The Vancouver Sun reports that the waterpark located to the west of the 1.2 million square foot Tsawwassen Mills Mall is going to reopen with a new 99 year leaseholder, the Executive Hotels and Resorts. This Vancouver based firm will also be building a 200 unit hotel adjacent to the waterpark site as a place for you to spend the night when you come to Delta to enjoy the shopping and the waterpark. And if you really like spending the night and shopping, they are also planning a residential development on the former Class 1 floodplain farmland.
As a spokesman said: “We did want to diversify a little bit and not just focus on one target audience. We want to make this the top attraction in the Lower Mainland. With Tsawwassen Mills, the Tsawwassen Springs golf course, Tsawwassen Commons and the waterpark, Tsawwassen is really turning into an entertainment and shopping destination.”
Location of Tsawwassen Commons serving residents within a seven minute drive
Yes, that is what they said. The new local serving mall beside Tsawwassen Mills which is called Tsawwassen Commons contains 100 stores and 550,000 square feet, the same retail square footage of Ladner and Tsawwassen combined. That mall is designed to steer residents away from the two town centres.But never mind that. Or the fact that the American border with much more diverse shopping experience is just twenty minutes away. Or the fact that a lot of folks buy their goods on-line. Or the fact that a lot of people just don’t drive to shop and sleep at big enclosed malls.
“We have established an exciting mixed use commercial/residential development plan, which includes a complete refurbishment of the waterpark, which is already underway, plus a new Executive Hotel. We will be open for business this summer and look forward to welcoming back all of the waterpark’s loyal guests, as well as thousands of new guests to experience the rejuvenated Big Splash waterpark experience.”
More evidence that Western civilization is KAPUT!
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
When did the board of Metro Vancouver receive and discuss this plan?
I guess the next thing going in will be an auto and RV mall.
well now I have a reason to go out there – waterslides are awesome!
For comparison, Great Wolf Lodge hotels & waterparks are very popular.
The closest is near Olympia, Washington on I-5, and I know of a number of families from Vancouver, BC who have crossed the border and stayed there for a vacation.
https://www.greatwolf.com/grand-mound
Jimmy Pattison has the exclusive franchise rights for Great Wolf Lodge in Canada , with an operation in Niagara Falls.
*****
As a side note, the Tulalip Hotel & Casino (next to Seattle Premium Outlets) is apparently also very popular (and I hear it has a great buffet).
No one is forced to buy from Jimmy Patterson or work for him. Yet, people do .. by the thousands or tens of thousands. What does that tell you ?
Are you just envious of a successful business person ?
Not I, my family or anyone I know will ever go there.
Why not widen your network of acquaintances ? Apparently many people like this. It is a diverse world, and with more and more immigration into Canada it will get more and more diverse.
Does our city planning take this into account ?
Does this blog ?
Not everyone is a bicycle enthusiast. Many folks consider a 6000 sq ft house with a quadruple garage the pinnacle of success, especially in Surrey. That is the result of immigration and diversity. A city needs to accommodate those and many other tastes, lifestyles & living arrangements. Condos in high-rises & packed like sardines into buses or LRTs: not for everyone !
My network is quite vast and covers many cities on two continents, thank you. And I grew up in Canadian suburbia and know exactly what its shortcomings are. I’ll take a walkable neighbourhood any day of the year over this mess of corporate asphalt and plastic entertainment.
Tarmac, plastic and tilt-up warehouse buildings used for retail is not a viable or sustainable alternative to farming on deep, high quality soils with a captive food market approaching three million people at the doorstep.
“former Class 1 floodplain farmland”
The mind boggles. Is it only the farmland that is “former?” Or can we expect the whole development to be … um … self-correcting with a little more global warming and sea level rise?
Why is farmland more important than land used for retail, industry, parks or housing ?
Obviously we need all of that in a prospering society. For example, food can be imported, often at far lower cost when grown elsewhere. Housing on the other hand has to be local, and to a large degree shopping, recreational or industry also. A balanced approach is needed to address teh needs of a very diverse and growing population trading with a growing rest of Canada and Asia !
Missing in MetroVan is a comprehensive debate on sensible use of ALR and expansion of low lying ocean/river flats. The hard baked “Don’t touch that” approach needs to be re-visited every 10-20 years in light of new immigration, shopping, weather or housing patterns !
You obviously don’t know a lot about agriculture. To you, farmland and farming are not viable long-term resources or valuable economic activities. Farmland is a commodity to be exploited and sold off for short-term gain to feed the maw of suburban development that can never be sustained.
BC produce is affordable year round. It outcompetes imported produce even from Mexico (with lower pesticide and environmental standards and rock bottom farm labour costs) when local field crops are in season. Hop On Farms in south Burnaby, to cite only one example, is located in the heart of the Metro and has a large local and very loyal clientele who enjoy fresh produce direct from the farmer year round from their fields and greenhouses off Marine Drive.
Greenhouse tomatoes, peppers, cukes, squash etc. etc. use ladybugs and other non-toxic bio controls instead of petrochemicals. Many of the greenhouses in Delta are connected to the methane gas-fired waste heat from the Vancouver landfill in winter.
Most BC supermarkets have large sections devoted to BC field produce when in season, and our dairy and meat sources are pretty well all Canadian all the time.
We have something called “winter” here, and that is the only thing stopping the local sourcing of our year-round green grocer supplies. When California inevitably arrives at the approaching water and subsidy carrying capacity wall, and limits are necessarily placed on their exports, Canadian agriculture will no doubt expand to take its place here.
Canadian agriculture has a great future potential and solar greenhouses on the southern Prairies (where the sun usually shines brightly even during bitter Arctic outflows) could eventually supply fresh winter produce to the entire nation. The northern BC and Prairie regions below the boreal forest contain some of the best soils in the world, and the latitude affords longer periods of photosynthesis to power up crop yields phenomenally during the growing season. With sustainable water management and soil conservation practices, Canada could become a net exporter of produce to the US as the increasingly longer southern droughts decimate their food-producing capacity in the latter half of this century.
Meanwhile, our milder winters will continue increase the importance of the ALR and local food production with an expanding export market.
I get it that farmland has value. Yet the same land also has value for other, competing uses.
If it is true, as you state that ” southern Prairies (where the sun usually shines brightly even during bitter Arctic outflows) could eventually supply fresh winter produce to the entire nation. ” then that is true for other parts of BC or NW USA as well. Food grown very close to cities, or in cities on land that is worth $1M or more an acre might not be the best land use then.
ALR in BC and rover/ocean mud flat land expansion needs further debate and a review every decade or 2 in light of new practices, or population growth, or events such as CA water shortages (which btw will be short lived as they now can desalinate water on a large scale fairly inexpensively .. see here on this Israel invented reverse osmosis technique: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/534996/megascale-desalination/ ) Subsidized blueberries next to 10 story highrises as we see in Richmond seems strange to me. BC is vast, and W-Canada even vaster .. surely we can grow food cheaper elsewhere and (e-)truck it in ?
There was a most interesting link within that link:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/533446/desalination-out-of-desperation/
Desalination uses almost four times the energy than it takes to fully treat raw sewage and return it to the urban distribution system as potable water (yes, from toilet to tap), and 20X that used in the collection, treatment and distribution of groundwater and water from depleting distant rivers.
Agriculture consumes 80% of California’s water supply, of which up to 85 million m3 is used for irrigation every day (source: USGS). Even if California could lower its desalination costs to 58 cents per m3 per the Israelis, you’re looking at almost $50 million a day ($18 billion a year) as a basement cost to replace all irrigation water with desalinated seawater on top of all the subsidies and high operating and replacement costs of a vast, crumbling 100-year-old distribution system spread over four states. It is more likely the costs will remain orders of magnitude higher for a long time.
Water isn’t the whole story. Compared to the depleted soils in the San Joaqin Valley (where our winter produce originates) the classes of irreplaceable soils in the Fraser Valley ALR are literally brown gold. Deep, rich soils with high organic content do not require a lot of expensive irrigation or fertilizer by comparison to the sand and gravel farmland of California.
California should adopt Israeli water-use standards. Even so, the environmental cost is too great to maintain its agricultural industry in its current form. Something has to give. The Colorado River no longer reaches the sea, and Lake Mead is 30+ metres below normal levels. Petrochemical fertilizer is the sole nutrient source for produce there, and mineral salt deposits are a serious problem in their irrigation systems.
The writing is on the wall for agricultural exports from California, and just about every other warm country on the continent. We have to avoid dumbing down our policies about agriculture and urbanism in that context.
Very sad that farmland had to be converted to this massive entertainment centre. Has anyone been to Niagara Falls? I have several times….we’ve biked by Niargara Falls on city (not jus the fall splendour) on the 50 km. plus MUP that parallels the road … which feels artificial, trashy and ..eventually an experience a person only goes there once and doesn’t come back for several years.
A smaller scale indoor entertainment centre ….near a large natural park within walking distance would have been a great way of planning things a lot better, to blend outdoor and rainy day activities. This type of stuff is intended for families with very young children or seniors who aren’t very mobile at all…particularily in lousy weather.
“Why is farmland more important than land used for retail, industry, parks or housing ?” It most certainly isn’t as BC’s economy is currently organized.
British Columbia once had a thriving economy based on natural resources. People bought homes for their families to live in. We had a thriving extractive economy.
Unfortunately all that h as been squandered!
Our natural resources have been mindlessly squanded despite warnings as far back as the 1950’s.
We are on a course of destruction as we mindlessly build empty towers and sell off empty single family properties to whoever or whatever comes along with a fat wallet. Every entity in this benighted place is embroiled in unpayable debt that will never be payed off.
In the meantime the game must continue: keep the ball rolling less some unfortuneate schmuks is left holding the bag! .
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Disneyland (whatever you may think of that commercial marketing juggernaut)
was built on a 160 acre orange orchard:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/01/22/article-2543873-1AE0D28A00000578-182_964x624.jpg
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2543873/How-Disney-grew-Aerial-images-chart-Disneyland-changed-past-60-year-existence.html
Staff there are recommending avoiding the crowds at weekends and trying to go midweek.
Once the Commons opens with WalMart, Canadian Tire, Petland, etc., the traffic will be much heavier. To relieve the volume on the SFPR they will probably extend 52nd up to Deltaport Way as an alternate.
As they advertise, there are over 200,000 people living within a 20 minute drive.
It will all get down to the price at the pump and family budgets.
Those who live in walkable communities — say, downtown Ladner, or just about any urban town centre — will count themselves lucky when they can give up the second car, take shorter car trips, or give up owning one entirely. That seems so far from the reality of these folks today, but the price breaking through the $2 / litre barrier in a few years will tend to shift paradigms.
Why would oil go up in price. About the only person I know that thinks that is Jeff Rubin. Poor guy. The US is producing more than ever, OPEC isn’t really cutting down. Iran is coming back on stream. Maybe even Venezuela will be properly run soon and then they’ll be properly producing.
Another thing is that usage is declining and vehicles are vastly more efficient than just a few years ago.
The only reason oil will increase is if some government raises taxes or inflation kicks in. If inflation kicks in it will probably cause earnings to rise, making higher prices just as affordable as today’s price.
Easy. Even a modest interest rate hike will tank many of the US frackers who are submerged in debt. Moreover, two of the five US shale plays will enter their inevitable decline in the early ’20s according to the geologists who have analyzed the data. Note independent geologists do not accept investment bank and oil company hype at face value, and they have noted that OPEC lies through its teeth about their supplies.
You keep harping on Rubin when I’ve countered several times before with links to said studies of the actual production data and geological strata assessments. I can’t help it if you don’t bother to read them, but just don’t try to imply to everybody that we can go on and on forever with fossil fuels when the cheap stuff has been on a plateau since 2008 and the only thing keeping supplies in a glut and production near 80 million barrels a day is the expensive oil from unconventional sources, which is now slowing with losses from low prices. Then you have OPEC, which is another story.
And VKT have levelled off and increased slightly on the continent with lower prices at the pump, as have sales of larger vehicles. They will decrease inversely to price increases, as always.
I rank your comments about oil with your preaching about Mr. Stone’s Holy Asphalt Scripture.
Are they going to bring back the go-kart track as well?