Vancouver planner wants to end ad hoc approach to developer fees.

Vancouver’s new director of planning wants to get rid of the city’s contentious method of negotiating with developers over fees they are required to pay for public services.

Brian Jackson, who starts his job as the general manager of planning and development Aug. 27, said the current “one-by-one” method of negotiating so-called community amenity contributions with individual developers is both unproductive and divisive. Instead, he wants the city to institute a system that allows developers to know up front what they’ll have to pay for parks, daycares and other needed community services.

“The owner of Vancouver’s Oakridge Mall is proposing a major expansion of the 56-year-old shopping centre that would transform the 11.5-hectare site into more of a community.

Ivanhoe Cambridge Inc. wants to build a broad range housing ranging from luxury to affordable, as well as more office and retail space, parks, bikeways, walking paths and a library, Senior Development Director Gordon Wylie said Monday.

Wylie said most of the development would occur on what are currently the mall’s massive parking lots.

“We’ll be building new parking underground and then on the surface area will become retail and residential areas.”

The city approved a similar plan in 2007, but since then, policies have opened up and Oakridge wants to take advantage with a new concept that goes beyond a modest expansion.”

Courtesy of the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/07/23/bc-oakridge-mall-expansion.html

1635-1637 West Broadway has sold to a local private investor for $5,150,000, or $445 per sq ft.

The building, formerly occupied by Liberty furniture, is a single storey retail building that had undergone renovations in recent years and was available for lease. The building totals 11,583 square feet.

Vancouver looks to Richmond in hiring new planning boss.

After an extensive international search in which it received 108 applications from all over the world, the City of Vancouver had to go no further than the municipality next door to hire a new general manager and director of planning.

On Tuesday the Vision Vancouver-led council ratified the hiring of Brian J.Jackson as the new general manager of planning and development. For the last four years Jackson has been acting general manager of planning for Richmond. He begins work August 27.