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/1458960
W alk around Seattle's South Lake Union these days, and it feels like it's exploding with new life and development. The once- industrial zone is now a hodge- podge of shiny, futuristic office towers that house 21st-century businesses ranging from Ama- zon to biotech firms, along with hotels, highly designed public spaces, restaurants, apartments and fitness centres. It's Seattle's version of Van- couver's False Creek Flats. This area, close to downtown and the water, was partly created by filling in an edge of Lake Union. It was the home of David Denny's pulp mill and later a convenient staging ground for manufacturers of all kinds. Now it's the new Seattle. Some of the same winds that blew through there are starting to puff across False Creek Flats and the nearby Mount Pleasant industrial area. Commercial brokers and builders are buzzing about how hot those two zones are becoming for a new wave of health- and tech-related ven- tures, as developers prepare for the changes that the $2-billion St. Paul's Hospital will bring to Levelling Up Thanks to a flurry of health, biotech and other developments, False Creek Flats and neighbouring Mount Pleasant are Vancouver's hot new real estate zones. Not everyone is thrilled by Frances Bula L A N D VA LU E S the Flats at the same time as biotech powerhouse AbCellera is building a large campus near Olympic Village. Changes to zoning have spurred some of that activ- ity, with a recent tweak to the Mount Pleasant plan that allows doctor/dentist-office-type uses in the once purely industrial area. Before that, the City had revised the rules by allowing of- fice space in industrial zones as long as there was some indus- trial use on the main floor of any prospective development. Meanwhile, federal money has been pouring into Vancou- ver to spur the expansion of biotech and to help create the kind of "supercluster" here that economists and politicians think is the key to seeing cities become innovation hubs. The result: an ever-growing list of projects underway and more not yet announced, as various players buy or lease properties between Clark and Main, Prior and Great Northern Way, and in the Mount Pleasant industrial zone. Among them: Keltic Canada, building a tower for medical of- fices near the hospital; the real estate arm of Great-West Lifeco, developing False Creek Station, 300,000 square feet of office space at Station and Terminal; Evolution Block by PC Urban Properties on Vernon Street, where vaccine maker Precision NanoSystems is moving; and Archetype on Main Street, be- ing promoted as a neighbour of the city's "innovation hub." There are also rumblings of big land purchases. "False Creek Flats is an area full of potential," says Graeme Scott, VP of development at QuadReal Property Group, an arm of B.C. Investment Man- agement Corp. (and developer of the Archetype building). "The neighbourhood is a prime location for the development of a vibrant community hub." Along with those health and biotech projects mostly north of the rail lines, there are other experiments. Frameworks, a new development at Clark and First by Alliance Partners, will be stacked industrial strata. PCI is building on top of the new subway station at First and Thornton. "As people start to see the development unfold, you will see a pretty drastic change," says Michael Buchan, a principal with Avison Young. But don't expect False Creek Flats to become a replica of South Lake Union, for one key reason. The City insists on keeping it an industrial zone, with some office mixed in. So there won't be huge rental apartment towers and condos to house all the people working in this new cluster. In Seattle, Vancouver's Onni and Concord Pacific have residential towers up or in the works in South Lake Union. But they can't do the same in False Creek Flats or Mount Pleasant industrial for the foreseeable future. The only such project on the hori- zon so far is on the perimeter: a set of rental towers at Prior and Dunlevy proposed by Strand. Some of those involved in the area don't think that will be a problem, given other new housing within striking dis- tance. "There is now millions of square feet of rental coming, with Molnar, Chard, Epta, Mar- con and a bunch of others in that zone," says Matthew Mac- Lean, a senior vice-president at Cushman & Wakefield. Others aren't so sanguine. "We see the lack of housing as such a limiting factor for Van- couver," says PCI president Tim MARCH/APRIL 2022 BCBUSINESS 19 QUADREAL PROPERTY GROUP AND HUNGERFORD PROPERTIES ( the informer ) Archetype on Main Street, shown in this rendering, is just one of several residential and office projects underway and not yet announced in False Creek Flats and the nearby industrial area