Industrial Vancouver: The Lost City
Squat concrete- block warehouses secured with razor-wire fences and steel-mesh windows stretch off into the morning light. Many appear deserted, with dust on windows and doorsills, garbage in the alley. In the doorway of one of several shabby houses, some dishevelled men gather to deal in drugs.
In an alley between a cheap hotel and a chicken processing plant, a trio of young artists paint canvases crafted in the lofts and ateliers of a converted sugar mill that looms over the street. A sodden-looking prostitute stands on a corner while a dozen immigrant women huddle nearby against the rain, waiting for a bus home from their sweatshop labour. On the main avenue, a relentless stream of cars roar past, carrying commuters from their downtown condominiums to suburban workplaces in office plazas, industrial parks and service malls far away.
This is Vancouver’s vibrant industrial future? Not even – it’s the current reality. And that’s a big problem.
Enamoured with high-rise living and glossy downtown lifestyles – not to mention condo developers’ praise – Vancouver politicians and city planners have neglected the city’s industrial needs for years. The available supply of empty industrial land in the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) has dropped by almost 50 per cent in the last decade. With 600 hectares locked up in Vancouver alone, there are only 36 hectares of undeveloped land remaining in the city for industrial purposes. Some of that empty ground is on the southern city limits along the Fraser River, but most is east of False Creek on former railway land once slated for a high-tech city. Now in a state of limbo, the False Creek lands are filling in with city works yards, furniture stores, storage companies and possibly a big hospital. Another industrial zone around the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood is being infiltrated with office, retail and live-work spaces. In expectation of the city relinquishing Mount Pleasant’s industrial status, developers are aggressively assembling land and flipping property to create sites for future townhouses, which makes the area unaffordable for the small industries that are supposed to be there. And in Strathcona, the city’s original zone of industry, there’s less than half a hectare of vacant industrial land along Powell Street and little more than one around Clark Drive. That’s it.
Toby Barazzuol is not skeptical by nature.
Inside the well-painted concrete-block building at the foot of Heatley Avenue in the heart of the Strathcona industrial zone, right next door to a halfway house/hostel, he runs an exceptionally neat, although currently crowded, design and manufacturing plant for glass and ceramic corporate awards. He does well and shares his success. He gives his eight employees paid time off for community work and underwrites their non-car travel. He hires local residents with employment handicaps. He uses environmentally safe materials, recycles and devotes time to the Strathcona Business Improvement Association (BIA) as a vice-chairman.
Four years ago, Barazzuol was forced out of his Yaletown factory because the landlord sold the building to a condominium developer. Barazzuol purchased the flat-roofed 2,600-square-foot former crab processing plant on Heatley Avenue because it was close to his employees’ homes, his suppliers and his customers. It was also cheap. He quickly learned he had to install security on the doors and windows and accept car break-ins on the street. But Eclipse Awards International Inc. prospered, and for the last two years he’s been trying to expand.
“I wanted to do a second floor with a green roof on top, a bit of something progressive in this area to alleviate the depressed look of the place,” says Barazzuol. But the business owner discovered he’s in a section of the industrial zone that demands any expansion include 20-per-cent space for social housing. City regulations also demand so many additional parking spaces that he would have to surrender his ground floor entirely to vehicles. “We were told it would be a real fight with the city to get any changes.” Adjacent expansion is also out; prices for nearby industrial land have gone way up. “So we’re temporarily stuck, ‘intensifying our use of existing space,’ ” he jokes, echoing city-planner talk while he gestures at stock and shipments piled to the ceiling. “We’ll stay here for the time being.”
What depresses Barazzuol is that the exodus of small industries from Strathcona seemed to slow recently (he’s not sure why), and he’d hate to revive the outflow of businesses. But it is a struggle to stay. Industry, non-profit groups, government social agencies and residents’ associations are in constant battles over allowable uses for the properties. Much of Strathcona is a motley mix of decrepit homes – the average family income here is less than $20,000 – light industry and social services of some variety. City Hall, the BIA and the residents can’t even agree on the boundaries for defining their neighbourhood. Plus, Barazzuol can literally point to “the marginalized people, the crime, the social decay” at his doorstep. Across the street, three homeless people are assembling their rags under a bridge abutment, preparing to camp. One is already wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag on the damp, garbage-strewn ground, showing no signs of life. “The BIA spends half its time fending off expansion of social services agencies, which would only further concentrate their clientele here,” says Barazzuol. “But I recognize there’s NIMBY everywhere else in the city and nowhere for them to go.”
Besides social services, the only expansion happening in Strathcona is city-sanctioned conversions of old industrial buildings into artists’ spaces and other cultural uses. “Is Railtown [a block-long conversion taking place on nearby Railway Street] really any better than what happened in Yaletown?” asks Barazzuol. “I don’t think it’s the best strategy. It displaces industry.” There are at least 250 artists living in 80-plus studios in the Strathcona residential and industrial community, according to city statistics. Barazzuol briefly enthuses about his dream: to see his neighbourhood become a “green zone of environmental technology and practices. [Let’s] make it a showpiece and create jobs. There’s such blue-collar opportunity in that, to create vitality instead of depression.” But then he slows and adds, “That would require rezoning” and other city initiatives.
Big cities do not prosper by condos and office towers alone. A city must have room for blue collar and “new collar” work – the traditional services ranging from auto-body shops to printers to food processors – and the new era of clean light industry such as filmmaking, IT and biotech. The city must also have strategically clustered spaces for next-generation industries that will create employment and income for the ensuing half-century. And it needs all those places near the city core, with transportation routes to move goods, services and people quickly and cleanly. And there’s the bottom-line reality: without industrial growth, to whom will the city turn for tax revenue except homeowners, retailers and office tenants?
Vancouver’s prosperity is woefully uncertain. The city has no specific strategy to retain and recruit industry, yet its industrial lands are fast disappearing. According to the GVRD’s recent inventory, the available supply of empty industrial land in the entire region dropped by almost half in the last decade, from 4,600 hectares in 1996 to 2,800 hectares in 2005.
The lack of land was showing up in the rental rates of developed industrial property too. According to a late-2006 region-wide survey by CB Richard Ellis Ltd., available industry buildings for rent have fallen from 3.5 per cent to 1.7 per cent between 2003 and late 2006.
Prospective buyers face hostile environments, haphazard zoning and owners holding out for condo developers. Big cities like San Francisco have declared their industrial lands as sacred as parkland. Seattle offers tax cuts and red-carpet treatment to new industry. New York City buys up and leases out industrial land to sustain jobs. In contrast, by neglect, Vancouver may just become the West Coast’s first post-industrial city, one massive retail mall and branch-office plaza. But it will be much poorer for it.
Except for the traffic flow – 20,000 cars a day use Powell Street as a conduit to the city core – the bleak future is current reality for Vancouver’s bizarre East End industry zone called Strathcona. It’s the roughly 10-block-long swath of the city that stretches east from the notorious Downtown Eastside to Clark Drive and runs between the fenced-off port lands and the colourful wooden houses of the old Chinese-immigrant, low-income Strathcona residential neighbourhood. It is one of the few areas of the city that supports light manufacturing, distribution and repair businesses. It provides at least 8,000 jobs in at least 300 mostly small companies – about one-quarter of the manufacturing jobs in the city and half the warehouse shipping jobs. The vast majority of these firms have fewer than six employees. And the jobs are changing to non-industrial positions as manufacturers vacate the area and buildings are left to rot. Other structures have been transformed into low-rent offices for social agencies struggling to cope with the homeless overflowing from the Downtown Eastside.
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