William Boei
Sun
Joseph Lee’s business, the Flamingo House Chinese restaurant, is suffering the effects of Canada Line construction — and he’s just one of a number of local employers who have endured disruption. Photograph by : Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
A sign put up by local business owner Joseph Lee, directing potential customers to his Flamingo House Chinese restaurant. Photograph by : Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
Alex Barker says his Obsessions gift boutique on Davie street is suffering a ‘devastating’ loss of sales due to construction work. Photograph by : Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
Rapid transit can transform neighbourhoods. Most often, it brings more development and higher density.
But it can be a painful and bewildering process, starting with the chaos of construction.
All along the Canada Line route, retailers and residents are starting to feel the pain, or wondering when it will hit them.
Most think it will turn their neighbourhoods into better places. But some are not sure whether they can hold out that long and, if they do, whether they will be able to afford the rent.
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Go to Davie Street between Pacific Boulevard and Mainland Street, walk around the high, black-draped scaffolding and peer in through the gaps.
You’ll see, hear and smell two large diesel-powered augers drilling into the ground and hurling a grey slurry of mud, debris and water into the air.
InTransitBC, the company building the Canada Line, found the soil under Davie around Mainland — the site of the future Yaletown-Roundhouse station — was too loose for normal excavation methods.
Just spraying concrete on the excavation walls wouldn’t do the job. A series of small piles had to be driven into the ground.
“The deeper we got, the ground conditions changed and it went from being a fine cohesive material to a looser, coarser material,” said InTransitBC vice-president Steve Crombie.
That meant sinking more piles. Drilling will take four months, to the end of September, perhaps a little longer.
To prevent flying muck from spraying buildings and passers-by, the project put scaffolding over the sidewalks and draped the fences around the site with black cloth.
Shops on either side of Davie are completely hidden from view. Myung Yam’s Dodi Market convenience store is invisible behind the scaffolding.
Across the street, drilling has closed a pedestrian ramp at Mainland and the sidewalk on many weekdays.
“When they close that ramp, I lose all the pedestrian traffic from my side of the street,” said Alex Barker, co-owner of the Obsessions gift boutique. “It’s devastating my sales.”
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Barker and his partner started the Obsessions chain eight years ago after arriving from England.
They remortgaged their home to finance a new outlet in Gastown — they now have four — to make up for lost revenue during construction in Yaletown. Barker worries about whether the business can survive, and he’s upset.
“I just feel so angry that all that hard work and commitment from new immigrants to start a business, which provides 21 employee positions for Canadians, that they can come along and do this without any compensation . . . and take away our business,” he said.
“They’ve completely eradicated the sightlines to my store. We pay premium rent in a premium location because, in retail, it’s about your visibility on the high street.”
Barker said sales are down 30 per cent or more. If Obsessions survives, he expects its location — steps from a rapid transit station — will mean higher rent.
At the Dodi Market, Yam says business is down 30 to 55 per cent, depending on the day.
For the first time in 12 years, the store has suffered a break-in. Someone hidden by the scaffolding broke through the front window, taking cigarettes and lottery tickets.
When Yam asked InTransitBC for compensation — arguing the break-in wouldn’t have happened if the view hadn’t been blocked — the company offered to pay for the window but not for the stolen merchandise, saying it had no way to confirm what was taken.
Retailers and residents worry the lack of visibility will attract drug users and dealers, and that it’s only a matter of time until someone is mugged. Yam has been finding used needles on the sidewalk.
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Compensation is not on the table, say Crombie and Alan Dever, spokesman for Canada Line Rapid Transit Inc., which oversees the project for TransLink.
“No level of government provides compensation for businesses or residents when public infrastructure projects take place,” Crombie said, “on the basis that they’re for the general good of the public.”
Dever adds: “There is no legislation for compensation for infrastructure projects. That’s the environment that we operate in.
“We fully understand there are inconveniences and we really are doing what we can to try to minimize those and support the businesses at the same time.”
The company has set up a business liaison committee and budgeted more than $1 million, mainly for advertising, to help businesses survive.
The message to the public is not to abandon small retailers now that they’re temporarily harder to reach, Dever said.
“We tell everyone, please make that extra little effort to help out your neighbours, especially in the small businesses.
“All of our public notices say, please support your businesses. We are trying to get the message out to people in Vancouver that these businesses need their support as we go through this construction.”
The project has placed hanging flower baskets along the hidden sidewalks in Yaletown to make the passages less daunting, and hired security guards to patrol the area at night.
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Not every business near the Yaletown station site is hurting.
At the Opus Hotel, just outside the construction zone, “things have been pretty good,” says general manager Daniel Craig.
“We’re a hotel and we don’t rely on walk-by traffic,” Craig said. “I think the businesses that rely on that kind of traffic are not faring that well.”
The hotel was built with noisy surroundings in mind and guests haven’t complained, he said.
For Donna Irwin, who lived in the highrise above the Dodi Market, the noise, the dust, the gloom and the prospect of another 21/2 years of construction were too much.
“We ended up moving because of it,” she said. “They work six days a week. They start at 7 a.m. on Saturday. The noise and the dust are just incredible.
“And all the scaffolding, it’s like a dark little tunnel. You have to walk a block and a half out of your way just to get to your front door.”
Irwin decided to pay a penalty to break her lease. She has moved to Fairview Slopes.
“If it was only for a few months, we could handle it,” she said. “But it was going to be for three years. There was no way we could handle that for three years.”
However, Crombie said, once the micro-piling is done, the scaffolding and the black draping will come down and a new fence will be built, covered by a transparent mesh.
“There will be much better visibility and much better light.”
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Across False Creek, in the Cambie Village retail strip between Broadway and 19th Avenue, it is the quiet before the storm.
A few side streets are blocked while crews move utilities to make way for the big trench that will be dug on the east side of Cambie.
That construction method, called “cut and cover,” sparked the biggest controversy in the project’s stormy history. The plan had been for most of the tunnel from Waterfront Station to 37th Avenue to be machine-bored, deep underground. The only surface construction would be at station sites.
But the final contract called for cut and cover from 2nd Avenue past 63rd Avenue, as well as in a three-block stretch of Granville Street from Cordova to south of Pender.
Merchants and residents cried foul.
For Peter Klein, it felt like a bait-and-switch scheme.
Klein is a former producer for the CBS public affairs program 60 Minutes, who now teaches journalism at the University of B.C. He and his wife bought a house on 17th Avenue just off Cambie, having been assured by his real estate agent, the neighbours and city hall that there would be no construction mess; the Canada Line tunnel would be bored underground.
That was a big deal for Klein and his wife, Vancouver native Melody Belkin. Their son Noah has serious health problems and breathes through a tracheotomy tube.
When they found out the tunnel plan had been changed to cut and cover, the prospect of months — even years — of construction dust brought back memories of Sept. 11, 2001, when they lived in New York and Melody was driving Noah and his infant sister, Ava, toward the World Trade Center.
In the chaos that followed, they had to abandon their car and make their way to safety through the dust clouds that enveloped Manhattan after the two towers collapsed.
One of their reasons for moving to Vancouver was cleaner air for Noah to breathe. Two years of construction dust didn’t figure in their plans.
“I would be concerned anyway as a parent,” Klein said, “but as a parent of someone with a tracheotomy, an open airway without any filtering, it’s especially concerning to us.”
He says the family will try to tough it out. They love the neighbourhood: quiet residential side streets and pleasant neighbours; just around the corner a busy, vibrant shopping and entertainment street with live music late into the evening.
“You feel like you’re in New York in a way,” Klein said. “There’s not a lot of places where you have that level of energy on a weeknight that late.”
It concerns him that some of the small shops on Cambie appear to be closing. But he is heartened by the arrival of a Capers supermarket, which seems to point to a bright post-construction future.
Rand Chatterjee, who helped rally neighbourhood opposition to the cut-and-cover plan, says more storefronts than usual between Sixth Avenue and King Edward are vacant.
There is always churn in retail. But at the moment, Chatterjee said, shops are closing and “nobody’s moving in.”
The Vancouver Sun counted 14 empty shops along Cambie between Broadway and King Edward. However, four of them, next to the Park Theatre, were damaged in a fire and are being renovated, and at least one other has posted a sign saying it will reopen following renovations.
To realtor Heather Maclean, Cambie Village is a community whose time is coming.
She recently sold a unit in the new Olive complex, a multi-storey condo development anchored by the Capers supermarket.
The buyer was “someone who thought community was important,” Maclean said. “They want close to downtown and easy access to shopping, so they were quite pleased.”
Another new complex is going up at Cambie and Broadway, and the area appears to be poised for denser development.
“I think it’s going to be very nice when it’s all done,” Maclean said, “and I think it’s going to be a benefit to the area, and to the shops.”
Not everyone agrees.
“I think it’s going to be dreadful,” said Susan Heyes, who owns the Hazel and Co. maternity and women’s wear shop in Cambie Village.
Construction hasn’t reached her shop yet, but she has filed notice of intent to sue the Canada Line project for damages.
She expects that when the trench is dug, traffic is snarled and parking scarce, many of her customers, especially pregnant women, will avoid the stress of shopping on Cambie.
“It’s not looking good for us,” Heyes said. “We’ve already had so many businesses leave the neighbourhood.
“I’ve got three more years on my lease, so I’m stuck.”
If the shop survives the construction period, she’s concerned rising rents will price her shop out of the new Cambie Village.
She expects older one-storey buildings will be bulldozed to make way for new Vancouver-style developments like the Olive building across the street.
“It will be like a tidal wave going down the street. I think a lot of those low-rise apartment buildings are going to go as well,” Heyes said.
Chatterjee agreed. There will be a different mix of shops on Cambie post-Canada Line, he said, probably more like those on Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano.
“Change happens,” he said. “But it’s pretty hard on those that are directly affected.”
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To Leonard Schein, the concerns seem overblown.
Schein owns the Park Theatre and he doesn’t think there has been any significant effect on retail in Cambie Village so far. The restaurants are busy and the shopkeepers he talks to are seeing about the same amount of business as last year.
Schein refers to Chatterjee and Heyes as “the squeaky wheels” and wonders why the minority gets most of the media attention.
He doesn’t believe many shops are closing because of the Canada Line, pointing to the four storefronts that are being renovated and will reopen.
Yes, Schein agreed, once construction begins, there will be some disruption.
“But we have worked with the Canada Line to replace all of the lost parking, we are working with them in terms of advertising to the community that we’re open, and we will be doing a number of initiatives to try to keep people coming who are getting frightened away by people like Rand.”
Vancouver needs rapid transit, Schein said, and underground is the best place to put it.
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At Cambie and 57th, Joseph Lee says business at his Flamingo House Chinese restaurant has gone through the floor since the nearest east-west thoroughfare, 59th Avenue, was closed at Cambie as Canada Line construction approached.
“My business dropped about 40 per cent and now it looks like it will drop further,” Lee said. “My lunch is down to almost a quarter of what I used to have.”
Many of the restaurant’s regulars can no longer get there except by taking long detours, Lee said, and that discourages people on their lunch hours. “If it takes an extra half an hour just to get to my parking space, of course they don’t come.”
His family has operated the Flamingo House for 33 years, but Lee says he’s not sure whether it can survive.
However, InTransitBC has now agreed to build a pedestrian walkway over Cambie at 59th Avenue, Crombie confirmed.
“All I can pray right now is that my regulars will come back after they reopen the road,” Lee said.
WHAT’S WORKING WHERE ON THE LINE
Work is proceeding all up and down the Canada Line route.
– The boring machine digging the deep tunnel under downtown Vancouver is moving about 10 metres a day. It will emerge on Granville north of Pender in March, and will be returned to Second Avenue at Cambie to dig a parallel second tunnel.
– Excavation for the machine’s extraction pit on Granville near Cordova will begin late this month or in September.
– On Granville between Georgia and Robson, digging for the City Centre station will begin any time now. Georgia and Robson will stay open.
– Temporary bridges will be built over Granville at Cordova and Hastings early next year to keep traffic moving during cut-and-cover construction.
– Tunnel sections have been completed from 29th Avenue to nearly 31st Avenue and the Cambie-29th Avenue intersection has been reopened.
– Piles are being driven for the Canada Line crossing of the north arm of the Fraser River.
– Soil compacting is complete at Bridgeport, where the line’s operations and maintenance centre will be built. Guideway columns have been erected along Bridgeport and work will reach No. 3 Road by January.
– At the airport, pile driving is complete for the Fraser’s middle-arm crossing and bridge deck sections are being prefabricated. Guideway columns are being erected and guideway segments will be installed starting about the end of September.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006