A Vancouver developer wants to reimagine the low-rise strip mall and parking lot at New Westminster’s Columbia Square as a mixed-use community with towers soaring as tall as 53 storeys.
New Westminster city council approved on Monday a rezoning bylaw that kicks off a detailed planning process. That will figure out how to fit 3,800 homes on the site, which about the size of three city blocks, as well as meet the needs for parks, public spaces, daycare spaces and a new school.
Adjacent to the site is high-density housing around the New Westminster SkyTrain Station. Columbia Square “is on the edge of what’s kind of the tower district of downtown,” said New West Mayor Patrick Johnstone.
“We have a housing need in our city, we have a housing need in our region,” Johnstone added. “And part of not just the city’s official community plan, but the regional plan, is to put as much housing as we can on SkyTrain stations and high-service transit areas.”
It’s a proposal, however, that strains New West’s already stretched public services, according to Coun. Daniel Fontaine, who voted against the bylaw over the amount of its density and lack of definition for amenities to be included in the master plan.
Fontaine said the proposal’s eight residential towers on “a postage stamp of a lot” would house some 7,250 people, would be almost like housing the town of Revelstoke, but without that town’s pool, rink and community centre.
“When you bring the entire town of Revelstoke and you leave behind all those amenities and just put in the people, it’s a recipe for building bad cities,” Fontaine said.
Since Monday’s meeting, Fontaine said his phone has been ringing with calls from constituents who are already irate at the state of services with one caller complaining “it’s easier to get Taylor Swift concert tickets than getting your kid into the trampoline program.”
Fontaine added that he supports higher-density housing near transit, “but when we lose the public because we build bad density (then) we’re going to lose the bigger battle around properly redeveloping the Metro Vancouver area, in particular, New Westminster.”
Johnstone, however, said Columbia Square fits within New West’s existing official community plan, which “always envisioned larger density, mixed-use development in that area.”
He added that its proponent, Vancouver’s Edgar Development, has been working through preliminary work and community consultations for three years.
Johnstone said the planning process will deal with the phasing in of residential development, which is intended to give existing Columbia Square retail tenants the option to relocate in the new development, the height of towers and accommodation for additional amenities.
Those include at least 20 per cent market-rental housing, between 130 and 170 below-market affordable units, up to 20,000 square feet of space for a daycare centre and the option for the New West school district to take an “air parcel” in one of its buildings to build a new school.
While on a small lot, some 25 per cent of the land of Edgar’s proposal must also be green space with a 50,000-square-foot public square.
“We’re also hoping to leverage a significant amount of the density bonus money from this site in order to see funding for more affordable housing across the city,” Johnstone said.
On schools in particular, Johnstone said he has already been pressing the province on building those faster if it expects municipalities to do their share in making more housing.
“The region is simply not building housing as fast as people are moving to the region,” Johnstone said. “We can’t stop and wait. It’s not that one has to happen before the other, it’s that they both have to happen at the same time.”