Before the pandemic, Concord Pacific had announced a major master planned community for the old Molson Brewery site called Quantum Park.Supplied
Vancouver’s industrial lands are again the target for rezoning, after city council passed a motion last week for staff to explore redevelopment options for five key sites, including the large pocket in Mount Pleasant.
Mayor Ken Sim had introduced the motion as focusing on “exceptional sites,” and he spoke about “a growing number of applications and inquiries for mixed-use development, which seek to introduce housing on sites historically zoned for employment uses.”
The mayor identified five areas for staff review by October, including Mount Pleasant’s industrial land north of Broadway, the former Molson Brewery site at the south end of Burrard Street Bridge, a site on the eastern corner of Main and Terminal, the Railtown district and a site at Marine Gateway. Some sites are near SkyTrain stations.
He also instructed staff to move ahead with current rezoning applications in those areas in the meantime, before conducting a review of development potential. The Metro Vancouver Regional District would also have to remove the sites from their protected industrial designations.
Developers who own properties in those areas spoke in support of the mayor’s motion, citing the need for housing close to transit, reduced demand for urban industrial space and the evolving nature of industrial land.
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Chris MacCauley, industrial property broker for CBRE, spoke on behalf of PCI Developments, which has properties in Mount Pleasant and Marine Gateway industrial areas. In an interview, he said that industrial vacancy rates are up. That is partly because around half the strata industrial properties – the equivalent of condos within the industrial sector – built several years ago were purchased by investors. Those investors have backed away in recent years, similar to reduced investor demand for residential. As well, industrial uses that require ground-level access don’t work within urban areas, he said.
“Lease rates went down; interest rates went up. [Investors] can’t service that debt any more. So, it doesn’t make sense any more to purchase strata right now,” said Mr. MacCauley.
“Do I want to protect industrial land? Absolutely, but where industrial makes sense...Most of our demand in industrial, over 60 per cent, is related to goods movement...and those uses don’t work in the core.”
The industrial lands have long been protected as a key part of a functioning city and continue to be protected by Metro Vancouver’s regional growth strategy, called Metro 2050. The idea is to protect the lands for future economic demands, not just current ones.
Chris DeMarco, who was the city’s industrial land planner in the nineties and also worked on industrial land protection as part of Metro Vancouver’s growth strategy, said the mayor’s motion goes against current city and regional policies to protect industrial areas from speculation, a challenge she faced back when she was working for government.
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In a letter to council, she called the motion “reckless and dangerous,” and counter to the council’s own policies. Industrial land makes up less than 10 per cent of the city’s land base, said Ms. DeMarco.
“There has always been pressure to use industrial land for housing and there always will be,” she wrote.
In an interview, she said of the motion: “It does seem to be responding to development pressure.
“In the history of the city there has always been pressure on industrial land, because that’s where the most money can be made. It’s the lowest value land, and if you can get it rezoned to housing, that’s a gold mine,” said Ms. DeMarco.
“The thing that’s extraordinary to me at this time is there is so much new capacity for housing: all the [transit-oriented areas], Senakw, Jericho Lands, the Broadway Plan – as if we need more space for housing.”
Her role as a planner was to keep industrial land affordable by reducing speculation. That affordability is maintained by not allowing rezonings, she said. But for developers, their “time horizon is short term,” and they need to maximize returns on their projects. At the moment there is no market for office space, which means they must pivot.
“So, they are looking to replace office with housing and get even higher returns,” she said.
But those short-term returns will have long-term consequences for other economic sectors, she argued. When she worked on industrial lands for the city, she called them “the refrigerator, the repair room and the workshop” of the city, run by a variety of business sectors, including the film industry, cruise ship provisions and car repair.
Former senior city planner Trish French, who worked as assistant director of central area planning, also wrote to the city to express concerns. She said in her letter that she was “extremely concerned about the part of the motion that calls for processing of non-compliant rezoning applications prior to the results of a staff review.”
She also cited the large amount of residential zoning within plans such as the Broadway Plan and the Vancouver Plan.
“The current council, as well as some immediate predecessors, seem to be more in touch with the UDI than with the real future needs of the city,” she wrote, referring to the development industry’s professional association, the Urban Development Institute.
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Louise Schwarz is co-owner of two green innovation businesses involving recycling and waste management, located at the False Creek Flats, along with hundreds of other businesses. Ms. Schwarz, who employs around 70 people, advised city council to consider the long-term impacts of any rezoning in the area.
The gritty historical industrial area has already been chipped away at by other uses, and Ms. Schwarz worries about further erosion.
Like others, she does not see a problem with redeveloping the old Molson Brewery site at the south end of Burrard Street Bridge. But the False Creek Flats is still a crucial industrial area that has seen industries disappear to the west and to the south. And the city’s proposal to rezone a site on the east side of Main Street is getting uncomfortably close to what remains of the industrial flats, where industrial vehicles and manufacturing plants don’t butt up against residential neighbourhoods.
“It’s one of the few [areas] left standing, and particularly standing this close to the city’s core, less than two kilometres away,” said Ms. Schwarz. “And as we move toward the future economy, the green economy, the circular economy and climate action . . . we need to start to build our own resilience into our cities that is more sustainable, and create diverse inclusive jobs,” she said.
“Do we have to keep pushing residential at the expense of what I call city-serving infrastructure?” asked Ms. Schwarz.
She’d like the city staff to quantify how much residential capacity there is compared to the jobs and infrastructure capacity left in the flats. Employees in that area don’t have the luxury of working from home, she said.
“We’ve been in business for quite a while, and we are established, but if they zone us out of industrial then we are out of Vancouver. Where else do you go?”