An innovation manufacturing company owner based out of Vancouver is considering moving her company out of the province.
Tasha Nathanson’s company, 7 Leagues Leather, uses fish skin and forestry waste to make clean, bio-based fish leather. She said she has spoken with another startup company, which was thinking of moving to Alberta, which has Nathanson thinking about the future of her company.
“In Alberta, (the other company told me) they could buy a facility for less than they would pay for rent in Vancouver, and that the permitting process in Alberta would take two to four months. The permitting process for what they are doing would take 18 months in B.C,” she said.
Cost, land availability, and red tape are factors Nathanson said would be easier to deal with if she were to move to Alberta.
“We are going to have to go where the space is available, where the support is available and where the policies are supportive of developing this kind of business,” she said.
In September, the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade released a report addressing the critical shortage of industrial land. Vancouver’s industrial land shortage has escalated to “crisis” levels, contributing to increased costs and lost job and revenue potential, the report found.
The city’s industrial land vacancy is about one per cent — among the lowest in North America, according to the study commissioned by the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade and NAIOP Vancouver, a commercial real estate advocacy group.
“People are having difficulty finding a place to live and employers are having a difficult time finding or growing their operations,” Bridgitte Anderson said, Greater Vancouver Board of Trade’s CEO. “We are being left with a situation where there is an affordability crisis for housing and an affordability crisis for businesses. If you don’t have either of those, you don’t have an economy and you don’t have a community.”
Nathanson said it would break her heart to move her company out of bc but she feels she may have no other choice.