Idea for Vancouver Rental Projects: Lose the Parking?

News of Cadillac Fairview’s proposal for a 65-storey, 580-unit rental apartment tower at Queen and Yonge St. in Downtown Toronto is interesting for Vancouver observers. The proposal indicates that the development will have zero parking stalls. Instead, it will include 580 bicycle spaces are planned instead. The building appears to be absent of unit balconies as well.

This particular site includes demolition of an existing retail space and preservation of an existing heritage building, and based upon the location, parking probably won’t be necessity for most urban residents.

This begs an interesting question however, would the outright or partial relaxation of parking requirements for a downtown rental project be viable from a rental or construction perspective? There are many buildings in the West End that do not have any parking, and this does not appear to impact rents…

Recent efforts to reduce parking requirements for Vancouver condo projects have yielded mixed results; such as the MC2 project at Marine and Cambie where units sans obligatory parking stall were apparently much slower to sell. Is rental different?