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Posted Sep 21, 2020, 8:18 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2015
Location: BC
Posts: 4,306
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Jericho Lands planning proceeds slowly, especially with pandemic
Quote:
The directive went out long ago that the deadline for military personnel to move out of the sprawling Jericho Lands would be January 2017 to make way for a potentially massive First Nations-led housing development.
But the Dill family is still on the property, known as the Jericho Garrison. One of military families still living in the about 50 small homes on the eastern portion of the spacious 36-hectare hillside property, they say they’ve been told their lease extends until at least 2023.
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Development of the Jericho Lands, which the Musqueam Indian Band, Squamish Nation and Tsleil-Waututh Nation bought in 2016 from the provincial and federal governments, has been proceeding slowly — some say the pandemic seems to have ground the city review process to a halt. (The military housing area is 50 per cent owned by the Canada Lands Company, a federal Crown corporation.)
Nearby residents are trying to get an idea of what vision the First-Nations-run MST Development Corporation has for the property — especially since residents are disturbed Vancouver council appears to be looking favourably upon what they see as a nearby precedent — a 14-storey tower to go up just 100 metres from the Jericho Lands.
“People have talked about there being 1,000 to 25,000 residents on the Jericho Lands. But no one in any position of power has ever told me what they’re thinking of in regards to numbers,” said Murray Hendren, who lives next to the Jericho Lands and co-chairs a city advisory committee on its future.
“Let’s just keep it reasonable. … We don’t want another Oakridge here,” said Hendren, referring to the slew of residential towers being built along Cambie between 41st and 49th.
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Michael Geller, a retired architect who developed an 11-storey residential building on Fourth Avenue adjacent to the Jericho Lands, said it’s difficult to say whether the Jericho Lands process is going quickly or slowly.
“But what I would say is it should go slowly, because it’s such a significant property.”
Decision makers, Geller said, have been wise to avoid prematurely forcing out the military families. One of the worst planning decisions in recent decades, he said, was the forced removal of social-housing tenants at Little Mountain in Vancouver, which has still not been developed.
Geller supports a mix of low-rise and highrise residential buildings for the Jericho Lands, which he thinks will eventually bring in “tens of thousands” of new residents to Point Grey, which has a population of about 12,000, while Kitsilano has 43,000. “It could be exactly the kind of place that people who are already in the neighbourhood might want to move into.”
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Every major housing development in Metro Vancouver draws intense scrutiny — and that is the case with the Jericho Lands, which stretch for one kilometre, by far the largest chunk of property controlled by the First Nations consortium.
The West Point Grey Residents Association last year produced a sophisticated 23-page report on the Jericho Lands, which includes a survey of more than 815 nearby residents.
The survey found strong support for two and four-storey buildings on the Jericho Lands, moderate support for six-storey apartment complexes and less than two per cent support for towers above 20 storeys.
More recently the association has obtained 2,901 signatures on an online Change.org petition opposing a 14-storey Westbank complex at Broadway and Alma, which it maintains would “set a precedent for the forthcoming development in the Jericho Lands, which lie only one block away.”
While Hendren believes city staff, First Nations and federal officials want to do a good job on the Jericho Lands, he said residents fear council members will give the go-ahead to the Broadway and Alma tower, as well as for too many highrises at Jericho, because they imagine there will soon be a subway line along Broadway to UBC.
The worry, Hendren said, is in light of COVID-19 restrictions, that demand for housing in the neighbourhood will not be that intense — because the subway line might not get built, fewer students, particularly from abroad, might attend UBC and that, conceivably, more people will be working out of home offices in the suburbs.
There will be many, many discussions to come, in public and behind the scenes. Hendren, who is retired, suspects there will not be a “shovel in the ground” on the Jericho Lands for up to six years. And that the project won’t be entirely “built out” for 30 years.
“I won’t be around then.”
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