The future’s here
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor William J. Mitchell wouldn’t have been over-surprised at the most recent NAIOP panel discussion. Mitchell, author of City of Bits (1995) and other books, is best known for exploring the ways new communications technologies would reshape the city.
Speaking in Vancouver as part of the 1999-2000 MacMillan Bloedel Lectures on Architecture, Mitchell described the “finer grain” of future cities in which live-work spaces blended and traditional offices became smaller as information became located in what would be known a decade later as the cloud.
But whither the office tower in such a city?
Panellists at NAIOP’s most recent breakfast meeting – Steffan Smith of GWL Realty Advisors Ltd., Jon Stovell of Reliance Properties Ltd. and Maury Dubuque of Colliers International – believe downtown office space needs to be rethought.
“How we use space is changing,” Smith said. “You don’t need a telephone, you don’t need a computer, you don’t need a monitor. So the question is, why are you sitting at that desk? We used to measure real estate in desks and offices and cubes, but I think that mentality is about to go the way of the dodo bird.”
Dubuque cited Atlanta-based CoreNet Global’s forecast that U.S. workers will require an average of 151 square feet of work space by 2017, down from 225 in 2010. Office workers will require 100 square feet or less. The shift means many older, lower-tier office properties in Vancouver are becoming ripe for conversion to other uses.
“A lot of these projects need to be scraped out and turned into residential,” he said. “They’re not efficient, effective and never will be office buildings in our time.”
Stovell agreed. He noted that the city’s 2004 moratorium on converting downtown office towers to residential use and the Metro Core Jobs & Economy Land Use Plan that followed were positive moves but will need revisiting as new space is built.
“It helped change the mindset toward developing office,” Stovell said, “but in a number of years from now I think it’s going to make sense to come back around to look at the office inventory, the job growth ... and say OK, are we OK now to let some of that older stock repurpose?”
Richmond industrial
Suburban office parks, as Maury Dubuque told the NAIOP breakfast meeting last month, don’t make sense to younger workers.
“[You] scrape some of the most fertile soil on the planet, pave it and build three-storey office buildings that aren’t served by transit,” he said. “That’s not a model that’s going to sell.”
Coincidentally, this columnist was booked for a tour of Richmond farmland immediately after the NAIOP meeting, much of it on the fringes of business parks in East Richmond. Despite being off transit, the properties are ideal for a range of uses.
Rabbit River Farms, for example, harvests organic eggs from 6,000 cage-free hens on land Port Metro Vancouver holds on River Road for “coastal shipping, port services and industrial uses” – and, in the meantime, a chicken run. Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc. has built a new, $26 million processing plant in Richmond with the blessing of the province’s Agricultural Land Commission and Richmond council, which deemed the industrial facility a benefit to the surrounding farmland. Situated in the middle of 2,000 acres of cranberry bogs, the state-of-the-art fruit-handling centre might have left the city if it hadn’t received a green light. Richmond is ideal for Ocean Spray because it’s not only close to the bogs that supply it with fruit but also Versacold’s Corpak cold storage facility on No. 6 Road and Highway 91, a key route for shipping fruit south for further processing in the U.S.
The 25,000-square-foot facility is the same size as its old plant in the Crestwood industrial area but can handle one and a half times as much fruit as the old plant, thanks to an efficient layout. The fate of Ocean Spray’s old processing plant has yet to be determined.
