The City of Richmond has attracted $4 billion worth of planned projects partly because its community plans are more detailed than other Metro Vancouver cities, according to Brian Jackson, Richmond's director of development.
He said those detailed plans provide more clarity for residents and developers and have helped the city attract proposals for:
16 hotels with 2,500 hotel rooms;
- 12,000 new residential units;
- 1.5 million square feet of office space; and
- 2.5 million square feet of retail space.
"It's not fair for the community to have plans [that] are vague and do not specify heights and densities and uses," he said. "[Developers] need that to make financial decisions, but also the community needs that to know what's going to be around them in the future."
Richmond's city centre plan designates where highrises, mid-rises and even future retail streets are slated.
The City of Vancouver's less detailed plans for neighbourhoods have sparked heated debates as critics charge that projects like Rize Alliance Properties' 19-storey tower planned for the corner of Broadway and Kingsway Avenue seem to land like "spaceships" because the neighbourhood plan doesn't warn of their pending arrival.
The Rize project won zoning approval April 17 after 139 speakers almost unanimously opposed the project during six nights of public hearings.
Vancouver launches three new community plan processes this month for:
- Grandview-Woodland;
- Marpole; and
- the West End.
No one from the city was available to discuss whether the planning process would be more proscriptive than in the past but the city's website says the plans are intended to have a "clear but flexible framework."
Vancouver spokeswoman Nancy Engcould not provide an estimate for the value of projects in the pipeline for the city.
She said four hotels with 871 rooms are planned for Vancouver. Eng added that the city doesn't break down how many office, retail and hotel proposals are in the pipeline.
However, she said that a total of 11,515,575 square feet of commercial real estate is planned for the city.
Developers such as Appia DevelopmentsCEO Jim Bosa are pleased Richmond has taken the initiative to streamline its development process.
Bosa dealt with the City of Richmond five years ago when Appia built the Prado development, which had two 16-storey towers and a nine-storey mid-rise building.
"Dealing with Richmond was a little more difficult than Burnaby or some other municipalities," said Bosa, who has yet to develop a project in Vancouver. "The goalposts tend to move a little bit."
Bosa said Richmond staff told him partway through the project that he had to make upgrades to stormwater pumps, which added significant expense.
But Jackson said that things have improved for developers in Richmond since Bosa's last experience.
He said that five years ago Richmond approved a new city centre area plan that concentrates development along five villages along the Canada Line and another one at the Olympic Oval. "We took a different approach in Richmond than has been taken in Vancouver. Vancouver has community amenity contributions (CACs). What we did through the area plan is identify specific things that we thought were necessary for the development of the city centre. We wanted to make sure that we provided clarity for developers to be able to make decisions."
Jackson added that the plan provides all of the details that anybody needs to buy and develop land in Richmond.
For Bosa, however, Burnaby remains the best city in the region for developers.
"They tell you upfront what they expect, what they would like to see, what the possibilities are and you know in a short period of time what you can or cannot do."
Bosa expects his Solo project – a four-tower, 1,351-home development on six acres bounded by Willingdon Avenue, Lougheed Highway, Rosser Avenue and a lane – to be complete by 2018.
The first phase of construction is slated to start in August and will include a 45-storey residential tower with 374 units, a Whole Foods grocery store and an additional 10,700 square feet of retail space.
