Port Moody and Moody Centre growth and speculation: sections vs. overall picture

Port Moody and Moody Centre growth and speculation: sections vs. overall picture

Current official discussions for major development in Moody Centre include “Westport” (Andres Wines site), Flavelle Oceanfront, Moody Centre transit-oriented development (TOD), plus numerous smaller but significant projects.

(In Port Moody but outside of “old town” Moody Centre, potential major development includes the established Coronation Park neighbourhood, city-owned land for sale or lease (former firehall and current public works yard), and the north shore Ioco lands, all examples of recent high-profile discussions/projects.)

Combined, these potential developments represent massive change. This site has much more information on the areas mentioned; just use the search bar, scroll, or check out the drop-down menus.

Feedback to the city on it’s recommended scenario for the Moody Centre TOD area is requested by March 17. The recommended scenario appears to arise more from city planning wishes and consultations with representatives from the development industry than from resident feedback spanning a number of years.

See Moody Centre TOD planning — Open House #2, March 1, 2017 for more information.
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In the news, excerpted (click on title links for full articles) …

Commercial Real Estate: Port Moody Centre looks to grow up, way up
By Evan Duggan, Vancouver Sun, March 14, 2017

Port Moody has taken another step toward converting the lands around the new Moody Centre Evergreen Line station into a high-density hub with as many as four 40-storey towers.
[…]
The goal is to create a dense, more walkable transit hub with mixed-use residential and commercial towers similar to what is being built in Brentwood town centre in Burnaby and other regional transit development hubs.
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[Vancitybuzz online, artist rendering of Burnaby Brentwood Mall site (28 acres)]

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[…]
Port Moody Mayor Mike Clay said the development community hasn’t responded to the current zoning permissions for the area. “There is no value in building in that form,” he said in an interview. “Once you get over six storeys, and you have to get way from wood frame, the costs go up a lot to build with concrete and steel.”
[…]
The preferred plan unveiled on March 1 was based on a combination of scenarios previously presented to the public, said James Stiver, Port Moody’s general manager of development services. “It has been tweaked on public input and other issues that we’ve been resolving,” he told The Sun at the open house.
[…]
The preferred option goes too far, said Chris Staddon of the Moody Centre Community Association. “The density is too high. St. John’s Street is already inundated with traffic and our park space is limited. We have Rocky Point Park, which is basically at a maximum-use point now,” he said.

“A general concern is that council is slicing off little sections of Port Moody for development without looking at the overall picture,” he said.

Staddon said it i’s clear that transit hubs are where development indeed needs to happen, but this is a “little bit aggressive”. Bringing an additional 4,000 residents into the city could also put a strain on other services, he said.

“Council seems to be focused on just getting these things built,” he said. “Has anybody looked at the schools? The hospitals? Everything else around it?”
[…]
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Building forms and geography

Port Moody’s OCP Hazardous Lands map is here.

Port Moody has had past land slides, and sinkholes during Skytrain construction. Many low lying areas have soil comprised of sand and silt.

Areas of San Francisco have some similarities to Port Moody.

The leaning tower of problems: Who will pay for San Francisco’s US$750 million tilting highrise?
James Tarmy and Kartikay Mehrotra, Bloomberg News
(Financial Post)
January 31, 2017

Nina Agabian, a retired director of research in global health science at the University of California, bought a 29th-floor apartment in San Francisco’s Millennium Tower in 2010. “It was supposed to be a wonderful building,” she said in January, sitting in a leather chair in the building’s vast, low-lit, owner’s-club level. “For many of us, who left our business lives to start our older years, this had become a nice, comfortable place.”
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The 58-storey tower’s shine faded on May 10, 2016, when Agabian attended a homeowners association meeting and was informed that the building had sunk 16 inches into the earth and tilted over 15 inches at its tip and 2 inches at the base, according to suits filed by residents and the city of San Francisco. “You can imagine how distressed we were to know that, for one, our lifetime investment and savings are at risk,” she said. “And we have no idea whether or not there’s a fix to it, and if there is a fix to it, what it will entail.”

The building, meanwhile, continues to sink.
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Castle in the sand
Since the mid-19th century, the city of San Francisco has expanded its shoreline by dumping debris into its coastal marshlands and transferring sand and clay from the ocean bed onto land. Much of downtown San Francisco, including parts of Mission Street, where Millennium Tower was built, is constructed on this loose, wet soil. But the city’s proximity to two major faults–the San Andreas and the Hayward–could render that same ground unstable in an earthquake, said Keith Knudsen, the deputy director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Science Center. “The soft material tends to amplify the parts of the shaking–the earthquake’s wavelengths–which are damaging to buildings,” he said.
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