With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1181452
NOVEMBER 2019 BCBUSINESS 35 BCBUSINESS.CA I think it's a shambles Gillespie's involvement with Oakridge began a decade ago, when he met with Daniel Fournier, who recently retired as CEO of former owner Ivanhoé Cambridge. Fournier's firm had already spent 10 years working with the City of Vancouver to rezone the site. "He said, 'Well, what do you think?'" Gillespie recalls. "And I said, 'I think it's a shambles. I think it's terrible.'" He told Fournier that simply driving in condo stratas was the wrong move. "I said, 'Future generations are going to look at 30 acres of consolidated ownership on a hugely important transit line, which has a lot of capacity that it could grow into, and go, What a wasted opportunity.'" The proj- ect would also lose money, he warned. Westbank went on to win the City's approval for its Oakridge vision, partly by talking to 30,000 residents over three years. "Our ambitions are to make a project looked at as the most thoughtful, complex, layered, sustainable mixed-use project in the history of the world," says Gillespie of what he calls a cultural hub. For Beasley, Oakridge is just one example of savvy developers across North America reinventing malls as entire com- munities, but he thinks it's a vanguard proj- ect. "I dealt with two generations before Ian of people thinking about that site, and this is probably one of the most intelligent pro- posals that has been confirmed." How are sales going? Gillespie starts by pointing out that condos make up just one part of Westbank's business, which spans offices, hotels and energy. Within residential, there's affordable rental and home ownership as well as luxury product. (Besides more than 2,300 units of market housing and 500,000 square feet of office space, Oakridge will include 290 affordable and 290 rental units.) "We are selling more than the rest of the market combined," Gillespie says of Oakridge. "It's probably going slower than we would have gone in the past, but I don't think that's a bad thing. To be honest, we were probably in a market that wasn't sustainable in the long run." Like other developers, Westbank—five of whose eight offices are in Asia—markets its Vancouver projects abroad. Where will Oakridge's residents hail from? "It's no dif- ferent than where is Vancouver coming from," Gillespie replies, adding that the provincial government's foreign buyers tax means few offshore purchasers. "The vast, vast bulk of the homes bought at Oakridge are bought by either residents or citizens of Canada." Beauty, eh? In Westbank's second book, the 600- odd-page Fight for Beauty, Gillespie con- tends that creating beautiful things has always been a struggle. Two years ago, Vancouver artists picketed the accompa- nying free exhibition, slamming it as "art- washing" by a developer whose projects displace people. Besides visual art, Gillespie owns one of the world's largest collections of vin- tage couture, displaying pieces at various Westbank properties. He doesn't think Vancouver has to choose between creating a beautiful place to live and ensuring that everyone has shelter. "Real, true beauty isn't ornamentation," he says. "It is what makes us human." Beasley cuts him some slack. "You've got to give credit to anyone who is interested in the aesthetic side of our culture, because "WE ARE SELLING MORE THAN THE REST OF THE MARKET COMBINED. IT'S PROBABLY GOING SLOWER THAN WE WOULD HAVE GONE IN THE PAST, BUT I DON'T THINK THAT'S A BAD THING. TO BE HONEST, WE WERE PROBABLY IN A MARKET THAT WASN'T SUSTAINABLE IN THE LONG RUN" –Ian Gillespie, founder, Westbank