City officials reviewed an "Active Ground Floor Study" aimed at diversifying downtown development requirements beyond traditional retail to include flexible uses like small-scale manufacturing, healthcare, and childcare. Concurrently, a 2025 development activity report highlighted severe declines in building permits, with residential unit production falling 51% below the six-year average and stalling progress toward the city's comprehensive plan housing goals. To address these pipeline challenges, the board discussed recent modifications to the Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) program and the status of upcoming public infrastructure investments.
Building_development
City Center Redevelopment Authority · Mar 19, 2026 · 23:07–23:15 · Watch on CVTV ↗
Keywords: zoning comprehensive plan building permits affordable housing infrastructure density
What was said
22:04 And they're figuring out how to sort of after the fact, redesign it for residential, or maybe they're taking on tenants after a year or two that are not quite paying as high rent as they thought. So there's just these sort of challenges. And so when you look at cities that are kind of at the forefront of urban adaptation, they're looking at flexibility. And it's thinking about what else can go in that ground floor. Retail and sort of restaurants make sense in certain areas. And that's sort of why we map where they are today. A lot of cities are focusing on those areas. How can we strengthen those known clusters without spreading out retail and restaurants sort of throughout all of the new development? Next slide. So we'll zoom back into Vancouver. And this is sort of where our work fits in, right? The city has done, produced the downtown design guidelines, which is sort of guiding the requirements
23:02 of what the ground floors need to look like. So that's sort of the, how do we meet this? The comprehensive plan is creating active ground floor required overlays and active ground floor ready. So the city's already thinking about not requiring ground floor activation everywhere. So that's sort of telling you the where do I have to do this? And so the outcomes of this study is really the, well, who and what kind of uses can fit in these places? So we're looking, we're really zooming out, looking at target industries, business types that fit into this realm of sort of active ground floor uses. But then we're digging into, if we see these different targets, what do they need? What do their spaces look like? How big, what utilities, what traffic ped counts, what curb control, how do they fit into downtown? 'Cause often we get these ground floor spaces that from the get-go don't have the utility capacity to attract a manufacturer or to do a certain use. So we wanna be setting the city up with an identification of what these different uses need.
24:01 And we're gonna zoom in both with ourselves, and I should have introduced our team. We're working with First Forty Feet, who's been deeply involved in the conversation here in Vancouver, more of the architect design side. So what are some of the architectural requirements
Evidence (1 match)
direct keyword 23:07–23:15 zoning, comprehensive plan, building permits, affordable housing, infrastructure, density
er. And this is sort of where our work fits in, right? The city has done, produced the downtown design guidelines, which is sort of guiding the requirements of what the ground floors need to look like. So that's sort of the, how do we meet this? The comprehensive plan is creating active ground floor required overlays and active ground floor ready. So the city's already thinking about not requiring ground floor activation everywhere. So that's sort of telling you the where do I have to do this? A