Parking space disappearing in new downtown office developments
Better public transit options, high cost of building such facilities are behind the change, experts say
Evan Duggan
The Vancouver Sun
The amount of parking spaces included in the next wave of downtown Vancouver office tower development is likely to see a sharp reduction compared to the existing inventory, say local commercial property brokers and developers.
Over the next three to four years, there will be about 11 office developments aiming to complete in the downtown core. Nearly all of them will have roughly half the number of parking spaces that buildings were designed with in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, according to Ross Moore, a senior vice-president with Cresa.
Ten years ago, virtually every downtown parking garage had a waiting list, said Moore, who published a report on upcoming downtown office projects and their parking inventory in November.
“Now, as far as I’m aware, there is only one parking garage downtown that has a waiting list,” he told Postmedia in a recent interview.
“There are empty parking garages,” he said “If you’re an owner or developer, you’re looking at that saying, that’s just wasted money. Parking garages are very expensive to construct.”
An office building’s parking inventory is usually measured by spaces per 1,000 square feet of the entire building, he said.
The most recent office tower to open, The Exchange, at 475 Howe Street, has one stall per 2,000 square feet, according to the report.
Among other planned projects, Morguard’s 25-storey tower at 601 West Hastings; Westbank/Allied REIT’s 24-floor building at 400 West Georgia; and Uptown Property Group’s 28-storey tower at 625 West Hastings would each have one stall per 2,000 sq. ft. as well, according to the report.
Bosa Developments’ 320 Granville Street tower, which will replace an existing parking garage, will have one space per 3,000 sq. ft.
Moore said older buildings such as Waterfront Centre (1991) has about one spot per 1,000 sq. ft. Park Place (1984) has one spot per 1,100 sq. ft., and Royal Centre (1973) also has one spot per 1,100 sq. ft.
Many companies seeking space these days in the downtown market care more about cycling facilities and transit links than parking, he said. On the other hand, Moore says he has still seen deals killed over a lack of parking.
GWL Realty Advisors (GWLRA) and Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan are set to replace a parking garage at 753 Seymour with the 33-storey Vancouver Centre II office tower. Due in mid-2021, that building will have one space per 1,600 sq. ft., said Geoff Heu, vice-president of development, Western Canada with GWLRA.
The new tower will include 586 stalls, which is an increase of 47 spaces, but those stalls will now service two towers with more than double the square footage. Heu said the overall square footage of the Vancouver Centre complex will increase from 371,000 sq. ft. to nearly 850,000 sq. ft.
“We’ve gone from about one stall per 800 square feet, to one stall per 1,600 square feet,” he said.
The above-grade portion of the new parkade is designed so it can be converted to office space, in the event the parking demand drops off in the future, he said.
Heu said the original parkade went up before the first office tower, which completed in the early 1970s. “It was all about the automobile then,” he said.
Since then, downtown Vancouver has become much more residential, more walkable and has added three SkyTrain lines. Heu called the opening of the Canada Line in 2010 a game-changer. “We saw a big drop in parking when the Canada Line was built,” he said.
Generally, tenants aren’t as concerned about parking anymore, he said. “There are other ways of getting to work these days.”
In its zoning requirements for non-residential buildings, the city now requires a minimum of one space per 1,560-sq.-ft.
Moore said demand to build parking spaces and to park in them dropped off dramatically in 2011, following the addition of the 21-per-cent TransLink-administered tax on the sale of a parking right. Combined with GST, it pushed the tax on a parking space up to 26 per cent.
“I think there were other things going on,” he said. “The price of gas was going up then. … There was a whole bunch of things coming together, and also the millennials don’t seem to be buying cars like older people.”
Impark, which manages more than 450 public parking lots around the Lower Mainland, agreed.
“2010 was a watershed year for parking for three reasons,” said Impark senior vice-president, Julian Jones. “The Canada Line was one of the reasons. The other one obviously was the Olympics. And at that time, TransLink had a huge push on just trying to get people to not drive downtown during the Olympics and it kind of had a permanent effect.
“You probably saw a 20-per-cent reduction in demand for parking post-Olympics,” he said, noting that demand has stabilized since then, but never rebounded.
He said there could be more dramatic changes to parking coming with the introduction here of ride-sharing, increasing cycling rates and the eventual introduction of driverless cars.
“Then what will parking look like? It probably won’t be the same as it is today,” Jones said.
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