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
ISTOCK; DON STOUDER/UNSPLASH (RIGHT) playing SimCity would lead anyone to believe. For sure, people are moving there. You always hear gleeful predictions that Surrey will be bigger than Vancouver any day now. But Metro Vancouver's aggressive projections about Surrey's growth never quite match reality. Surrey gained an average of about 53,000 peo- ple every five years from 1996 to 2016. But Vancouver, which accommodated a lot of rede- velopment, saw an average of 30,000 more in each five-year period. Surrey isn't projected to match Vancouver's popula- tion until 2041, when both should be around 780,000. The differential is even starker when it comes to office development. Central cities have Jupiter-level gravitational pull and decades of built-up infrastructure. Vancouver has more office space under construction downtown (3.3 million square feet) than Surrey has in its entire 31,640 hectares. And Vancouver's office space is highly concen- trated in an area studded with sparkly attractions. For Surrey to succeed at acquiring some planetary heft of its own, there has to be so much more than a random scattering of an office tower here, a condo tower there. It's penalized by an excess of land, in a way that New Westminster and City of North Vancouver aren't. Surrey needs private building activity to be rigor- ously funnelled, and govern- ments at all levels would need to make strategic moves. The federal government has helped out in the past, putting its Revenue Canada building there years ago and recently, in a small coup for Surrey, its new Pacific Economic Development Canada agency, an offshoot of Western Economic Diversifica- tion. The province notably relo- cated ICBC there. But moves to create a second big hub for the feds, alongside the planned expansion at down- town Vancouver's Sinclair Cen- tre, have been on hold since the pandemic. And private develop- ers still seem more interested in piling on condos in random locations than creating a dense mixed office/commercial/ residential district. A strong Surrey centre is something that more than just Surrey boosters think is neces- sary. As Tom Hutton, a retired UBC planning professor who has written extensively about healthy regional economies, has pointed out repeatedly, regions need multiple but con- nected industrial and business hubs to thrive—"a complete ecosystem of innovation," as he calls it. Everything from people inventing things in garages to powerhouse mega-companies. Seattle has done it by fos- tering diverse kinds of busi- ness districts: tech in South Lake Union, Microsoft and satellites in Bellevue, aero- space near the airport, health districts near the University of Washington, among about 10 altogether. Metro Vancouver needs hubs like that, Hutton says. But instead, every city is going at things separately, with no discussion about who should focus on which part of the ecosystem. Surrey should be part of that ecosystem. But that will only work if there's a regional— not just a Surrey city hall—plan and people to drive it. • The new Surrey city centre would include a dense and pedestrian-friendly cluster of offices, restaurants, shops and transit T E R M S + C ON DI T ION S Our contribution to the language of business and beyond emp•ty desk•ers WFH staff who keep an office cubicle for old times' sake cac•tus club BCers with second homes in Palm Springs cryp•to pi•ty what bitcoin owners feel for the rest of us 24 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 ( the informer )