Burnaby’s Lougheed Town Centre is the latest shopping mall on a SkyTrain line to have an owner intent on transforming it into a residential community hub.
Redevelopment plans are also working through city approval processes at Vancouver’s Oakridge Town Centre and Burnaby’s Brentwood Town Centre and Metropolis at Metrotown.
Lougheed Town Centre owner Shape Properties Corp. has long been public about its proposal to expand the 44-year-old, 666,323-square-foot mall with 400,000 square feet of new retail space.
More ambitious plans to build nearly a dozen residential towers on the site have been under wraps. The towers would be built on the mall’s current parking lot, thereby mirroring Shape’s Brentwood Town Centre development, the company’s executive vice-president Darren Kwiatkowski told Business in Vancouver.
He plans to conduct public consultation in the next few months as part of a process to get the City of Burnaby to approve a master plan for Lougheed Town Centre. Kwiatkowski added that more public consultation and city approval of detailed plans for the first towers would follow.
He has already gone down this road at Brentwood, where the city has approved a master plan and public consultation is underway on his plans to build two towers that are each up to 60 storeys as well as 500,000 square feet of new retail space. Once complete, Kwiatkowski said future phases at Brentwood would include another nine towers including two office buildings on the 28-acre site.
In 1997, the City of Burnaby identified Lougheed Town Centre, Metrotown, Edmonds and Brentwood as the municipality’s four city centre hubs.
So Kwiatkowski does not expect much public opposition to his densification plans.
“There’s a lot of undeveloped land that sits in surface parking lots,” Kwiatkowski said. “We have the city’s existing planning policies and a desire for us to imminently come forward with a master plan and start the process of public consultation.”
Fiercer opposition is expected at Oakridge, where mall owner Ivanhoe Cambridge and partner Westbank Development have submitted a rezoning application for the 11-acre site.
Ivanhoe Cambridge wants to expand the 506,000-square-foot mall to 1.2 million square feet, the company’s vice-president of retail development Graeme Silvera told BIV.
He added that a total of 13 buildings would add more than 2,800 residential units. Those buildings would include a 45-storey tower at the corner of Cambie Street and West 41st Avenue. Other towers would terrace down from the corner and be 42, 35 and 30 storeys.
Earlier this year, critics of the redevelopment, including members of the Oakridge Langara Area Residents, urged Vancouver city council to reject the tall building heights at Oakridge.
B.C.’s largest shopping centre, the 1.7 million-square-foot Metropolis at Metrotown, is the final mall set to be next to major residential development.
Sears Canada has a large store on nine acres of land it owns adjacent to the Ivanhoe Cambridge-owned Metropolis at Metrotown development.
It applied in June to the City of Burnaby to rezone the land to allow for a $1 billion development that would include five mixed-use towers and two office towers along with a new department store.
The only exception to this trend appears to be at Surrey’s Central City Shopping Centre, where plenty of towers have already sprouted up nearby. Mall owner Blackwood Partners Management Corp. has no plans to build towers on Central City’s at-grade parking lots, the mall’s marketing manager Vivian Li told BIV. •
