Non-Partisan Association (NPA) mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton believes more exemptions should be made to building height restrictions in the city’s long-standing view corridor policy.
A long-time supporter of tall towers, Anton believes that Providence Health Care executives should not be limited to building an 11-storey structure at the corner of Comox and Thurlow streets.
“It is unnecessary to restrict them to 11 storeys for the new ambulatory care building that they’re planning,” Anton told Business in Vancouver.
She does not believe the policy of having view corridors should be scrapped, only that there are places where exemptions make sense.
“I defy you to tell me which view corridor it is,” Anton said. “I bet you could ask your BIV readers and not one of them would know.”
Anton was not even clear herself which view corridor would be affected.
“The economies of scale of allowing a taller building are huge when you compare doing a large building project to one with several smaller buildings,” Anton said. “Who knows what the difference in value will be? But it will be enormous and that will be savings for the taxpayer.”
View corridor restrictions forced St. Paul’s Hospital executives to draft a proposal last year to build a structure no higher than 11 storeys.
The construction project’s aim was to reinforce the 117-year-old hospital’s status as downtown Vancouver’s hospital and not an ancillary facility to a new hospital built on the False Creek Flats.
Dianne Doyle, who is CEO of Providence Health Care, which operates St. Paul’s, had no problem with that height restriction when Business in Vancouver spoke with her last November.
Her plans were to put a 200,000-square-foot tower at the corner of Thurlow and Comox streets because that would cause the least disruption to hospital operations.
The 11-storey building would replace the current Comox Building, which houses hospital offices and a parking lot. Doyle has criticized her hospital for having an inefficient floor plan.
New purpose-built space, she said, would therefore replace the equivalent of more than 200,000 square feet of space in existing buildings.
Glen Korstrom
@GlenKorstrom