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
frustrated by how long it's tak- ing the school, community centre and decent transit to arrive. The community-centre delay is partly attributable to an event that affected the whole project at the beginning: the worldwide housing reces- sion. Wesgroup had a hard time getting financing for big build- ings, so it started building the lower-rise stuff in the west first. That didn't generate enough revenue or population to pay for or trigger the centre. (It also delayed the development of the now rapidly expanding com- mercial zone.) Then it turned out that the city didn't have enough money to build the centre, as originally planned. So Wesgroup was given some extra density to cover the cost and now it's going to build the thing itself. ( ETA: 2027, two years behind.) The school? Ha. As with ev- erywhere else in Vancouver and the region, the provincial edu- cation ministry doesn't pay for new schools in newly developed areas until: 1. an entire genera- tion of children has completed high school elsewhere (kidding, not kidding), and 2. all other schools within a 20-kilometre radius are filled up completely. So, like Olympic Village and the future Jericho Lands, no school yet or planned for the foresee- able future. Daycare is a pain point, too. Willowbrae Academy, which has locations all over Metro Vancouver but none yet in the actual city, was supposed to open 176 new licenced child- care spaces by summer 2021. Over 140 people have joined a Facebook group titled "Will Willowbrae Ever Open in the River District?!" Interested par- ties have had to pay a deposit to get on the waitlist. The latest update they've received is that it will open in October of this year. Transit? Though many say the situation has improved, it's still not frequent enough to get a lot of people out of their cars. After that, opinions on the area vary depending on personal situations. Philipp Postrehovsky, who lined up to buy a three-bedroom semi-de- tached townhouse a little more than a decade ago (price then: $728,000) finds it ideal for his family. It's quiet. They can walk to everything in the neighbour- hood. There are parks and the path along the river is great for running. Postrehovsky, an entrepreneur with proptech startup Zenbase, doesn't have to commute for work anymore, but finds the area convenient to downtown, Burnaby and Rich- mond when he does go out. DJ Lam is less enchanted. It's too quiet for someone like him, who spent part of his childhood in Hong Kong: "You can hear a pin drop at night." The transit, though better, is still not good. The retail took a long time to go in—a big deal for him, because he is quadriplegic and can't just run up the hill in his car to the Champlain Square mall as others do. Marja Smith (two-bedroom condo, just under $600,000 in 2018) lives a bit further away from the commercial zone and finds it so clogged with drivers that it's a hassle to shop there. "I end up still having to go out all the time," says 44-year-old Smith, president of Simply Computing. But she does ap- preciate what a good area it is for her dog. Besides the parks within the development, the former landfill-turned-park across Marine Drive and up the hill from River District, Everett Crowley, is one of the best dog parks in Vancouver. ( the informer ) WESGROUP 18 BCBUSINESS.CA SEPTEMBER 2023 MODEL 'HOOD? The demographic stats on Paradigm, one of River District's recent buildings: 42% 39 OR YOUNGER 35% OVER 50 25% PROPORTION WITH CHILDREN 47% ENGLISH PRIMARY SPEAKERS 40% MANDARIN OR CANTONESE PRIMARY SPEAKERS 4.4% PUNJABI SPEAKERS 55% MARRIED 65% WITH A BACHELOR'S DEGREE OR HIGHER 52% HOUSEHOLD INCOME $100,000 OR LESS For Kirsten Robinson, a City of Vancouver planner who's been working on River District since she was a junior just out of planning school, it's been rewarding to see the neigh- bourhood come together in spite of some deficiencies. She also finds it illuminating to see what things could have been done differently. Back then, the city focused only on the land's industrial past as the site of a pulp mill. The Musqueam, whose reserve is 15 kilometres away, were barely mentioned. Now the history of the Nation's long presence on the river will be integrated into the new com- munity centre. And, long after its initial plans were drafted, the whole site had to be built up to a new height in order to prepare for sea-level rise. But it feels like it mostly worked. "I spent a lot of time on that site and, most of the time, it was nothing. Now we're starting to see 20 years' worth of hard work come to fruition," says Robinson. Interestingly, the nearby neighbourhood—whose residents pushed the city to do better planning with River District—seems to concur. "I think it's 70, 80, 90 percent of what we agreed to," says Steve Lloyd, who was the chair of the Everett Crowley Park commit- tee way back at the turn of the century when residents in that Victoria-Fraserview-Killarney area decided to get involved in what was then called East Fraserlands. The development got a lot of attention from international planners for the successful way the city worked with the surrounding neighbourhoods to create a less tower-dominated, more sustainable project than origi- nally envisioned. "I cannot em- phasize strongly enough how important it is to plan with the community." Lloyd felt like it was a good process, helped in part by Matt Shillito, the planner who was put in charge of the project. And things have come full circle. Shillito is the main plan- ner overseeing the big new development on Jericho Lands. It's a different time now. There is a community working group the city has established to give feedback on Jericho. But it is divided, as the community is, with no sign of the kind of consensus the city and resi- dents were able to reach 20 years ago. £