Posted Feb 14, 2025, 2:45 AM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Dec 2015
Posts: 14,650
|
|
Inside The City Of Vancouver Housing Development Office With Director Brad Foster
Quote:
We are under more scrutiny than most developers, because we are public. I mean, Howard, you're going to be looking at every single rezoning application I put in from now on, and I'm sure of it, right? Because you want to know what we're doing. And we appreciate that scrutiny. And, by the way, that scrutiny extends to our planning and development services unit — the regulatory side of the house. The VHDO represents the land owner side of the house. We face exactly the same processes, the same scrutiny on policy and form of development just like any other developer does. And I would say more so.
Some opinionated real estate agents have said this, but there's no elbowing our way to the front of anything. We're in line just like everybody else. To us, it's a story of success that will include the local development and investment community. We are going to try and participate more fully as an equity partner. But we can't do it alone. We need the development community's expertise as development managers, as finance experts, we're also going to need very large-scale equity contributions to finance these projects. So this notion that there's an 'us versus them' situation is untrue. And in my view, it's really a negative overreaction by an insecure minority.
We've taken this project to all of the top developers in the Lower Mainland. We've sat down with all of them, presentations with UDI, with the Board of Trade. We talked to everybody. Colliers did a bunch of work for us on market testing. We have a strong finance team and a strong development team, but we want to make sure that we're testing our assumptions all the time, because it's a complicated business, there's a lot to know, and we want to make sure we have the best eyes on what we're doing.
|
Quote:
Yeah, that's the idea. We're going to rezone the land and that rezoned land would be our equity, potentially, in that development deal, and we would bring a development deal to the market. That would have to be through a public and transparent process, obviously, to identify what we're looking for and hope to achieve and see what comes. I think there's a lot of great developers right here in our backyard that are going to be very excited about this. That's probably the process that we'll see unfold in the next couple of years.
I mean, the City of Vancouver isn't going to go borrow $600 million anytime soon. It can't do that for a development project. We'll have to rely — just like developers — on equity markets, private equity. For construction financing, naturally, we'll look to our provincial partners, our federal partners potentially, but the private community's doing that as well. In a sense, we're doing all the same things. The big difference here is that all of the cash flow and value that we generate goes back to the public. We're not putting rubber on the Bentley, you know what I mean? Everything that we do goes back to public benefit, but it's going to require private markets for us to succeed, for sure. 100%.
|
Quote:
|
No. These are large projects — like four million square feet of residential. That's a lot, right? So I think once we get rolling, we'll probably start with — we don't even know yet, we're still doing that analysis — probably one of the more modest projects. Not that any of these are really modest. What's the deal structure look like? How are we taking these to market? Who's going to be our development partner? That's all part of the mix and the decision-making that we still need to make once we get the sites zoned.
|
https://storeys.com/vancouver-housin...e-brad-foster/
|
Prev
Linear Mode
