Scarce industrial land in Vancouver is vulnerable to storms, flooding
Credit to Author: Joanne Lee-Young| Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2020 00:59:19 +0000
Industrial land in the City of Vancouver is tight and shrinking. Vacancy rates are low and rents are skyrocketing.
And there’s more bad news.
A report going to city council next week is the first phase of looking at where offices, hotels, industrial businesses, including manufacturers, and distributors will be located in the future. Basically, this is space slated to support jobs and drive the economy in a city with expensive living costs.
High up in the 200-plus-page report is a map revealing how large portions of the city’s scarce industrial land “are vulnerable to flooding due to a major storm and a one-metre rise in sea level.”
They include the Fraser River industrial area, the False Creek Flats and the area around the Port of Vancouver.
If no additional measures are put in place, there could be “significant disruption” to some 2,800 parcels, 13 square kilometres of land and 53,000 existing jobs,” according to the report.
“Based on best science and advice from the provincial and federal governments, the city is planning for one metre of sea level rise by 2100. . . . It may mean that the city and region have even less industrial land capacity in the future.”
There will be a need, in Phase 2 of the review, to come up with land use policies so that industrial businesses can thrive, said the report, without further details.
The call comes as other coastal cities are also trying to figure out how far they need to go, what they should spend and who should pay for projects to cope with the threat of rising sea levels because of climate change.
Some, such as New York City, are studying and arguing over the need for elaborate, infrastructure projects, such as a $100 billion-plus, swinging-gate barrier to prevent flooding, according to the New York Times.
For now, there are no signs of the risk of diminishing demand or prices for industrial land in Vancouver.
While rising sea levels have long been on the radar when leasing or buying land in Richmond because it sits right on a flood plain, they haven’t in Vancouver, said Stefan Morissette, a commercial broker specializing in industrial land at Colliers International.
“For most people, it’s likely too far away. I’m a climate-aware person, so I think the risk of it might come faster than some people anticipate.
“If you’re talking about False Creek (being vulnerable to flooding), it would involve a massive relocation of people. But it also could be more than 20 to 40 years away. Right now, the focus is really on the crunch for industrial space. No one cares about anything else.”
With corporations such as Amazon able to take on large chunks of space, between 100,000- to 500,000-square feet, and long leases, such as for 15 years, the pinch has been even more acute for smaller, local companies, said Morissette. He just helped a client renew a lease for 80 per cent more so the business could remain in the same space.
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