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/296829
50 BCBusiness May 2014 Industry was long ago squeezed out of prime urban waterfront real estate by commercial and residential develop- ment: the sawmills that once lined the shores of False Creek and Coal Harbour have been replaced by forests of condos and offices. Forced to the urban periph- ery, industrial developers are now feel- ing the squeeze as they run up against agricultural land, much of it preserved by legislation. But even as agriculture proponents mobilize to defend arable land against developers of distribution centres, it's clear that the terms of debate have shifted fundamentally. Industry's need for space no longer comes down to a simple either/or debate, a choice between sawmills or highrises—as it was a century ago—or between grow- ing tomatoes and building warehouses today. Industrial developers must come to terms not only with a finite land base, but with the changing demands of global commerce. W hen Metro Vancouver inves- tigated the supply and future demand for Lower Mainland industrial land a few years back, it concluded the land could all be used up by the mid-2020s. That was the conservative scenario. If future port activity, and in particular the incom- ing flow of container traffic, is bigger than expected, the space to facilitate warehousing, distribution and logistics activity across the region will be gone— "absorbed," in real estate parlance—by the year 2020. Such exercises in crystal-ball gazing are always fraught with uncertainty. Both scenarios assume growth, ignor- ing the possibility that the global econ- omy will contract. But Derek Corrigan, Burnaby mayor and chair of the Metro Regional Planning and Agriculture Committee that accepted the inventory results, was alarmed enough to call for action. "What really brought it home to us, from the point of view of local govern- ments, is that if the industrial land is eaten up, the pressure will immediately go to our agricultural lands," says Cor- rigan. "In the next decade we're going to see the implications of this." The most recent Metro land inven- tory (2010) scanned the entire Lower Mainland and identified about 11,500 hectares of municipally designated industrial land, of which more than three-quarters had already been devel- oped. Of the remaining approximately 2,700 hectares, scattered across such municipalities as Delta, Surrey, White Rock and Richmond, not all would be appropriate for industrial use. Whereas a century ago demands on Lower Mainland industrial land came primarily from manufacturing, today service is king. Where the future growth lies, says Robert Gritten of Avison Young Canada Inc., who has 30 years' experi- ence in Metro Vancouver industrial real estate, is with businesses involved p48-54_IndRealEstate_may.indd 50 2014-04-10 9:01 AM