Hard road ahead for Capri
The transformation of the Capri-Landmark area into a true urban centre requires, among many other things, something quite pedestrian: Sidewalks.
An amenity taken for granted elsewhere is pretty hit-and-miss throughout the CapriLandmark district, an area the city expects to grow from 2,500 residents now to 10,000 by 2040.
“This area has been developing ad hoc, maybe not in the way it should,” acting city manager Joe Creron observed at Monday’s council meeting. “But 22 years from now, somebody will say, ‘This is a pretty good neighbourhood. All the bits and pieces are here.’”
Coun. Ryan Donn said he often hears from people who wonder about the unusual nature of Capri-Landmark, where gleaming office towers nudge up against hardscabble industrial areas and neighbourhoods where many homes have seen better days.
“There are skyscrapers with no sidewalks,” Donn said at the Monday meeting.
The city’s vision for improving amenities and infrastructure in Capri-Landmark — with new roads, parks, and, yes, sidewalks — comes at an eye-popping figure of $95 million.
Expected revenues from future development projects might cover two-thirds of the cost, but taxpayers will still be on the hook for about $32 million.
Capri-Landmark is something of an accidental urban centre right now, it’s signature collection of business and high-tech high-rises existing mainly because of planning quirk that dates back to the 1970s.
Land-use contracts that conferred special rights and exemptions from normal city rules and regulations were the fashion of the day across B.C., promoted by a Social Credit government that wanted to speed up growth.
A big patch of land south of Harvey Avenue across from the Parkinson recreation centre was the subject one such contract.
Essentially, it granted developer Al Stober the right to build the job-rich towers in this somewhat unusual location, without the mandatory payment of various city fees that would have otherwise been required. The contracts also offered immunity from any future city changes in servicing requirements or zoning regulations.
The city would surely have preferred such buildings to be located downtown, but the land-use contract meant there wasn’t much they could do to prevent the emergence of the Landmark business and technology centre.
“The developers had every right to take advantage of the benefits that the land-use contract gave them,” Ryan Smith, a city planning manager, said in 2015. “You can’t fault business people for seeing an opportunity and taking advantage of it.”
Stober did make some voluntary payments to the city when building permits were issued for most of the recent buildings, Smith said this week. “They would argue that those payments were equivalent to the development cost charges that they didn’t have to pay,” Smith said.
In any event, recognizing the restrictions they place on municipalities’ ability to apply uniform rules across their jurisdictions, the previous Liberal government mandated the phase-out of all land-use contracts across B.C. by 2024.
Kelowna had about 80 of these contracts, many of which apply to small properties and are narrow in scope, such as prohibiting secondary suites. Some have been extinguished, but it’s a slow process, and there are still about 70 in place, including the one that covers the Landmark tower area.
For the larger Capri-Landmark urban centre, bounded by Harvey, Spall, Gordon and Springfield, the city wants most of the new development to be in multi-family projects. For example, a 31-unit rental building on Pacific Avenue, a project that will replace a single-family home, was approved on Tuesday by council.
High-density development in established areas, the planning mantra goes, is desirable because it’s a better use of existing infrastructure like water and sewer lines, and might lessen people’s reliance on private vehicles to get to work.
“I wholeheartedly believe we must focus as much growth as possible in urban centres,” Mayor Colin Basran said this week.
The potential problem with this plan is people. Specifically, the ongoing preference of most people to prefer a single-family home in the suburbs over relatively cramped living in a condo or townhouse.
Last year, the Canadian Home Builders’ Association said a single-family home was preferred by 66 per cent of buyers, against 34 per cent who craved a condo or townhouse.
But Kelowna, like most municipalities, is nevertheless busy adopting programs and policies with a specific aim of ensuring most new homes are in multi-family units.
I’m not sure, but I bet most city councillors and well-paid top city officials live in singlefamily homes. It’s what they want, but not what they want for other people.
They want people to live in places like Capri-Landmark, now just a phantom urban centre where even sidewalks are hard to find.
Ron Seymour is a Daily Courier reporter. Phone: 250-470-0750 Email: ron.seymour@ok.bc.ca.