Metro Vancouver’s hot real estate market has many young people wondering whether they have a future in a region where home ownership is increasingly unattainable; but skyrocketing housing prices also threaten to drive out the reason Vancouver was built in the first place.
Metro Vancouver lost 865 acres of industrial land to urbanization between 2010 and 2015—an area just 100 acres shy of Stanley Park, according to Dustin Lupick, a student at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP).
While many think of emissions-belching smokestacks when they hear the word “industrial,” the loss of productive industrial property threatens to impact everything from transportation systems to greenhouse gas emissions to farm land.
“The biggest issue is if you take away industrial land, it’s never coming back,” Lupick said in an interview.
Lupick carried out a literature review on industrial land for Metro Vancouver, and found “The way land prices are going, [and with] the way we view how people work . . . it’s not the highest and best use necessarily, but it is a huge boon for employment.”
Vancouver was founded as a port city, and continues to rely on industrial jobs to fuel its economy. According to Metro Vancouver, the area’s regional district, 23 per cent of jobs in the region are supported on industrial land—including repair shops, hotel laundry services, breweries, and catering companies, as well as emerging tech industries.
Built on a series of peninsulas and squeezed between the U.S. border and a mountain range, Vancouver has never had room to sprawl. In the 1970s, the provincial government’s Agricultural Land Reserve placed further restraints on how the city could grow.
Writing in the Georgia Straight, Brendan Hurley and Lenore Newman credit the ALR with fostering the urban design philosophy known as Vancouverism—which emphasized “building up, not out.” According to Hurley and Newman, the ALR “has been extremely effective at protecting our region’s farmland.”
“Land lost to development fell by nearly 90 percent, and secure in their tenure, farmers developed an intensive agricultural landscape that currently produces 4.5 percent of Canada’s farm income on 0.2 percent of the country’s farmland.”
While Vancouverism has allowed cities and farmland to coexist, it has increased demand for land and placed additional pressures on industrial-zoned properties in the city’s core. Rising housing prices have led developers to snatch up former industrial parcels to convert into more valuable residential and commercial zones.
At this rate, Metro Vancouver officials expect significant industrial land shortages in the next 10 to 15 years.
“The resulting lack of available lands and high costs could slow job growth, discourage businesses from locating or expanding in the region and put pressure on agricultural lands,” district officials say.
Lupick said this puts pressure on emerging sectors, including brewing, 3D printing, and automated trucking.
“Public perception of what industrial land is used for is smokestacks and vehicle assembly lines, and in a lot of ways that’s not how industrial is being used anymore,” he said.
The loss of industrial land to urbanization has also pushed industry to Vancouver’s periphery, at a time when regional mayors and the province are at an impasse over how to fund transportation infrastructure and reduce gridlock.
For Lupick, the loss of industrial land raises basic questions about Vancouver’s identity. “If you get rid of all the industrial land, what’s to stop it from becoming a resort town?” he said.
Jonny Wakefield, 24 November 2016