Vancouver’s Gastown Heritage Program On Hold

May 27th, 2008 Categories: Downtown, Vancouver Real Estate

City Hall has placed Vancouver’s Gastown heritage revitalization program on hold.

I did a post on this recently and thought I’d follow it up with City Hall’s explanation. So here it is.

Here is an excerpt from Vancouver’s City Hall report recommending freezing the program:

An oversupply of banked density could affect the value of the density leading to even larger bonuses, and could potentially undermine the viability of the bank as a heritage incentive. This would affect both current as well as future heritage projects.

Therefore, it is prudent to pause and review the bank’s capacity, the density bonusing formula, and other possible heritage incentives to mitigate the current size of bonuses being generated by heritage projects to ensure the bank remains a viable heritage revitalization tool.

Staff are concerned the current situation could be exacerbated by the number of applications potentially coming on stream over the next few months.

Rather than a moratorium on all heritage density projects, staff are proposing to proceed with those already well on in the development process.
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