Quote:
Originally Posted by connect2source
Regardless of who's responsible it's in dire need of redevelopment and currently is a shameful collection of dilapidated 80's buildings with CRU's from another era, too small for most today/s international tenants. The vacancy rate is astounding for how central it is especially towards Bute, shame to see this once vibrant stretch rotting on the vine.
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I'd imagine part of the problem with redevelopment along Robson is inadvertently related to city planning.
Robson rents are generalyl too high for small retailers. Ideally a medium or maybe large retailer would want to be on the street due to high foot traffic, but the blocks are, as you said, mostly taken by small landlords with disparate CRUs. So this makes it tricky for any medium or large retailer, who would need a larger footprint location.
The small landlords in most part are not selling, so it prevents land assemblies along that stretch. So retailers can only get a decent amount of square footage if they build up. But with a single-width or even a double-width CRU storefront, you'd need to go up many many floors to attract a medium-sized retail store with your square footage - and even then, it just becomes too expensive and inefficient to build, and not ideal for customers to shop over split floors if you're a smallish retailer.
On top of that, City Hall has limited the height of retail stores over Robson Street anyway, so no developer would even be motivated to even attempt to build a multi-storey narrow CRU.
The best solution would be for some of those small CRUs near Robson and Burrard to sell to a developer, who then assembles a decent-sized floorplan (say, half a block). Then they can redevelop to the maximum allowed height, create a 2-floor retail footprint, more if they have interest from an appropriate retailer, and put offices above that, up to the full allowable FSR height.
The nearest to this concept that I've seen done on Robson happened a few years ago on 2 of the Robson/Granville corners. First with the Futureshop/Winners development, and more recently with the Old Navy site. Something like those 2 redevelopments could definitely happen further down Robson, and I think it would help put some big names on the street. I could totally imagine a Muji or similar successfully taking up a 2 storey floorplan mid-Robson. Something with international draw would be the only tenant that could make it work.
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