Here’s a purely speculative exercise.
From Business in Vancouver: Will Vancouver be Alibaba’s next home away from home?
“Had a great meeting with Alibaba.com CEO Jack Ma,” Industry Minister James Moore tweeted to followers November 10.
“Alibaba is seriously considering a new campus in Vancouver.” …
Whether Vancouver can support such a colossus in its own backyard is uncertain.
While office space catering to the tech industry is in good supply in the city’s downtown core, he said Alibaba would likely have to build its own distribution centre, as such facilities are very specialized. There’s simply nothing in the Lower Mainland that is ready to lease or buy.
If Alibaba’s position was that it would need to build on land currently outside the urban growth area – perhaps on ALR, perhaps south of the proposed Massey Crossing on the South Fraser Perimeter Road, perhaps anywhere it wanted – what do you think would happen?
Interesting prospect!
Why would Alibaba need to build outside the urban growth area? I would think that a municipality like Surrey would love to host such a campus.
This is not my industry, but I would think that a distribution centre/campus would benefit from easy access to transportation infrastructure for its goods and its employees. Building in the ALR would fail on at least the second of those criteria.
Target built its immense distribution centre outside of Calgary because no suitable site was available near Vancouver.
A relevant story about the impact on housing growth due to Amazon in Seattle.
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/company-town-amazons-rapid-growth-sparks-housing-boom-seattles-urban-core/
The cynic in me knows with enough money, they’ll build wherever they want.
My question is what makes their operation so specialized that there is nothing already in the market for them to repurpose?
Its not that what they need is so specialized, but what they need is just a lot of land that is hard to come by.
Depending on size requirements, YVR, Boundary Bay and Abbotsford Airports have land that they’d love to see put to use as a distribution centre. Plus there is runway access possible as a part of the attraction.
It would be opposed just like a pipeline below Burnaby mountain. Touching the ALR: forget it. Blueberries are more important than jobs.
Blueberries create more permenent jobs in BC than the oil pipelines plus they are a lot taster especially on pancakes.
Here’s your great pipeline Thomas. http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2014/11/17/Tran-Mountain-Pipeline-Investments/
I hope we would let them build in the ALR.
The benefit of having Alibaba in the region would surely far outway cost of the loss of farmland.
What benefit is that? How does being able to spew out millions of mass produced tchotkes around the planet benefit the Lower Mainland?.
Bob, haven’t you heard? As a species we’ve evolved to digest plastic. We have uncoupled our reliance on consuming diseased and inefficient organic plant and animal matter and now can stick to a safe petroleum-based tchotke diet as nature intended.
From what I can tell, they only handle the online sales. They do not do distrubution so that would not be an issue. I expect existing logistics and delivery companies would handle that so a big distrubtion centre would not be required.
It would not surprise me if there campus would be in Richmond, near the airport.