City set to vote on Kerrisdale redevelopment
A historic Kerrisdale church will learn its fate at a Vancouver city hall meeting tonight when councillors vote on an application to redevelop its valuable property by adding a condo tower and subsidized rentals.
The Dunbar Ryerson United Church at Yew and 45th Avenue has asked the city to OK its plan to build an eight-storey condo with 40 market-priced units plus a fivestorey building for a new community centre that would include 32 rental units, two-thirds with subsidized rent.
Despite vocal opposition from the neighbourhood, a housing expert who supports densification in Vancouver’s pricey West Side neighbourhoods said the city can’t afford not to approve the project by the church and Wall Financial.
“I would upzone the entire West Side,” said Prof. Thomas Davidoff of University of B.C.’s Sauder School of Business.
He said with “dramatically” rising land prices putting a typical acre into the $40-million range, Vancouver can’t afford not to densify its single-family dwelling neighbourhoods.
“To have land prices going up five or six times and to hold density constant” isn’t possible, he said.
If it costs the church roughly $200 a square foot to build condos that now sell in Vancouver for at least $1,000 a square foot, there’s an $800-per-square-foot “social benefit” used to create affordable rentals and a community centre or other community amenities, he said.
Davidoff said he understands the neighbours’ opposition, but it’s all about costs and benefits.
“I’d rather not have a big building across from me,” he said. But in this case, “the costs are concentrated on a small number of landowners and the benefits are very diffuse over the whole region.”
If housing isn’t built in Vancouver, it will be built in the suburbs and there are costs to that in lost agricultural land or increased transportation, Davidoff argued.
The money the church earns from the deal would be used to run the rental building and community centre and renovate the 89-yearold church, which needs $10 million in repairs, said Gordon Esau, the volunteer chair of the church’s development committee.
But opponents say if the city approves the project, it will ignore its own rules on community planning set out for Kerrisdale and other similar neighbourhoods more than 10 years ago. Buildings on arterial roads are restricted to four storeys, and they’re opposed to the project’s eight-storey tower.
They worry the building’s shadows will keep “residents in the dark during fall and winter” and the new community centre will attract up to 800 people for events at one time, increasing traffic and parking problems.
The group, which has also made public presentations to earlier city hall meetings, also warn the development will kill mature trees and green spaces, and fails to include an adequate buffer zone to adjacent single-family houses. Spokeswoman Ann Kent didn’t return a request for comment.
Esau said concerns have been addressed over the six years of planning for the development, and “from the church’s standpoint, everything that’s generated from this will go back into the community and into the development.”
According to the 2011 census, 53 per cent of occupied homes in Kerrisdale are single-family homes, with 28 per cent in apartments less than five storeys, and 11 per cent in apartments five storeys and higher.