Prior Street CAC Modification Amendment (Fry)

To the chair and council, thank you very much for your time and thank you for your hard work over the last four years, week in and week out, helping to shape our city. I'm Michael Mortensen. I'm an urban planner. I'm a resident of Vancouver for the last 30 plus years and a never-ending student of the city in addition to somebody who's pretty active in its evolution. I'm here to support the proposal. I think the post-industrial future of the city, of this area, was written with the South Falls Creek Official Development Plan in 1974, which is a key pivot in Vancouver's history, where the city decided to abandon industrial uses along this part of the waterfront. So your decision today on this parcel really builds on the vision from 1974. And I think it's a logical conclusion that industrial land in this location is no longer appropriate for Hoover. We can do a lot better than 200 jobs on a 7.7 acre industrial site. When the plant closed, I think they might have had 100 people on the site. I remember because when after it closed, as it was closing, I was watching. I'd sit there in the cafe across the street looking at how many people, there's nobody on this site. Really, 7.7 acres of inner city land with barely any employment on it. You heard from city staff, we could probably get four times the number of jobs with the equivalent amount of space if we deploy it as light industrial flex tech employment space. So more jobs for Vancouver, plus the opportunity for more housing, more amenities, more... commercial uses as well, too, and more amenities. So, you know, but to be brief, I think you've got a busy agenda today. I think that there are great placemaking opportunities between the owners of the Molson site and Inchikai, Squamish Nation, for the Sanok site. Interface between those properties is so enormous. There just has to be some great placemaking outcomes. if we let those two parties come together. I think given the intensity of use on that part, that just makes sense too. When we're thinking about transit, let's also think about water, water mobility as well. Walking, cycling, buses, new SkyTrain, but also the ferries that take people across the water. Two major centers of employment within a kilometer of this site in terms of the Broadway corridor. plus the entire downtown peninsula, which we know you can walk in 20 minutes. So this just makes too much sense. And again, I'm not part of this project. I'm not paid to come here and recommend this. It's just me for the love of my city and the right thing to do as we evolve and move forward. So just to wrap up, I urge council to approve in principle the amendments to the Vancouver Official Development Plan as presented in the report and to... changes that come through from Metro.

No, I'm a resident of Coquitlam, but I work in Vancouver.

Okay, yeah, good evening. My position is opposed. Like I said, I work in Vancouver. I have a lot of friends who live and work in Vancouver, so I'm really concerned about the quality and the quantity of jobs available to people in the city. So I want to kind of focus what I'm going to say today on the, you know, the loss of this industrial use land. So I know we've heard some different numbers thrown around, but, you know, this former brewery seems like at one point employed maybe at its height 250 people, maybe at the end of its, you know, lifespan around 100, as the previous person said. But, you know, this report proposes at least like a one-to-one replacement of that new floor space with job space, which does sound good. You know, definitely on paper it sounds reasonable, but I don't think that we should, I don't want to get confused between like floor space and the actual replacement of the, you know, economic opportunity and the opportunity for jobs. So I think there's, like, two linked concerns here. There's, like, the loss of industrial land and then also the need for well-paying jobs. I think those concerns are really important because industrial land is difficult to recreate once it is converted. So, you know, production, repair laboratories, all these different sectors, they need suitable space in our city, and that comes with, like, certain restrictions and certain considerations. I'm just worried, you know, if these functions are mostly replaced by things like restaurants, you know, hotels, shops, offices, you know, we could end up in a situation where the city is meeting a floor area target but still losing, like, the diversity and resilience in a local economy. So I think that council should consider that as part of this application, there should be maybe an employment plan or some extra stipulations on this land before approving the redevelopment framework. And that plan should identify the minimum amount of space for light industrial production and other... job uses so it can include like design standards that make those spaces functional and not just like a nominal thing so potentially could also be if possible i'll look into maybe including protection that would protect um the like the the rent that's charged on the commercial commercial spaces to make sure that there's opportunity for small businesses local entrepreneurs, as some previous speakers were, in order for them to have a spot to get into the market and have an area for them to have spaces that produce jobs in our city. I think also that job quality really has to be part of this plan. I don't know what the wages were at the Molson Brewery, but I do know that if this space were to be replaced... by a bunch of jobs and employment opportunities that pay minimum wage, I don't think that's a good use of land.