Jacob Parry writes in BC Business on the recent announcement that the Province of BC has sold this land.
Three Vancouver area First Nations have purchased one of the last major tracts of undeveloped land on Vancouver’s west side for a half-billion dollars. On Friday, the Tsleil-Watuth, Squamish and Musqueam First Nations announced that they had acquired the 38-acre parcel in Point Grey—currently the site of West Point Grey Academy—from the provincial government and have preliminary plans to redevelop the plot over the coming years.
According to a Province of BC news release, CAC’s may be involved, and consultation with the City of Vancouver:
This landmark agreement enables First Nations to begin a meaningful community consultation process with the City of Vancouver on what the community would like to see with respect to future development of the lands. Any and all rezoning and development plans will be required to follow the mandated consultation process established by the City of Vancouver, and will require a Community Amenity Contribution from the First Nations to the City based in part on the outcome of the consultation.
Confirming the sale and transfer of the Lands to the First Nations is a further step towards reconciling the Nations’ and the Province’s interests with respect to their traditional territories and confirms the settlement of all of the Nations’ claims to the Jericho Lands.
It would be a terrible waste of an opportunity if the area NIMBYs are able to restrain this to low density housing. If there’s anywhere that should see infill, it’s desirable west-side areas where there’s no plausible displacement argument
There will be opportunities to do a very fine development on the Jericho Lands that allows for a variety of building types while still having the right fit within the neighbourhood. However, it is not downtown and should reasonably reflect the context. Local community interests should be considered given that this is a large part of the community and will have a substantial impact.
It’s a huge chunk of land. Why does it have to ‘fit in’ with adjacent areas? It’s not like someone’s building a tower in the middle of a block of houses
Agreed.
It’s a large site enough to “create its own character” as a town centre.
Bought fro the Province: 38 acres
Bought from the Feds: 52 acres
TOTAL AREA: 90 acres!!!
By comparison:
The Oakridge Mall site is 28.3 acres.
http://former.vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/20140218/documents/p6.pdf
The Pearson-Dogwood lands are 25.4 acres.
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/pearson-dogwood.aspx
Or, for consolidated sites not directly on a rapid transit line, but still to be [more moderately] densely developed:
The Little Mountain site is 15 acres.
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/little-mountain.aspx
The Oakridge Transit Centre site is 13.8 acres.
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/oakridge-transit-centre.aspx
The Jericho Lands are not a town centre. They are an integral part within an established neighbourhood and must be an appropriate fit. Given that there are some existing apartments and townhouses adjacent to the site, there is plenty of opportunities to create more ground oriented multi-family housing for families that is a policy objective for the city. This could be designed to fit very well into the existing neighbourhood if done well.
Check out Block F in UEL what is likely to come.
“Must be an appropriate fit” could be translated as ‘the housing crisis must continue’
I’m curious: do you think the West End is a bad thing that should never have been built?
If appropriate development means continuation of the housing crisis, does that mean that inappropriate development is the solution? I guess that would solve the problem all right – eventually no one would want to live in the city.
It is a great part of the region to live in. Plenty of parks, near the ocean, close to downtown and UBC. Whatever is done should enable a lot more people of all income levels to live there. Much better than forcing people to drive long distances because of lack of homes in the city.
And there are existing communities near all the malls in the region where towers are being built. Not sure why Jericho should be any different.
On the Jericho site it may be wise to consider a new neighbourhood character. The existing detached home on an open lot character to the south and west are not affordable, and moreover are not a sustainable land use. Our affordability crises is exemplifying that the single-lot subdivision is now obsolete.
Low rise multifamily, townhouses and rowhouses from mid-slope to the top are, in my view, most appropriate. Graduated height mid-rises below mid-slope will also complement the Alma, Broadway, 19th Ave and 4th Ave arterials, and if zoned mixed use will bring an additional economic chemistry and street activity into play.
But the built form is not the only way to design a new neighbourhood. This site should be laced with parks, like the veins in a leaf. I suggest 20% of the land should be public green space,, and if that means increasing density by another 10% to achieve the owner’s housing and return on investment goals, then so be it . Green corridors can open up into uniquely programmed small parks filled with community spirit fostering seating areas, long community picnic tables, playgrounds, quiet enclaves, grand views, arboretum tree planting, public art, etc. There needn’t be any single-use sports fields.
Where is the plan to extend ( the yet to be built) Broadway subway to at least Alma, or through this land to UBC ?
Will we repeat mistakes in other medium to high-density developments and wait for grid lock before we even consider rapid transit options ?
Why was there no consultation before the federal land was sold ?
Why was there no consultation before the provincial land was sold ?
Why does race matter in Canada ? I thought we are all equal ?
Proudly, second “nation” !
I agree with your comments on rapid transit.
Most consultation on land acquisition even in the public sector is held in private because the financing and other details are private.
There is great potential for the development on Jericho to be in the forefront of sustainability and design. It can allow for a variety of building types and still have the right fit within the neighbourhood. Across the street is home to much wildlife for can and should be protected and preserved. Jericho is not Downtown. The individuality of Vancouver neighbourhoods can be preserved while still increasing density.
Why no consultation? – good question for the Province & City.
I agree that this is a great opportunity to do something meaningful and relevant to the century we now live in. It is now west side’s turn to accept greater density, and the wisdom of how that density is executed will be on stage.
I would love to see a completely walkable and transit-oriented, mixed use, mixed income community built on this site with a mandate to enliven the streets with humans. If there is even one single family detached dwelling, or one 40+-storey tower, or one cul-de-sac, or more than one parking stall per unit, or one published opinion to avoid developing design guidelines, or one plan that privatizes the best view locations, I would consider this project a failure.
To those who interpret appropriate density as something similar to the standard lots up the hill now catering to higher incomes, I draw your attention to the significant density in all its forms already absorbed by east Vancouver, Fairview, Kits and downtown. And the pathetic performance of the west side to shoulder its fair share.
Eric Villagomez has illustrated this very well, but the animation ends a decade ago and most of the eastern and northern neighbourhoods have grown even more.
http://spacing.ca/vancouver/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2016/04/CoV_NeighbourhoodPopulation_Animation.gif
I should add that this site deserves a generous public park system throughout, and a lot of it on otherwise prime development land at that. One example: the top level near 8th Ave with the best views should be public open space, as should the stream that trickles down to 4th Ave, but with 50m setbacks instead of the standard DFO 30m. If greater density and compact urban form (including streets) is proposed , then more open space on the ground would open up to become part of the Commons.
In all fairness to the west side, the map above covers a time period where significant rapid transit was opened though the east side and not as much on the west side. It did sort of make sense to see those areas densify faster than the rest of the city during that time.
But I don’t disagree that the opening of the Canada Line and (hopefully) the Broadway Line will necessitate / justify much greater density for the west side, at least nodally, including on the Jericho Lands. I also think the Arbutus Corridor should be considered for much greater density even if no rail is ever built along there. E.g., between West Broadway and W. 16th. There are also these huge unused medians that are a kind of “dead space” between W. 16th and King Edward and then again between W. 37th and W. 41st (where it is largely parking spaces). There could be nice opportunities for infill development there now that they will back onto a greenway of some description (or potentially a tramway at some future date).
I agree with the notion now of extending the Broadway subway to Alma. But note that even W. 10th up the hill has seen some modest increases in density served by just the B-Line and the trolley.
The 16th Ave median has some very large regional-scale underground services, including a large diameter gas line. The light-railers often drool over that and other medians, but they should actually look up some utility maps and be educated. Personally, I wouldn’t touch 16th with a 100m pole because of the undergrounds.
Agree re: 16th. It has very little existing density to justify the investment, no Canada Line stop to hook into and some mean hills to climb at the western edge.
After Broadway, the next best East-West route would probably be 41st Ave from Dunbar to Kerrisdale to Oakridge to Joyce. A heck of a long way off of course. But better than 16th.
I agree with 41st Ave, but would underground it from McKinnon and extend it under Central Park to Metrotown Station. I think that connection would create a dynamic loop between the Expo Line, Broadway Line and 41st Ave (Metrotown to UBC), with the difference being 41st would be LRT.
I wonder if we will be seeing a few more of those Bell Telephone (Astral Media) massive digital billboards?
In Vancouver, for example, because the city doesn’t allow digital billboards, the company struck a deal with the Squamish Nation to put the billboards on federal land. (Marketing Mag)
I guess people accept them.
http://www.bellmedia.ca/sales/out-of-home/product/digital/
The residents who I talk to, my neighbours, are not expecting single family development on the property. Rather they want something reasonable and in context with the neighbourhood. Not NIMBY but perhaps BRIMBY – Be reasonable in my backyard.
I agree with the posters below who say that there is room for a variety of building types on the property and still maintain a development in context. The question is “What is the process to make this happen”.
I think the City would be wise to involve the residents VERY EARLY in the planning process. Working with a group of very active and determined residents is infinitely better than working against them.
Jericho can be a model of process as well as planning and design. In fact, Jericho has to be a model of process, the world is watching.
What’s reasonable? Is it reasonable for the City or the assembled nations to shortchange themselves because people in neighboring areas falsely believe they have title to their views? Is it reasonable for policy to respond to people’s distaste for living sort-of near tall buildings? Is it reasonable to redirect more of the city’s housing demands on areas that will suffer more for it on the east side?
The great thing about Vancouver is the variety of neighbourhoods with their distinct character. Each area can have a variety of housing types that suites that context. This is entirely reasonable. It is, however, entirely unreasonable for land owners to think they can just do anything they want. The zoning and development bylaws are there to give a regulatory framework for what is appropriate in what area and the neighbourhood residents have every right to be central to that process. There is an assumption by some that the community do not want to see any development there, but that is not actually the case. They just generally want an enhancement to the area with appropriate scale and amenities rather than an outcome being driven by uninformed greed. The city’s own consultants’ report confirmed there is already enough existing zoned capacity to last for the next 20 years, so there is no need to assume every neighbourhood needs to be built out in high density tower forms.
‘Existing zoned capacity’ for what price point?
There is no assigned price point to existing zoned capacity. Further, increasing supply has not made housing more affordable. Developers will only build if they can get their price. The free market determines price unless the units are somehow subsidized. The real estate market is now disconnected from the local economy due to foreign capital. Anything built at Jericho will likely be expensive unless substantially subsidized.
So what if it’s expensive? It’s expensive housing on the expensive side of town. It reduces the demand for expensive housing on the more affordable side of town.
“increasing supply has not made housing more affordable”
How do you know what prices would be without that supply? Additional supply lowers prices relative to what they would be without that supply – not necessarily relative to previous prices.
“Further, increasing supply has not made housing more affordable.”
You cannot say whether additional supply has made housing more affordable simply by looking at the fact that supply has been added and that prices have gone up. You need a control group to compare it against. As an example, to test if a medication is effective you can’t just have people take the medication and see if they get better. You need to compare that to what happened to a group of people who didn’t take the medication.
One way to look at this in the Metro Vancouver housing market is to compare the relative changes in the number of single family homes and the relative changes in sale prices, to these same measures in the condo market. So for instance between 1991 and 2011 about 150,000 condo units were added in Metro Vancouver. Over the same time period the number of single family homes in Metro Vancouver remained unchanged.
If you look at single family home prices they have dramatically increased over this time period while condo prices have been much more flat (noting that the graph below has not been adjusted for inflation). So in the condo category you added to the supply and prices remained relatively flat, while in the single family home market you did not add to the supply and prices dramatically increased. This is analogous to the medicine working.
http://www.alexblock.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/vancouver-housing-prices-1024×700.png
If the point you were really trying to make was that adding supply to the condo market has not made single family homes more affordable you would have to compare the changes in single family housing prices in areas that allowed for the increase in density vs the changes in housing prices in the areas that didn’t.
You make some good points regarding affordability. Unfortunately the statement as written regarding supply and affordability is perfectly true.
When a strategy fails to produce the desired results, we should do a thorough analysis to see the causes and potential solutions.
Supply and demand are not in balance in Vancouver, especially for SF homes, far less so for condos. The supply is increasing only outside of Vancouver (Coquitlam, Surrey, Delta, Langley etc.) for new SF homes and is flat to slightly negative in Vancouver. The demand is very high due to high Asian immigration AND foreign money looking to park (illegal and legal) cash here. We could decrease demand by taxing it more, FAR more for foreign money, but that discussion is tepid at best right now.
Once you go beyond Vancouver, and include MetroVan prices for a condo get far more reasonable and even homes are sub $1M or sub $500,000 for a TH, but of course further out.
As such, I’d expect medium to high density condo development on this land, like the Block F proposal in UEL, up to 20 story towers. Yaletown West, with the odd mid-rise (say “only” 8 stories) within the development and a bit of greenspace, all coated in sustainable and family oriented language. Since Yaletown starts at $800/sq ft for non-view lower floor units and is now well above $1000/sq ft for higher floor units I’d expect prices to be at least this high. Perhaps 10% or so is rental or below market housing.
It will be interesting to see if the property being leasehold from the Musqueam deters the overseas buyers. If it does, we might see some meaningful progress on affordability. If not, it will be just another development catering to the rich. Whoever buys, I’d insist on a locked in 100 year lease.
Have they announced it will be leasehold? Given that it isn’t reserve land, the owners would appear to have a choice in how they market it.
Hopefully, there’s some market rental properties too.
Good point, Bob. Most aboriginal land, on and off-reserve, is leased. Long term 99-year leases are quite common, but so are are 30 and 50-year leases. The leases need to be affordable, stable and inflation-adjusted that also gives the First Nations owners a reasonable return on their investment.
It’s notable that Chief Sparrow of the Musqueam Nation said that this deal was a compromise on their initial claim on this land, which was never sold or ceded but taken away after they continuously occupied it for millennia. They compromised because of the presence of two other overlapping claims, and the prospective oncoming years — perhaps decades — of court battles ahead with a more adversarial approach. The Musqueam are not entirely happy to be buying land that they feel they always owned, but this development scenario does provide a reasonable third way and the promise of much needed permanent independent income.
Mortgages will cover only the structures, not the land, in a leasehold scenario.
@ Brendan Dawe re: “So what if it’s expensive? It’s expensive housing on the expensive side of town. It reduces the demand for expensive housing on the more affordable side of town.”
That is not how things work. If people are moving to the more affordable side of town it is because that is what they can afford, not more expensive units. Although this may be additional options for people who can afford them, it will more than likely just feed the foreign condo commodities market that will buy up most of the presales. So, as I said before, don’t expect this area to provide affordable housing unless it is subsidized. The First Nations have been reported to say this is not their focus, it is to maximize return. Who can blame them.
@ E. Murphy: So you are saying that more supply on the west side has no effect on east side prices? Because these are “foreign condo commodities”? It sounds as if you are saying that foreign demand for Vancouver west side property is infinite and perfectly inelastic?
I disagree. I think that developing the site with many units, even if expensive, will displace demand (foreign or not) that would otherwise be placed on the existing COV housing stock, including on the east side. There will be some affordability benefit to this, but it’s invisible and not easily quantifiable. In this sense, it’s a bit like free trade. Just because the affordability benefits are tough to measure doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Look at what Mumbai has done to itself planning as if any new housing would be snapped up by and only encourage meddlesome interlopers.
I expect to see the Federal side of Jericho developed into something resembling Wesbrook Village at UBC. I expect commercial and mixed commercial residential along 4th from Highbury west to the point where the opposite side of the street switches from residential to park. The rest of 4th Avenue will be fronted by low-rise residential, likely without ground floor retail.
Behind that as far up as 7th I expect to find a mix of low-rise and high rise residential with a small amount of open space.
Along 8th I think there will be something ground oriented like the Sasamat Place development a few blocks away.
The Provincial side is much harder to predict for a variety of reasons including steep slope and high ground water flow on the west edge plus the existence of large institutional buildings on the site. More people in the area would only increase demand for the swimming pool, gymnasium and other facilities.
Here’s the really interesting bit about the provincial side of Jericho. A little bird told me that West Point Grey Academy is going to be staying put for the foreseeable future. If true that means that only the old Justice Institute site will be re-developed.
It seems odd that the First Nations would let the school stay on the most valuable part of the site, but it would help explain the low price tag. Considering the spectacular views available and the likelihood of high density zoning, the site is worth $ billions.
Well, they do have a huge site to develop first and only so much capital to do it with.
Likewise, the University Golf Club will be staying on that site for some time as well (makes sense to wait for the M-Line extension to UBC to get full value when developed).
The Musqueam also have other lands to develop mentioned in this article:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/musqueam-unveil-plans-to-build-condos-on-forested-lot/article6385840/
and the Squamish have lands near Burrard Bridge they want to develop, too.
http://www.vancourier.com/community/vancouver-special/kitsilano/kitsilano-developing-story-squamish-plans-going-ahead-few-details-available-1.586413
Article regarding the federal Jericho lands – to be developed in a Joint Venture with Canada Lands Corp.
http://www.squamishchief.com/news/local-news/squamish-nation-signs-onto-huge-land-deal-1.1413214
Where are the savvy Pricetags commenters who can analyze the pro forma needed to profit on the provincial Jericho portion? A beefed up version of this piece would be great: https://pricetags.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/a-pro-forma-for-jericho-in-shangri-la-equivalents/
$480m for 38.8 acres is ~$284/gross sq ft. That’s a pretty penny once you account for site servicing, CACs, development costs and so on….
Hence Yaletown, UBC or west end condo pricing @ $1000/sq ft .. perhaps a bit lower on lower non-view inferior locations, and 25%+ above that for high end upper floor view locations.
For starters, we could conjecture that recent COV large site rezonings could serve as a guide for ultimate development capacity. The Little Mountain site is running about 2.5 FSR (too high IMO) and there’s been a recently approved rezoning at the former Oakridge bus barns site, probably at a gross density around 1.5- 2FSR, I’m guessing. Somewhere in this range might be the kind of overall gross density that the buyers may be seeking. With at least 50% of this beautiful site set aside for open space, roads, etc., the net densities could be double these figures. (As a reference, 2.5 FSR is the NET allowable density in the nearby mixed use zones further west of the site on 4th Avenue.)
I would really like the road standards and parking requirements to be re-examined. I don’t believe this site needs 20m road allowances. Electric car share parking and charging stations can be interspersed throughout. It may be possible to get the requirement down to 0.5 or even 0.25 cars per household average using generous car share availability (perhaps Jericho-only usage?), proximity to transit and generous mixed-use zoning (grocery stores within walking distance) as the rationale.
However, I could agree to generous road allowances if a system of narrow streets is paralleled with a linear park network. The necessary terracing of the contours fro roads could also assist in creating accessible adjacent park space in places.
I agree with Frank that the existing apartments and townhouses to the west of the site on HIghbury and 4th Ave. are an appropriate scale for some of the Jericho Lands, balanced with substantial open green space, trees and restoration of the stream system to connect with Jericho Park and Beach wetlands. As it transitions into the community to the south, a mix of new housing types such as rowhouses and townhouses could provide more family housing at a complementary scale. This could be a stunning development on a beautiful site if done right.