How do you untangle the train wreck of the Arbutus corridor rail line dust-up? Ever since CP made good on its promise to clear the 11-kilometre right-of-way for unknown transportation purposes, this decades-old disagreement between CP and the City of Vancouver is more off the rails than ever.
Do you get it back on track by siding with the property owner or elite squatters? Tender vegetables or banging backhoes? Green mayor with a bicycle or big-dog CEO with a train? City hall or bullying railroad? Stranded shareholders or bullying city hall? Kerrisdale crème or “anybody but”? CP shareholders enjoying a 430% share price increase over five years or “anybody but”? Fair offers or ridiculous offers? NPA business sense or NPA flip-flop? Vision business sense or Vision fumble? Whew.
The ultimate outcome of this dispute will be city ownership of the corridor, at least until its future development is determined. CP will end up selling to the city. Consider that given. Who else wants land locked up for transportation use?
The challenge, of course, is deciding on a price, which means determining who gets the uplift from the inevitable future upzoning at various points along the line: city taxpayers, CP shareholders or both?
The recent hissy fit by CP, sending in backhoes to uproot community gardens for no real purpose a few weeks before harvest and a few months before the November elections, is only the latest episode in years of bad blood between CP and the city.
CP feels bullied by the city's dogged legal protection of the corridor's transportation status – the better to drive down the value of the property, they say. (The day the 2006 Supreme Court of Canada decision came down in the city's favour, CP development staff were awaiting the verdict at the city hall permit department, lined up with their plans for development.)
There are senior staff at city hall who still believe the city can get the line for nothing. That faint hope is backed up by CP's refusal to risk invoking discontinuing the rail line under the Canada Transportation Act. I'm told they fear that the federal agency that steps in when a government and railway line can't agree might set a “net salvage value” of zero. That would make the city's $20 million offer look generous.
On the other side, the standard “over the fence” expropriation process that's used in other cases where a government takes over land, is based on the adjacent zoning. In this case that means mostly single-family residential, with some commercial. If the city paid RS-1 prices for the 45-acre corridor, set some land aside for parks and a greenway bike route, ditched the train line and infilled with single-family lots, it's worth north of $500 million.
Amazingly, there is a middle-ground plan that has been all but forgotten. In 2005, CP hired the highly respected outgoing sustainability director of the city, Mark Holland, and pledged to live with whatever he and a group of blue-chip planners, sustainability experts and neighbours came up with. The city, then as now, refused to participate. (At the time – I was on council – the city was rightfully preoccupied with the Olympic Village and Canada Line.)
Holland remembers that it was the community partners, representing every neighbourhood association along the route, who came up with the idea of combining the city's low-value adjacent roads and rights-of-way with CP's low-value transportation corridor to create a high-value, vibrant, mixed-use plan.
“Our plan had a two-way rail line, a bike lane, community gardens, linear parks, an aboriginal interpretive centre in Marpole and 12 development nodes with three-storey mixed residential and retail,” Holland recalled. “The net value in 2005, after costing out public amenities [excluding rail service], was between $200 million and $300 million. Every community association signed off on it.”
At the time, CP wanted $150 million. Now they're said to be asking $100 million.
The plan still exists.
