this concept that is trying to be sold here is total horse —.
Reimer here is misunderstanding or being disingenuous about the role of zoning. The point is to separate types of activities based on their level of nuisance. Software development is a low nuisance activity. You could put it anywhere. You could allow a software development studio in the heart of residential Kitsilano and nearby residents would probably not notice. In contrast types of industrial use, with supply vans coming and going and industrial fans working all day (and night!) is high nuisance activity that can't go in the heart of residential Kitsilano without aggravating a ton of people. You could put any low nuisance activity in a higher nuisance zone, but you're then not using land effectively and you're potentially undermining the high nuisance activities.
This leads to the other danger of trying to undermine industrial zoning by introducing other uses. Why would someone cheaply rent space to an artist studio or food truck startup commisary kitchen when one could fetch higher rents and a more stable renter by renting to an established tech company? Why rent to a small manufacturer when one could make so much more by selling the land and redeveloping it into a condo building?
I think it's reasonably likely that the unintended consequence introducing other uses into industrial zoning without extreme care is that broad swaths of types of businesses become unviable.
Maybe it no longer makes sense for businesses like Hudson Plating to exist in this exact area, but I think there are lots of other industrial type businesses that the city is best off keeping room set aside for. The economy of Vancouver is if anything already too weak and one dimensional as it is. We need to keep the options open to more types of potential businesses in the city, not narrow them further.
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