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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1494678
I n a city like Vancouver, touted with nauseating frequency as a Number One Place to Visit, Live, Invest, you'd think that every inch of space would be spoken for and maximized. It can feel like this must be true, as every new building project works its way through an agonizing steeplechase to get approved—as if every metre of height and every protruding corner will be the last straw for this so-so-so crowded city. However, as anyone who has lived here longer than a month knows, that's not really the case. There are squares, rectangles, slices, whole blocks of mystifyingly empty land throughout our supposedly high-priced, packed-to-the-gills metropolis. And nowhere is it more no- ticeable than when that vacant space is located along a prime neighbourhood shopping cluster—a stretch of street that needs lots of life and activity in order to thrive. Among these spots: the emptied-out Safeway site on West 10th, the closure of which severely damaged that small but important commercial strip; the almost decade-old half-block next to the London Space Odyssey Despite real estate that's more valuable than gold, Vancouver has a lot of empty pockets of land waiting for... something? by Frances Bula L A N D VA LU E S BAD LOT Vacant spaces aren't just a Vancouver phenomenon—city dwellers are equally perplexed by empty lots in Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Victoria and many other cities Drugs on East Hastings; an- other half-block at West 7th and Granville that remains solidly vacant (a "community garden" on one half, the papered over windows of the former Zonda Nellis store on the other) five years after the company that owns the properties got a development permit to build; the perpetually vacant lot on high-rent Robson Street near Broughton; a couple of blocks on Dunbar; and multiple sites all along Main Street. Each of these blank store- fronts or cleared lots has an outsized impact on business along the shopping streets around it, and on life in the neighbourhood in general. "It is devastating for the area," says Patricia Barnes, the executive director of the East Village Business Improvement Association, which has faced a decade of dealing with that empty half-block owned by London Drugs, which sits in the heart of the business com- munity. "It creates an empty space. People kind of stop, and don't continue on." (Recent news suggests that some kind of development is finally about to start here.) It's not just a Vancouver phenomenon, of course. When I asked my Twitter followers to tell me about the most puzzling piece of empty land in their neighbourhood, I received responses from a long list of cities, including Toronto, Win- nipeg, Calgary and Victoria, among many others. It's a big enough problem in some places that politicians have muttered about charg- ing an "empty storefront" tax. Vancouver's recently departed mayor, Kennedy Stewart, threw the idea out during last fall's election campaign. Former New York mayor Bill de Blasio floated such a tax in both 2019 and 2020. The town of Jackson, Tennessee, imposed a system of escalating fines for vacant commercial properties in 2019. Montreal residents and business operators have also been fret- ting about vacant stores there for the last couple of years. But fines only work if you make the assumption (okay, a somewhat common one) that empty storefronts are all about evil property owners/develop- ers who don't care about the city's health at all and are quite content to pay the taxes on their vacant land, feasting on the certainty that their asset is increasing steadily in value. This might seem like the case for empty 2301 Granville, where owners Aoyuan Inter- national applied for a city de- velopment permit in 2017 and were marketing condos for the site at some point after that. That land increased in value by $1.39 million over the last two ISTOCK ( the informer ) MARCH/APRIL 2023 BCBUSINESS.CA 19