Dan Fumano: How an old East Van bus loop could have become 285 rental homes
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2020 01:18:29 +0000
TransLink was recently kicking the tires on a new venture: real estate development.
Someone at Metro Vancouver’s transportation authority was eyeing the Kootenay Bus Loop, a spot of pavement taking up about a third of a city block on East Hastings a block west of the Burnaby border. That person apparently saw an opportunity for the site to be something more than a spot for buses to turn around — there could be potential here for as many as 285 rental homes, from studios to three-bedroom suites, dozens of which would be permanently secured at below-market rents.
Although TransLink had never acted as a developer on any residential or commercial development projects in Metro Vancouver, the authority submitted an inquiry in 2018 under a City of Vancouver pilot project aimed at encouraging rental housing construction.
Of the 55 applicants Vancouver received under its moderate income rental housing pilot, TransLink’s inquiry was one of 20 selected.
Details of the project weren’t made public because within months of being selected for the pilot, TransLink withdrew its application. It never advanced to the stage in the process where it would have become public knowledge. The Vancouver Sun learned of the abandoned project from documents obtained through a freedom of information request and requested additional details from TransLink.
Although the Kootenay Loop housing project is dead for now, TransLink spokesman Ben Murphy said the agency “may revisit this prospect at some point in the future.”
That prospect, local experts say, raises an intriguing proposition.
Transportation authorities in other cities have taken innovative and more direct roles in housing developments. Some Vancouver-based urban thinkers are applauding TransLink for looking into the idea, even if it didn’t come to fruition in this case.
“We were made aware that our site was within a corridor suited to potential projects under the program,” Murphy said in an email. “The idea was explored, recognizing the opportunity to potentially accommodate more than the current use as a bus loop. Had the concept developed, it could have generated revenue for TransLink.”
Kootenay Loop opened in 1950, and is “an important piece of transit infrastructure,” Murphy said. The loop would have been integrated into any development pursued on the site.
The application was made in conjunction with the adjacent landowner, and the decision to withdraw was made based on factors including “current market context, bus loop impacts and financial implications,” Murphy said.
TransLink’s real estate division is responsible for acquiring, managing and disposing of properties in a way that optimizes revenue and supports the authority’s goals for transportation infrastructure and a healthy environment. TransLink and its operating companies own 190 properties in Metro Vancouver, including park-and-ride lots, bus loops and work yards. The vast majority, Murphy said, would not be suited to residential development.
TransLink supports transit-oriented development and density at key transit nodes, Murphy said, and the agency works with developers building residential and commercial projects near transit infrastructure, to “facilitate their new community in a way that does not impact our operations.”
Kootenay bus loop on East Hastings Street in Vancouver.
With the Kootenay project, TransLink appears to have been contemplating a larger role. And Alex Boston, the executive director of Simon Fraser University’s Renewable Cities program, is glad to see it.
It would need to be determined which entity would be best suited to develop and manage an apartment building on a TransLink-owned property, Boston said, but he applauded the “participation of TransLink in identifying strategic opportunities.”
For one thing, Boston said, it’s important to build secure rental housing near transit hubs — and affordable rentals are even better.
“Renters drive the success of our transit system in Greater Vancouver” as they use transit at about double the rate of homeowners, Boston said. “But over the last 50 years, we’ve been losing rental housing on strategic corridors. Because of the amount of speculation, we’ve displaced so much purpose-built rental with condominium development.”
For example, in Burnaby’s Metrotown affordable apartments have been replaced bt expensive condos in recent years. It’s happened in just about every Metro municipality, Boston said.
Just last week, Langley Township Mayor Jack Froese addressed an audience of developers and warned of high-end condo development near major transit infrastructure that “displaces the people that need it the most” and attracts residents who use transit less.
Boston pointed to Seattle, where Sound Transit recently developed six storeys of housing above a light rail station. There were more than 1,300 applicants for the 110 homes, Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reported.
Montreal’s transit authority announced its first real estate project in 2018, a 300-unit housing development near a metro station. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority is partnering on a proposal to build a seven-storey development above a bus yard, including 560 homes, aiming to make half of them affordable.
Former Vancouver Coun. Gordon Price pictured in Vancouver in 2017.
Gordon Price, a former Vancouver councillor and director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, credited TransLink for exploring this concept. While he likes those North American examples, he thinks we should look across the ocean at even more ambitious transit-oriented projects.
Price recalled a visit to Tokyo where he received a briefing from East Japan Railway Company, which he described as “basically a development company with one of the world’s biggest rapid transit systems attached to it.”
British officials have been looking to Japan to learn how that country’s rail system became hugely profitable, popular and reliable, while keeping fares down — all “without a single yen of public subsidy,” the Financial Times reported last year. A “vital part” of the Japanese railways’ success was real estate development.
“You could say the same thing of Singapore, Hong Kong,” said Price. “We should be looking more and more to the east … There’s no doubt, at the global level, transit agencies and land development go together.”
“We can learn from them, but we will definitely do it in our own way.”
With a file from Joanne Lee-Young