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/1425269
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 23 TOP AND NEXT PAGE: HARIRI PONTARINI ARCHITECTS M ichael Heeney has a theory about the future of this region as people continue to flood into the eastern suburbs. Downtown Vancouver will become less attractive to businesses run by that in- creasingly large proportion of suburban residents. It was a convenient place when all the executives lived in North and West Vancouver. But the young generation starting businesses now, the millennials, can't afford to live there. So they have moved out. The region's centre of gravity, the midpoint of all population, keeps shifting east and now hovers around New Westminster. When those young entre- preneurs get their businesses past startup, they're going to want head offices to be close to where they live, just like the boomer executives did. They'll also want something conve- nient for future employees as they compete for labour. And that convenient place is less likely to be the downtown the region has now, close to the northwestern edge of the me- tropolis. "Nature has forced us in this region into one direction —south and east," says Heeney, an architect and former busi- ness partner for many years of late architect Bing Thom. "So my concept is, a second central business district." That's Heeney's pitch to media, Surrey council and businesses as he shows off daz- zling pictures and animations of the city-planning concepts to remake the tract of land, now used as a mega bus loop, The City That Could Surrey has long been hailed as B.C.'s next major downtown. Making that happen will require more than wishful thinking and some shiny new towers by Frances Bula L A N D VA LU E S A rendering of the Centre Block, which would replace the bus loop and parking lots in Surrey's central city; (below) architect and con- sultant Michael Heeney, former head of the now-defunct local devel- opment corporation, is pitching this vision to council and business that sits between the two exist- ing place markers for a Surrey downtown: the Bing Thom– designed SFU building on top of a mall on one side and the civic cluster—city hall, library, hotel, plaza—on the other. The delicious renderings of this future Surrey centre de- signed by Toronto-based Hariri Pontarini Architects paint Pixar-worthy images of a dense cluster of offices, restaurants, shops, pedes- trians, transit. Something very different from the way "downtown" Sur- rey looks now—disconnected pockets of architecturally striking buildings lost among giant parking lots, malls big and strip, and highway- width streets. Surrey has been talking about a downtown forever, particularly under former mayor Dianne Watts (in power 2005-14) and her spiritual suc- cessor, Linda Hepner (2014-18). Watts is the one who moved city hall from farm country to a spot next to the Surrey Cen- tre SkyTrain station and got the library built next door. She created a development corporation to do whatever it could to plan a downtown and smooth the land acquisition/zoning/ permitting path for builders will- ing to contribute to creating it. Heeney ran that corporation in its last years, before Mayor Doug McCallum killed it shortly after his elec- tion win in 2018. But Heeney is still passionate about Surrey and working on this project as a consultant to the City. The question is what it will take to get more companies to move to Surrey and what the hurdles might be. Creating cit- ies is more complicated than ( the informer )