The District of North Vancouver is moving forward with a new official community plan reflecting the prospect of an additional 45,000 people to the municipality by 2030. The plan also boosts density, making residential towers possible in areas such as the Lower Lynn neighbourhood.
“Developers are very keen to invest in that area,” said Matt Thomas, an industrial broker in the Vancouver office of Avison Young. “You’ve got groups paying, for some properties, up to $165 a square foot buildable. And you don’t see that anywhere else in Metro Vancouver other than smack dab in the middle of downtown.”
The district’s new plan will complement development in the City of North Vancouver that’s transformed the Lower Lonsdale area and is now marching north up Lonsdale Avenue.
“It’s going to look very similar,” Thomas said of the Lower Lynn area along Seymour Creek.
North Van’s plan also envisions an “enhanced transit, energy and utility corridor” stretching from Seymour Creek to Ambleside, where West Vancouver is engaging the public on an ambitious Grosvenor Canada Ltd. redevelopment plans for the 1300-block of Marine Drive.
West Vancouver sees Ambleside as its town centre. According to its annual report, Grosvenor wants to combine residential and retail uses on its site and complete the project by 2016.
Grosvenor is not the only developer eyeing the area. Plans are also afoot to make over GH West Van Holdings Ltd.’s Safeway site in the 1600-block of Marine Drive.
A genuine respect for old wood was part of the reason Mike Bazilli wanted to include salvaged lumber in the renovation of 1920 Mahon Avenue in North Vancouver. But it would have been cheaper to build new, he says of a project that resulted from a unique combination of circumstances.
Bazilli, principal of Far North Enterprises Ltd., renovated the two-storey house in partnership with Naikoon Construction Ltd. A buyer promptly snapped up the home when construction completed in April.
The home fetched a premium price, but Bazilli said the use of 70-year-old timbers and glulam beams from the 1950s and 1960s throughout the project wasn’t a factor. The wood wasn’t incorporated as a heritage feature but rather because it was good, and wood. Chipping it and shipping it off for hog fuel, as often happens, would have been a waste of decent lumber – so decent, in fact, the original grading marks were still attached.
“It’s nice wood. It just happens to be old,” Bazilli said. “If we find another piece of property and we have the time to put together some wood, we would try it again, but it’s not a business model you could draw up and charge out and do.”
Storage and transport costs are major obstacles.
Bazilli said he was fortunate to be able to source wood from a school demolished in Surrey, industrial buildings being redeveloped for residential towers and even timbers from Alberta’s pavilion for the 2010 Winter Olympics. This limited damage to the lumber, cut storage costs and worked with his timeline.
By the same token, he believes more could be done. Structural engineers helped make his project possible, but that’s not always the case, even though wood is there for those willing to find it.
“If you’re looking, and you’re constantly looking, there’s an amazing amount of stuff that comes along,” Bazilli said.
B.C. farmland values were virtually unchanged in the latter half of 2010, rising just 0.4% in the period according to the latest Farm Credit Canada survey.
The increase followed a decline in the first half of the year, which the federal agency attributed to economic uncertainty and a high Canadian dollar.
The loonie’s value relative to other currencies continued to challenge the agricultural land market in the latter half of 2010.
Overseas investment in the province’s food-production lands was modest, and producers, while adjusting well, were not driving up values to the extent seen in the mid-2000s.
“It’s stable to slightly downward,” said Bill Wiebe, a senior appraiser in Farm Credit Canada’s Abbotsford office.
“There’s still some offshore investment off and on here, some larger purchases with offshore money, though a high Canadian dollar is a damper on agriculture in general.”
The most active area in the province was the Peace River district, where off-farm income from the oil and gas sector is helping fund acquisitions in the Dawson Creek and Fort St. John areas.