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/1515520
24 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M A R C H 2 0 24 Workplaces have been reimagined throughout the region in the aftermath of, first, the pandemic, then, second, the giant push to seduce employees away from their pyjamas and home offices. The snaz- ziest of these office buildings have attached wellness centres, party patios, dog parks, grocery stores. Business parks have added in cool coffee shops and fitness spaces. Surrey, New Westminster, Burnaby and North Vancouver, after a slowdown during the high-interest-rate-induced recession of the 2020s, have developed intense new office districts that are wildly popular with the thousands of suburban employees that prefer them to the downtown commute. Apartments that are in mixed-use devel- opments have mushroomed along SkyTrain and RapidBus lines, thanks to the provin- cial housing legislation that opened the floodgates. That means lots of new clusters and rows of shopping spots—some carefully curated mini-high streets, others more pre- carious and less centrally managed strings of rotating businesses aimed at cashing in on the quick-serve needs of transit users. Elsewhere, the luxury-shopping world is dominated by two poles: Downtown Vancouver and the new universe at Oakridge Park. Surrounding all of that are the increas- ingly varied, high-tech industrial buildings to service the new people and shops and offices. There are gigantic warehouses for transloading containers from the port. Industrial owners have developed ever more sophisticated plans for multi-storey industrial buildings in the region's ongo- ing effort to max out the limited supply of industrial-zoned land. New industrial parks have a mix of small and big spaces that can host both startup operations that are making the leap from a backyard garage and more established manufacturing and biotech big-foots. Other cities, like Maple Ridge, have been newly developed in the constant hunt for industrial space in a perpetually land-squeezed region. All of that is where metropolitan Van- couver is potentially headed in the next two decades, as urban life gets re-organized once again in the wake of multiple shocks and explosive accelerations of specific trends. Among them: pandemic isolation A NETWORK OF HIGH-DENSITY shopping-mall villages slash town centres— neo-downtowns complete with apartments, hotels, art galleries, public plazas, offi es, pop-up stores and community festivals—are studded across the landscape, all connected by Metro Vancouver's octopus-armed SkyTrain system. REAL ESTATE