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/1510895
SOURCES: BC STATS SMALL BUSINESS PROFILE 2022; BCAA; INNOVATION, SCIENCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CANADA; CFIB G O F I G U R E According to a 2021 survey by the B.C. Automobile Association... 46% OF EMPLOYED RESPONDENTS SAID THEY WOULD CONSIDER WORKING FOR THEMSELVES 35% SAID THEY ARE WILLING TO START A BUSINESS Goods-producing businesses have a higher survival rate than service businesses, with exactly 50% of those with employees in Canada surviving to their 10th year, versus 44.7% of service businesses 61.9% OF MAJORITY MALE-OWNED BUSINESSES SURVIVED UNTIL THEIR 10TH YEAR, COMPARED TO 57.7% OF FEMALE- OWNED BUSINESSES COMPANIES JOINTLY OWNED BY MEN AND WOMEN HAD THE HIGHEST SURVIVAL RATE OF ALL, AT 68.6% The highest- growth sectors by employment in Canada between 2016 and 2019 were mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction (8.7%), information and cultural industries (6%) and professional, scientific and technical services (5.6%) TOP LEFT: STANTEC ARCHITECTURE; TOP RIGHT: PCI DEVELOPMENTS AND LOW TIDE PROPERTIES NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2023 BCBUSINESS.CA 15 Home Schooled Vancouver Community College is looking to redevelop its Broadway campus and provide much-needed housing in the process by Rushmila Rahman R E A L E STAT E A few months ago, on a bright afternoon in early June, I met Vancouver Community College president and CEO Ajay Patel at the BCBusiness Top 100 event in Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. He informed me that the VCC had started a major campus rede- velopment project that could tackle one of the biggest issues in the province: housing. The largest and oldest community college in B.C., VCC has three campuses (Downtown Vancouver, East Broadway and Annacis Island) and roots dating back to 1965. Like those roots, its facilities are old, so, in 2018, the college started talking seriously about campus renovations. Its redevelopment of the Broadway campus includes educational spaces and a $291-million cleantech centre. (The provincial government committed $271 million of that funding to the project in July.) "We break ground next year," Patel says on a follow-up Zoom call. "We basically dis- covered that we have around 2 million square feet of real estate that we could build that will allow us not only to redo our facilities, but also to re- spond to community needs." Hence VCC's idea to sprout an additional 3,300 residential units on its Broadway campus and make at least 20 percent of them below-market housing rentals. "It can be paid for by the housing that we want to do on it," says Patel. "I want to pri- oritize the rental to students, First Nations, first responders under that affordability piece." The college is also consider- ing daycare spaces and other important amenities to create a hub around its Broadway site, given all the development going on along neighbouring Great Northern Way. "We know the SkyTrain is going to get extended to Emily Carr," says Patel. "EA Sports is across the street from us, Lu- lulemon is in the middle of a de- velopment permit application... [Low Tide Properties] intends to build a destination plaza." On top of that, Patel hopes to see thermal energy gener- ated from waste powering VCC's Broadway renovation—speci- fically, waste from a massive sewer pipe under the campus. "This could potentially heat the entire redevelopment of VCC, housing and all," he says, "and potentially leave some extra to go across the street to help some of the Great Northern Way neighbours." He adds that the City of Vancouver, through the Neigh- bourhood Energy Utility (the BC Hydro of sewage heat reco- very), involved third-party con- sultants to assess if flow rates, volumes and temperatures sup- port the plan for a sewage heat recovery centre to be placed on the Broadway campus site. That way, the sewer under the campus could be used to heat buildings in the area. As of press time, the report is yet to be released, and while Patel ad- mits that there are some logisti- cal challenges (like in the case of flooding, when heat can't be extracted), he believes they can be overcome. "We're talking about 2.6 million square feet of space, 500,000 square feet of new modernized educational facilities, at least 3,300 housing units—of which at least 20 per- cent could be affordable based on today's dollars—and we're going to try to do it with almost net-zero emissions," he says. £ BUILDING EDUCATION VCC president and CEO Ajay Patel unveils the college's plans to renovate its Broadway campus, noting that it's an opportunity to add 3,300 new residential units—while keeping emissions low