Where to Buy Now (Part 1)

With downtown filling out, two areas—Oakridge and the East Fraserlands—are being targeted for more density. Not everybody's happy.

By Matt O'Grady (Published: March 2006)

OAKRIDGE

To understand just how far Vancouver’s transformation from low-density burg to high-density metropolis has progressed, look no further than Oakridge. In the postwar years, Vancouver adopted a decidedly suburban take on urban planning—wide streets, open landscaping, low-lying bungalows. The former CPR lands bounded by Oak, Cambie, 41st and 57th typified that approach. Lynchpin to this master-planned community, as with so many ’50s-era burbs, was the mall.

Now, almost 50 years after Oakridge Shopping Centre opened its doors, developers are hoping to invert the suburban formula by building up. Brian Castle, senior VP for Ivanhoe Cambridge (which owns the mall), approached the City in 2004 to get the ball rolling on densification, asking for a 20-year master plan to help guide redevelopment. “We have RAV dropping at our front door,” says Castle. “Both the City and ourselves want to see a lot more mixed-use arrive on the site—to take advantage of transit, but also in terms of new residential, offices, potentially a hotel. How can these uses really start to act as an urban centre?” When Oakridge was built, the car was king—hence the 3,550 parking spaces—but now, with a SkyTrain station promised at its doorstep, Oakridge is expecting more people traipsing through its corridors—not just visiting shoppers, but people who’ll be living and working next door.

The exact shape of Oakridge is still up for public debate, with a final report not due to council until June, but already draft plans are stoking NIMBYist fires. According to Michael Mortensen, the City’s planner on the project, the current concept would see about 1.2 million square feet of residential property in various low-, mid- and highrise forms. Depending on what ultimately gets built, this could yield between 900 and 1,100 residential units over the next 20 years.

“The public generally supports the low- and mid-rise forms,” says Mortensen, “but there is some opposition to the form and location of the highrises proposed.” There’s the rub when you try to densify outside downtown: unlike in Coal Harbour or Yaletown, where the towers came first (usually replacing faceless industry), in Oakridge there are angry ratepayers to contend with—and million-dollar homes that don’t want to live in the shadows. Still, with the City’s land use and transportation policies encouraging densification, a more mixed-use Oakridge seems inevitable. As Adlai Stevenson once said, “All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.”

EAST FRASERLANDS

It is, as über-realtor Bob Rennie told our panel, “like Concord Pacific” in size. And it may well be the last of the Vancouver megaprojects—certainly the biggest since Yaletown’s Concord development. It is East Fraserlands: the 130-acre site, formerly home to Weyerhaeuser’s Canadian White Pine Mill, that hogs the southeast corner of the city (Boundary to Kerr, Marine Drive to the Fraser River). It’s one of the few undeveloped spaces in space-poor Vancouver, and it’s the future home to an estimated 10,000 people.

The conversion of East Fraserlands (EFL) from brown fields to green neighbourhood is a typically Vancouver story. Bit by bit, industry—particularly the once-dominant timber business—is being wiped clean from our waterfronts (first False Creek and Burrard Inlet; now the Fraser River) and replaced by sparkling master-planned urban villages. “What we’re really trying to do is create a
sustainable mixed-use community which will deliver some much-needed housing [to southeast Vancouver],” says Matt Shillito, lead planner for the City on EFL. There will be townhouses, row houses, low-, mid- and highrise buildings—but very little in the way of single-family housing. People down there generally welcome the development, and they don’t even object to the increase in density. But what they want to make damn sure of is that it’s supported by all the
amenities they want to serve a new population.”

To that end, the City is planning a commercial centre, with shops focussed on a high street, yet to be built, that will run north-south from Marine to the river. Big-box stores are specifically excluded. Also planned: a community centre, a small selection of bars and restaurants, as well as schools, a daycare and a seniors centre (pending demographic study). Shillito says that the bordering areas—10-year-old West Fraserlands (now 5,000-residents strong) and Champlain Heights—have been woefully underserved to date, and so the proposed commercial centre
could effectively turn EFL into the hub of southeast Vancouver.

Before the hordes arrive, though, there’s the small matter of what to do with the sawmill mess. “There’s quite a bit of contamination to clean up before it can be used for housing,” admits Shillito. He says that ParkLane (the developers who now own the land) have gone a long way towards remedying the situation, but much work remains. (Timeline for EFL: ParkLane isn’t expected to break ground until late 2007, with the project building out over a 15 to 20 year timeframe.) Shillito says that, from public consultations the City undertook last year, it became clear that improving the ecological state of the area was one of residents’ top priorities, and so the City has additional plans to create habitat for birds, fishes and insects, freshwater wetlands within the parks and tidal marshes and channels.

As for the actual design of the community, ParkLane is pulling out all the stops. They’ve hired James Cheng (he of the Shangri-La) as lead architect. The father of New Urbanism himself, Andrés Duany, will be lead designer (“For about the same price, we could have hired Elton John,” ParkLane’s VP of development, Norm Shearing, told one of the public meetings. “But we didn’t trust his urban-design skills.”). Duany, in particular, has raised a few eyebrows. Although he’s ostensibly antisprawl, many of his almost 300 master-planned communities (like 25-year-old Seaside, Florida) still require you to drive to them—transit is rarely an option—and feature traditional architectural styles (1920s-ish bungalows) with little useful retail, often built on valuable farmland. While transit may also prove a problem at EFL—there is no regular bus service along Marine, and the new RAV line is blocks away at Cambie—this project does promise to be different, in everything from the site itself to its dense (and more varied) forms of housing.

So is Rennie right? Is this it—the last of the Vancouver megaprojects? “You look for other big institutions or uses that might fold and therefore become available for redevelopment,” says Shillito. “But it’s hard to see another site of the same scale, where you could assemble 130 acres in one place. Certainly nothing on the waterfront.”

CONTINUE TO "WHERE TO BUY NOW (PART 2)"