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/1505828
I t sounds so familiar. Van- couver, desperate to create new housing, starts the planning process for a gigantic tract of empty land near water at the request of a developer. The first version is a forest of towers. Nearby residents, who largely live in suburban-style big houses with big yards, object, saying it's too dense. Months and years of back-and- forth ensue. No—this isn't Jericho, the current site of a pitched battle over a proposal by three Indig- enous Nations, working with the Canada Lands Company, to build 13,000 homes—about equal to the entire popula- tion of next door's Point Grey neighbourhood. But before Jericho there was, and is, River District, the southeast corner of Vancouver that many people forget about until they find themselves whizzing along Marine Drive en route to Burnaby. If they turn in, they discover a mini- city on the Fraser River that is finally emerging into growth, 20 years after its early talks and the first stages of the slow but steady build-out by Wes- group Properties. The 124-acre River District provides a glimpse into the future of the 90-acre Jericho Lands, though obviously the current plan for Jericho envi- sions far more density: 144 homes per acre at Jericho, com- pared to 56 at River District. L A N D VA LU E S But the two are both large, master-planned communities that will be developed by a sin- gle entity, which means there's a unified concept and an owner that will oversee everything from curating the mix of retail to advocating for better tran- sit to putting effort into good public spaces that are often the heart of a community. (So, already light years better than the random towers that, for example, Burnaby has let vari- ous developers put up around Lougheed and Willingdon, where there appears to be no one doing anything to make the streets or general area feel like a community instead of piles of concrete next to a big road and a SkyTrain line—the Brentwood Mall re-development excepted.) I hung out on the main plaza in River District one sunny afternoon and have talked to many people who live there to get a sense of what they think works (and what doesn't), with the district now about half built out and with approximately 6,000 people now living in that corner. I found a very Vancouver mix of people sitting at café tables—a series of dad-son teams playing ping-pong, along with countless dogs and stroll- ers. (How Vancouver a mix? See sidebar, p.18.) Like any good bougie urban- ist, I was seduced by the cool visible stuff: the bikeway, the riverside path, the apiary that Wesgroup developed with the help of a retired beekeeper, the careful placement of the towers against the hills of Ever- ett Crowley Park, the exterior details that pay tribute to the site's industrial past as a saw- mill zone: rusted steel slats, copies of old machinery parts and so on. But those are easy hits for a passing visitor. What's it like to live there? What makes it feel like a good neighbourhood, what's still missing? What works and what doesn't? As is likely to happen with Jericho, many residents are WESGROUP ( the informer ) 16 BCBUSINESS.CA SEPTEMBER 2023 Down by the River Vancouver's River District is a work in progress, but it does seem like exactly that—progress by Frances Bula SOUTHERN COMFORT Vancouver's River District lay dormant not that long ago. Now, thanks to real estate developer Wesgroup, it's home to thousands of people and is surrounded by restaurants and parks. But some key amenities are missing in action