Waterfront Stadium part of much larger plan

Even the initial proposal asking council to look at the plan has many big-time corporate sponsors. But the suspicion is that the real overall plan is being kept quiet.

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

It’s no surprise why the Vancouver Sun surprised the city last week with a splashy front page rendering of a newly-proposed waterfront soccer stadium improbably built over railway tracks at the foot of Cambie Street. The Vancouver Sun, along with The Province newspaper, Global TV, 1040 AM Sports Radio, and Pattision Outdoor Signs, are the corporate sponsors of the Whitecaps Waterfront Stadium Proposal. Yes, the proposal to City Hall itself has major corporate sponsors, that’s how together the group behind it is. The Vancouver Sun went on to suggest, in its unsigned editorial inside the paper days later, that it would be “silly” for the City to reject the plan.

The proposal is unique. If accepted, it will be built seven metres above the CP rail yard adjacent to the Sea Bus terminal and behind The Landing building east over to the foot of Cambie Street. The rail yard will continue to operate underneath. The stadium will have three closed sides with the north face, looking out over Burrard Inlet and the North Shore mountains, open.

A numbered company, 0718365 BC Ltd., which lists Greg Kerfoot as a director, purchased the property from Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, formerly Marathon Reality. Marathon was the company created by Canadian Pacific Railways to market its prime downtown property in all Western Canadian cities that were freely granted to the rail company to reward it for building the trans Canada railway more than a century ago. Gordon Campbell, premier of BC and former mayor of Vancouver, was an executive with Marathon before entering politics. He remains as connected to Fairmont as Dick Cheney does to Haliburton.

Greg Kerfoot is formerly an executive with software start-up Crystal Decisions which was sold in 1998 near the peak of the high-tech boom, netting Kerfoot an undisclosed fortune. He bought the Whitecaps Football Club in 2002 and has ever since been looking to relocate the home field for the soccer team from the aging and out-of-the-way Swanguard Stadium, located just inside Burnaby, to downtown Vancouver.

All indications were that Kerfoot would try to build a new stadium in the South False Creek flats area near Main Street and Terminal Avenue, northeast of the Pacific Central Bus Station. It was certainly a location that Vancouver City Hall favoured as it looked to kickstart redevelopment of this prime vacant land. Instead, Kerfoot surprised everyone when he unleashed former soccer star Bob Lenarduzzi, now director of operations for the Whitecaps, with Via Architect’s renderings of a major proposed stadium bordering the downtown eastside.

A clue about why plans were dramatically shifted one mile north can be gleaned from details of the purchase by the mysterious 0718365 BC Ltd. While the proposed stadium is expected to occupy about 10 hectares, Kerfoot bought 26 hectares. The total purchased property extends past the foot of Cambie Street, marking the eastern extremity of the proposed stadium, all the way to the foot of Main Street, and up against the downtown eastside’s beloved waterfront public space, Crab Park.

Crab Park remains the property of Port of Vancouver, and is not in fact an officially designated City of Vancouver park. The Port of Vancouver may be enticed to sell the land to a developer. The extra 16 hectares of the land purchased by Kerfoot running along the north side of Vancouver’s historic Gastown district, could become some of the hottest ocean-front condominium development property in North America, once the principle of building overtop railway tracks is established.

For now, Whitecaps FC president John Rocha told The Republic that Greg Kerfoot is the only party on the project and that the football club owns the land. But clearly a football club doesn’t buy land and a software engineer doesn’t huck up buildings. The Westbank Group of Companies, however, has already worked with former CP rail properties and Fairmont when it built the Shaw Tower. It is also the company behind the height-restriction-shattering Shangri La complex, which will eventually be 57 stories tall, the biggest building in Vancouver. Owner Ian Gillespie is also well-connected to City Hall, having won the City contract to refurbish the former Woodwards building, the anchor to the whole redevelopment of the downtown eastside. His team at Westbank includes condo-king Bob Rennie and architect Jim Cheng (Shaw Tower, Shangri La). Westbank advertises itself as a specialist in tight urban spaces slated for redevelopment. If one was planning something in the underdeveloped strip between Gastown and the waterfront, it would be a serious blow to Westbank’s reputation not to be involved.

It isn’t about the stadium

Whoever they are, the interests of other, hidden partners are not necessarily limited to seeing a glorious soccer stadium in downtown Vancouver. Obviously, the extra 16 hectares were picked up for a reason. There is no question that such a public amenity as a soccer stadium would count for serious gold stars if and when a plan is finally unwrapped for a row of new high-end condos stretching up between the Pan Pacific Hotel and Main Street along the waterfront. Such a project would need to show City Hall significant contributions to public amenities in exchange for cutting off the city’s most historic, and downtrodden, neighbourhood, from its access to the waterfront, in both a physical and a view-corridor sense. The soccer stadium fulfils the role of public amenity perfectly, even it does present a high concrete wall on the sides bordering its neighbours.

A soccer stadium in South False Creek Flats makes better sense for the city. But development partners, whoever they are, can’t leverage a $65 million stadium into part of a much bigger money-making condo-building plan in South False Creek flats.

No doubt the partners had their eye on the much more enticing rail yard waterfront lands for a while. Kerfoot’s idea of a soccer stadium came along just in time to fill in the missing piece of their puzzle: it can be set up as a major public amenity with which to buy off the City when their plans for a string of condos comes forward for approval.

Once the public is sold on the idea of a stadium, and the future of soccer in Vancouver and in Canada is tied intimately to the reality of it being built, then the development partners can roll out the condo plan for the remaining 16 hectares, and let all concerned know that the stadium can’t be built unless the condos get the go ahead.

How to pull it off

When this project is compared to the Hastings Entertainment Company plan for installing a 600-slot casino in Hastings Park, a general principle about how these things are pulled off begins to come into focus. The only real power City Council has is its exclusive control over zoning designations—it can allow or disallow different kinds of land usages on different patches of private property. When it comes to developers and their plans, once a private financier, a private builder, a private architect and a private marketing firm are lined up, there are no remaining obstacles to the project—except for the publicly controlled City Council and its power over zoning designations.

City Council can handle proposals in one of only three ways: it can simply reject them out of hand, it can accept them right off the bat, or—what puts the political punch in the bowl of City Hall—it can offer its acceptance in exchange for something in return from the developer, usually amenities for the citizens to enjoy. Developers who anticipate a flat out rejection won’t usually bother to bring plans forward. Developers who anticipate easy acceptance would be running the risk of overconfidence and their financial backers would likely flee from that recklessness. All that is left coming before City Council are those developers who have plans they can reasonably anticipate will be tentatively accepted so long as there are enough public amenities put on the table to buy the Council off.

Therefore, the job of assembling public amenities, or at least arguments that illustrate public amenities as part of an overall development project, is an important one for developers, and maybe even the most important one, given the risk of upsetting fickle financiers if plans, and their attending amenities, are in any event rejected by City Council. Whoever is in charge of assembling public amenities, or at least arguments that show public amenities, better do that job well, or the whole works goes down the drain, including everyone’s reputation and future jobs.

Purchasing things that could be called public amenities is one good strategy, and certainly is easier, and potentially cheaper, than actually creating new public amenities. That’s especially the case if what the developer purchases is already recognized by the public as a good public amenity. But then arises the problem of how to be seen to be offering something new to the public, since the public amenity is already there. The answer, if Great Canadian Casinos (owners of Hastings Entertainment) and Greg Kerfoot and his silent partners are a guide, is to buy the public amenity, then describe a threat to its continued existence, and then offer to simply sustain it, thereby gaining credit for the equivalent of actually creating the amenity.

Great Canadian Casinos has the public, and City Council, convinced that the ancient horse race track at Hastings Park will likely close unless its operations are subsidized by the income arising from 600 slot machines installed on the site. They got their approval. Kerfoot and his partners are already making noise about the dismal future of the famed Whitecaps soccer franchise, and all amateur soccer in Vancouver and Canada as a whole. The proposed soccer stadium will first be described as the only way to save the franchise, then as the only way to save soccer itself in Vancouver and Canada. And then the building of the stadium will be held back until the owners of the property achieve City Council zoning decisions allowing them to string up a row of ocean front condos all along Gastown’s northern side, since (they will claim) only that development will allow the stadium to be built.

The lesson? Send your wife off for to lovely spa vacation before you cheat on her, or it will cost you a lot more after.

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