1065 Pacific St rezoning application

The staff team reached out to the applicant team for a response and they provided the following:

Two of the three houses on Thurlow have a City of Vancouver heritage designation. We did reach out to the owners of the homes on Thurlow to determine if they would be interested in a sale. Following discussions, it became clear that their price expectations were not realistic, especially in the context of the heritage designations. As a result, we created a unique hi-rise building design that respects the heritage buildings on both the west and the east property lines and future potential building separations.

The proposed setback is also an improvement over the currently existing situation.

City staff will be reviewing the proposal for its compliance with built form provisions in the West End Plan and any relevant guidelines and bulletins. The review will also be informed by feedback gathered from the public consultation process and the Urban Design Panel.

The site is located in Area G of the Burrard Corridor under the West End Plan. Building heights up to 300 feet can be considered in the area. Development proposals with frontages of less than 39.6 m (130 ft.) can be considered at the discretion of the Director of Planning, where these proposals include contributions to the Public Benefits Strategy, including secured market rental or social housing. Staff will be evaluating the proposal’s contribution to the Public Benefits Strategy and its compliance with relevant urban design objectives in determining the suitability of a site frontage less than 130 ft.

In regards to construction, this development must comply with the Vancouver Building By-law, which regulates the design and construction of buildings, as well as the administrative provisions related to permitting, inspections, and the enforcement of these requirements. A Demolition Plan must be submitted which outlines the procedure for demolishing a building in a manner that does not negatively affect the integrity of any other buildings, structures, buried or above ground utilities or any other real property. This Plan must be provided by the Demolition Contractor or a Professional Engineer registered in the Province of BC. Additional plans are reviewed at the Building Permit stage and regular inspections are carried out through the construction process to ensure compliance with the Vancouver Building By-law.

The staff team reached out to the applicant team for a response and they provided the following:

The short answer is that we would like to reduce the number of parking stalls and eliminate parking level P5.

This task is not quite that simple however, as we still have to satisfy the minimum code requirement. At the time of submission we weren’t sure if staff would accept our rational for a 20% parking reduction based on proximity to transit. We now have this confirmation. With that we have to provide a minimum of 77 residential stalls (compared to the 95 stalls we are currently providing). There are, however, 24 stalls on P5, and deleting all of them would bring the count down to 71. The parking by-law allows us to count each of the required accessible stalls as 2 for code purposes, which would bring us up to 78.

In addition we will have to ensure that we can provide a minimum of one (1) storage unit per suite. We would be losing 37 on level P5 and about 12 on level P4 because the elevator machine room would need to move up one level. Currently we provide one storage unit per suite in the parkade. We would now have to rely on the 60 in-suite storage units to make up for the loss of 49 storage units in the Parkade, which is acceptable by code.

It is quite tight to make all this work and delete P5. However, if what is described above can be achieved and is acceptable to staff, we would go ahead and delete P5.