The Metropolitan Core Jobs and Economy Land Use Plan

Although it's title is a bureaucratic mouthful, the above-mentioned study will be one of the biggest reports to be published by the City of Vancouver in quite some time.

For the past two years, planners have been looking at land use in Vancouver, with a focus on how zoning should shape the City's future mix of commercial and residential development.

Besides the downtown core, the Metropolitan Core study also considers land use along the Broadway corridor, the False Creek Flats, and in East Vancouver, out to Clark Drive.

While Vancouver has done an excellent job of bringing life to the City's urban centre, there are concerns that residential development may become a victim of its own success - that it is now gobbling up the remaining land available for downtown office space, which may in turn drive jobs out of the City.

The study looks at related issues as well, such as the need to locate both jobs and services nearby residential areas as a means of reducing people's reliance on cars.

Furthermore, planners are looking for ways to concentrate office jobs around transportation hubs, to better accommodate commuters that come into Vancouver from outside of the downtown core.

As of June 2007, much of the information gathering has been completed, and the City is now soliticiting feedback on its broad policy goals, before moving ahead with the more detailed planning stage.

We'll provide further information about these new goals in our next post.

In the meantime, for more info on the Metropolitan Core Jobs and Economy Land Use Plan itself, check out the study's main web page here.

Comments

[sean orr]

"there are concerns that residential development may become a victim of its own success - that it is now gobbling up the remaining land available for downtown office space, which may in turn drive jobs out of the City."

No doubt. I haven't been on the freeway in years, but recently traveled on two separate occasions and found that the rush-hour was just as bad in the opposite direction than it should be.

The term bedroom community is apt to describe the downtown core.

Oh, and why is it so hard to commute btwn the two largest centres of employment; the core and the broadway corridor. All our transit seems to go east.