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From Bob Mackin @ Business In Vancouver....

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Grandstanding: The great stadium debate

Vancouver’s Gastown business community is at a crossroads as competing visions for the city’s central waterfront go to council June 27

Bob Mackin

Corner kicks or condos?

That’s the basis for the great stadium debate of 2006.

Will media-shy, tech-millionaire Greg Kerfoot get a chance to build his privately financed 15,000-seat stadium for soccer and more by Burrard Inlet’s shore?

Or will Reliance Holdings’ real estate developer Jon Stovell’s dream of Concord Pacific-style condo towers next to Gastown’s red-brick historic buildings entice council? The answer could come as soon as June 27 when city council examines the high level review of the Whitecaps Waterfront Stadium proposal. Like many a soccer match, it’ll require plenty of time added on. The speakers’ list could be as long as a soccer pitch.

Kerfoot bought the Canadian Pacific railyard last summer for $20 million, and the Whitecaps announced plans for the 15,000-seat stadium – expandable to 30,000 – last October. It would be built to open in 2009 on a platform above the railway tracks using the latest in sustainable B.C. building products. Soccer is the most-played game in Canada, and the Lower Mainland is the nation’s soccer hotbed. But the park won’t be for soccer alone. Rugby, tennis and concerts would find a home there. Vanoc wants to use it as a sponsor or national Olympic committee venue during the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Not so fast, said Stovell. He has likened the stadium proposal to the aborted Project 200 of the 1960s, which envisioned three-dozen low-rises and towers above the tracks. He’s spearheading a campaign by the ad hoc Gastown Neighourhood Coalition and Gastown Residents Association to thwart the stadium. It’s all stage-managed by Reputations Corporation, the spin doctors who helped elect NPA Mayor Sam Sullivan last fall.

“It’s just a bad, disrespectful type of development,” Stovell said. “It’s rail land as long as it needs to be rail land, but if it’s going to be something else, it should be developed properly, and this part of the city should have the same opportunity to reconnect to the waterfront as others.”

The Gastown Business Improvement Society paid an architect to devise three alternatives that don’t look dissimilar to Project 200.

It shows a future without railway tracks. In their place, low-rises. On the waterfront, condo towers.

A stadium could fit, Stovell said, on ground level only.

GBIS did not consult the Vancouver Port Authority, CP Rail or the Whitecaps and conceded that the railway tracks may remain for decades.

Public open houses, opinion polls and architecture studies yielded city hall planner Kevin McNaney’s report on the high level review.

It will be council’s guide as it comes to a decision.

McNaney raised red flags about inadequate vehicle access, movement of dangerous goods in the railyard, the design’s relationship with historic Gastown and its impact on area livability.

All the issues, he wrote, can be resolved with “very large financial investments, additional site area and co-operation or partnerships with key landowners.”

Whitecaps president John Rocha said the club is eager to fix the problems and proceed with a formal application to build the stadium.

It would, he said, be a rare privately financed public asset and, as such, deserves to proceed on a schedule instead of being studied ad nauseam and hampered by delays.

Gastown resident John Kostiuk said if Stovell prevails, it would send a bad message to anyone wanting to invest in Gastown.

“Every year the Whitecaps are not allowed to develop the stadium is a loss of a Major League Soccer franchise, lost revenue, lost opportunity to the city of tax revenue the city is not generating. The neighborhood needs it.”

Kostiuk lives in a loft at Water Street’s Taylor Building where he’s also strata council president.

He runs a home-based Cuban cigar mail order company and dabbles in Web design.

Kostiuk said he couldn’t continue to sit on the sidelines, so he started the independent Stadium Now pro stadium group and its stadiumnow.org website.

He said the opposition groups didn’t exist before the stadium was proposed and don’t truly represent Gastown residents or their interests.

“We have huge issues with dumpster fires in the alley, panhandling, drug use. They did a porno shoot in our alley this last week. There are real issues facing the neighborhood,” Kostiuk said. “What is your position on them?”

Anti-stadium groups won’t say precisely how many members or supporters they have.

GBIS president Paul Ardagh would only say “a majority” are opposed.

Kostiuk has 26 supporters and said he would have more if people weren’t afraid to alienate Stovell, whose company is a major Gastown landowner.


“Gassy Jack [Deighton, Gastown’s namesake] was a saloon owner. The first business down here on the waterfront was a lumber mill.

“The neighbourhood has residences in it, it’s got social housing, it’s got retail, it’s got office space, it’s got industrial uses,” Kostiuk said.

“That’s why people like myself live in Gastown. I don’t want to live in Yaletown. I don’t want to be surrounded by condo towers.”