Aggressive urban planning around SkyTrain stations in Burnaby is turning the municipality into Metro Vancouver’s hotbed for condo development, according to an Urban Development Institute report.

Heavy pre-sales in projects such as Station Square at Metrotown and the redevelopment of Brentwood Town Centre added up to almost 30 per cent of all new-construction sales across Metro Vancouver, outpacing Vancouver’s downtown and west side neighbourhoods.

Throw in the city’s east side and Vancouver still sold more condominiums, but Burnaby’s high-density push is bringing development levels between the two cities closer together.

To the end of the third quarter, Burnaby saw 1,613 presales of condos under development compared with 1,394 for downtown and west-side Vancouver combined, UDI reported.

In total, developers have projects that add up to 14,548 units in the planning stage in Burnaby, within striking distance of the 14,766 in the City of Vancouver’s planning process.

By Frances Bula

This comment is buried far down in a post on Gord Price’s blog, Pricetags, (the one about the death of residential real estate) but of course it’s attracting a lot of interest. For those who don’t know, Scot Hein ran the urban-design department inside the city’s planning division. It was a position that had been created by former planner Larry Beasley, as a way of driving home the point that planning wasn’t just about the buildings or the traffic flow or the other mechanical parts, but about how communities used space. Scot was a big part of the planning for Olympic village. The European feel of the plaza, which has become a hive of activity, is part of his work. He left earlier this year to work at UBC, a surprise to many who knew him and how dedicated he was to the city.

Scot permalink

November 10, 2014 4:28 pm

Here is what really happened speaking as the city’s Senior Urban Designer at the time the GW process was tabling built form.

We put together what we believed was a reasoned overall plan for GW towards increased residential and employment opportunity. We fully appreciated the development economics of the Safeway site …read more

Source:: Frances Bula