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Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1512670
19 B C B U S I N E S S . C A J A N U A R Y 2 0 24 There is no notoriously obstructive planner in Burnaby who has put spokes in the wheels with capricious requests. Those planners do exist, sprinkled around B.C.'s high-development cities and known and feared by many. I hear about them on the regular from every architect, nonprofit housing developer and builder I know. Planners who will request, at the last minute after three years of negotiations and design work, that the builder put in a cute coffee shop. (A change like that requires a major revamp of the whole building, plus additional costs to meet building-code require- ments for a commercial area.) Or who will quibble about the colour of the tiles planned for an area. (Leading to a project getting held up for a month, at a few tens of thousands in interest costs, in the mean- time.) Or who saw something in Copenhagen they think is cool and should be incorpo- rated into the building. (Even though it's totally unworkable in the setting.) That's not the case for Burnaby, which is seen as hav- ing a strong planning team that collaborates productively with builders. "The senior team in Burnaby is some of the best. They want to work with us," says Rob Blackwell, another VP of development at Anthem. And the whole team says the senior planner who worked with them is one of the Very Good Ones. But things happen. And they did with this building. After Anthem bought the property in 2019, Howey and her team coordinated closely with city staff. "In the early planning stage, you rely heavily on information from the city. If that information changes, even in the slight- est way, you can't technically achieve what you planned," she says. In spite of what everyone thought was rigorous attention to every rule, it turned out, a year in, that the whole project would have to be redesigned because someone in engineer- ing finally alerted planners and the development team that the sidewalk needed to be wider as part of the city's efforts to create more pedestrian space. There doesn't seem to be an explanation for why that crucial information wasn't transmitted earlier. That meant the buildable area on the site had to be pushed back. In turn, there wasn't enough room to have two separate towers—every- thing had to be combined into one 66-storey tower. With that came tens of millions in extra costs: more concrete to support a bigger building; a dif- ferent kind of crane that would have to be rented and for a longer period; many more months (55 instead of 40) to build; a building-maintenance unit that costs a million more; $2 million more for a different kind of window. And so on. That came on top of other unexpected changes. A year- long delay while Burnaby worked out a new policy for below-market rentals. Being told partway through that the buyout for parking stalls was changing from $10,000 to $25,000 per stall—an extra $2 million. At this point, Carlson and his team are hoping they can at least get the GST rebate on rental apartments that the fed- eral government announced last September. It wasn't totally clear to them, when we talked in the fall, whether buildings that have a distinct air-space parcel of rental units in a con- do building, like theirs, will be eligible in the way that a stand- alone rental is. They're waiting for the federal bureaucrats to write the detailed regulations. If the Anthem team does get it, they say, they'll use it immediately to reduce prices slightly throughout the build- ing. Developer critics typically pooh-pooh any suggestion that something like this ever happens, saying that builders will simply keep any govern- ment money they get to make a bigger profit. But that's not what is likely to happen, says the team. "We're all competing against each other out here," says Blackwell. "If you have a competitive price advantage, you'll take it. We're always looking at how do we get an advantage over the person down the street so we can fill up the building before they do." And no matter how expe- rienced people in a company are, every project feels like a walk on a tightrope without a net as you watch tens of millions of real money run down the drain. Carlson talks ruefully about emerging on the other side of this project with "cuts and bruises." So what, some might say. So they make a few million less than they might have. Carl- son's argument is that he's not the only loser. So is the public. If the project had taken less time and stuck to the original budget, the company could have built double the amount of housing. A project like this eats into a company's capital and strength. And governments could fix this without spending a lot of money, like they are with the GST rebate and various housing programs. The most effective solution, says Carlson, is for cities to be clear and consistent once a project has reached a certain point in the road. No policy on the fly. No, "Oh, why don't you just do this or that?" No changes that result in multi- million-dollar additions. "You can take any one hit," says Carlson, "but not when it's hit after hit after hit." ADDED VALUE Advertisements for Anthem's Citizen development at its presentation cenre on McKay Ave. in Burnaby (opposite page) and on the Joyce-Collingwood SkyTrain platform (left)