Downtown office space is in demand, rents are rising and investors are eager to join the exclusive club of those who own property in Vancouver’s core, according to a panel of experts the commercial property association NAIOP convened in late October.
Small wonder, then, that plans by the Jim Pattison Group and Reliance Properties to redevelop an assembly of 23 parcels (including the Toyota dealership at Burrard and Drake streets) to make space for a 13-storey office tower.
A recent Avison Young report surveys a handful of other projects, including Oxford Properties Group’s plans for 260,000 square feet on the site of the former University Women’s Club on West Hastings as well as 1133 Melville Street, where Amacon had planned a 42-storey office tower.
Austeville Properties Ltd. and Telus each have sites being discussed for upward of one million square feet of space. And let’s not forget the long-standing proposals by Bentall Capital and the Aquilini Investment Group for projects at 745 Thurlow Street and 800 Griffiths Way, respectively.
While none of the proposed towers would complete before 2014, CB Richard Ellis executive vice-president Jim Szabo told NAIOP he foresees a “broadening” of the office market by 2020.
“The market could probably withstand something in the neighbourhood of two, possibly three office towers downtown in that 700,000 to one million square feet [range] because they won’t all be done at the same time,” he said.
Cushman & Wakefield vice-president Kevin Meikle seconded Szabo’s opinion, while the doyen of Vancouver investment sales, Avtar Bains, shooed away fears of Vancouver suffering the fate of Calgary’s overbuilt office market.
Optimism in the Calgary market was fuelled by the price of oil, but Vancouver’s diverse economy means no one sector and no one user is going to prompt a downtown building boom.
“That’s one of the innate protections we have in our marketplace,” Bains said. “We are so diversified that no one’s going to come into the marketplace and want 400,000 or 500,000 or 600,000 square feet all at once.”
A few nights ago, your columnist awoke with a start from dreams that his childhood address was extended from three digits to five, as if subjected to a densification initiative in which a greater number of residences required longer civic numbering. Yet out of the misty dreamscape, the message was clear: what we’ve known will be remade.
Which, coincidentally, meshed with the gist of Georgia Institute of Technology architecture professor Ellen Dunham-Jones’ presentations last week as SFU’s visiting fellow in urban sustainable development.
Dunham-Jones kicked off a breakfast presentation to Urban Development Institute members with some stark comments regarding the suburbs. While acknowledging many suburbs as “lovely, leafy enclaves that will remain beloved places for a very long time,” Dunham-Jones highlighted the dysfunction lurking beneath the shiny, happy – and generally paved – surface.
“Your child is 10 times more likely to die from a car crash in the suburbs than to die in a pool of blood in any other manner in the city,” she said.
And if driving wasn’t bad enough, consider the non-drivers: “Both the elderly and teenagers have the highest suicide rates, the highest rates of depression, isolation.”
Dunham-Jones’s dystopic vision of suburbia damned by the auto highlighted the importance of the dynamic solutions she proposed as suburbs lose their original identity in the midst of urban sprawl.
Tops on her agenda are malls, particularly dead ones.
“Nobody likes to see a business fail, but the reality is every time I see another dead mall, I go, ‘Yes! it’s a chance to get it right this time!’” she crowed.
Getting it right may involve retrofitting former malls and retail complexes with “community-serving uses” that provide gathering points, or the outright redevelopment of the properties in accordance with the green principles that represent current best practice. Some properties, on the other hand, should be left to return to nature through what she called “regreening.”
The return to municipalities will be at the very least a tripling of tax revenues.
“This is only targeting underperforming commercial sites, and then it’s rebuilding them … to provide options for a more urban lifestyle for that new demographic that are looking for that,” she said.
Regardless of the risks, Westbank is welcoming new mall development as Anthem Properties Group sees a new Real Canadian Superstore location complete at its Governor’s Landing property, while across the street Governor’s Market proceeds toward an April 2011 complete date. Anthem is also pursuing Snyat·n, a joint venture with Westbank First Nation set to open in fall 2011 with Future Shop and Winners as anchor tenants and smaller shops also on board.
A tight market in Kelowna for retail space boosted interest in Westbank, just outside the limits of West Kelowna and close enough to the Coquihalla connector to let the area serve communities in the Nicola Valley and southern Okanagan.
“We didn’t see the recession affecting us long term,” said Stuart Kerr, development director for Anthem. “We saw it as kind of a blip. And as we’re seeing now, the tenant interest is starting to recover, and we’re quite pleased with the progress that we’re seeing on the leasing front.”