Debate over 80-storey tower in Burnaby with 14 levels of parking

A big vacant lot next to the Lougheed SkyTrain station will soon be the site of a big, tall building.

The tower is expected to be 80 storeys high but it will also have 14 levels of parking.

According to Burnaby city councillor Alison Gu, each parking stall in an underground car park can cost between 50 to 100 thousand dollars and the deeper it goes, the more money it takes.

“And that cost ends up getting passed down to the end consumer, whether you rent or you buy,” she said. “And those costs are from studies around relatively normal and common levels of parking, and it becomes increasingly expensive to further down dig.

“So what we do know is this: the cost is going to end up being over $100,000 per stall likely, and that’s going to get redistributed across all residents who live in this building.”

Developers would prefer to build fewer parking stalls but say it is city bylaws that force the industry into pouring concrete for what are called parking minimums.

“On transit sites, with a lot of small units… there’s no way that they need one parking per unit,” Jon Stovell with Reliance Properties told Global News.

The 14-level parkade proposed for under the 80-storey building would be the equivalent of an 11-storey building, all underground.

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“We are passing these policies that were enacted 20 years ago,” Gu said. “And these are going to be buildings that are in place 50 years from now. So we don’t know what the future of transportation is going to look like and the future of our city and cities.”

She added that, in her opinion, it defeats the purpose of being transit-oriented if residents are actually just creating carbon emissions right next to a Skytrain station.

Brent Toderian, a city planning consultant who also used to be Vancouver’s chief planner, told Global News that there has been a lot of change among parking minimums in various municipalities and it was Edmonton that was probably the first major Canadian city that got rid of their parking minimums city-wide.

“But many cities are having the conversation like Burnaby is having about at least changing your parking minimums around transit, because the whole point is to have less cars, not just less car use, but less car ownership,” he said. “And that’s connected to how many parking spaces that we’re building.”

Gu has the support of Mayor Mike Hurley who has had sharp questions for staff on why an updated policy is still months away from being implemented.

The development on Austin Avenue did pass the council unanimously, but it will be possible to rethink the number of stalls and sub-floors that could be needed.

“In the places where we’ve done everything right from a land use perspective, from an investment in transit infrastructure perspective, I think there’s a very necessary conversation about not just getting rid of mandating too much parking but actually mandating the prevention of too much parking,” Toderian said.

“So frankly, the real parking problem in this context isn’t that there’s not enough parking. The real parking problem is we’re continuing to build too much with staggering costs for housing affordability, climate change and everything else that we measure in terms of public health, etc., related to how we design cities and suburbs.”