October, 2005

Mr. Royer spoke to us about his city’s successful “compact urban development” projects, a highly livable alternative to suburban sprawl. Port Moody is being recognized worldwide for its visionary planning. It recently won first place from the International Awards for Livable Communities for “Planning for the Future” and was named third-best city in the world for livability.

Q: How is it that Port Moody is doing such progressive developments when so much of the rest of the country is building undifferentiated suburban sprawl?

GR: It’s political determination. This is how we want to develop. There was a debate about seven years ago on how Port Moody would grow. There’s typical suburban development going up the mountainside. When that was built, decision makers, including our mayor who was on council at the time, were faced with approving more of the same, cutting more trees and creating these subdivisions. There was a group of people who got together and talked about a different vision, which is to achieve the same population growth but preserve these acres of forested hillside. They suggested we create a more compact, urban development centred around the city hall. The outcome was a referendum. The hillside forest was dedicated as parkland. That gave the political decision makers a blueprint for urban density if we wanted to achieve the population growth we needed here. It required a commitment to more compact development.

Q: How fast is Port Moody growing?

GR: We are the fastest-growing city in BC. – between 4.5 and 5%.

Q: Why does Newport Village work so well?

GR: It’s the convenience of services, and the fact that there's a single owner of the commercial development as well as a single developer of the residential housing. Both aspects were master planned in partnership with the city. There’s a combination of things that make it coherent – a meat store, fish store, vegetable market in the centre, all the services you would require. The streetscape details, all the things that the city insisted be provided, add up to something that is very coherent that meets the needs of the residents.

Q: You live in Newort Village. How is it from a social point of view? Do you find it a pleasant place to live?

GR: It’s quite incredible. I belong to the Rotary Club. Probably a third of the members are residents of Newport Village. People call themselves the “Village People.” I walk daily from my home to work, which is across the street at City Hall and I cannot get there without stopping and chatting with a neighbour or business owner. It’s like village life in the old days. You get to know your neighbours here. There’s a real sense of pride.

Q: How do high-rise towers work with everything else? Have they been effectively integrated?

GR: It all has to do with zoning and the amount of site coverage that’s allowed. If you look at Newport Village, why it’s so different from other developments is that it occupies almost 100% of the land. We have another development in a different area, in Moody Centre, and we’re creating the same kind of feel there. We have a lot of control because about 65% of the development is on land formally owned by the city. We’ve allowed 100% coverage of site, much of it in four or five-story buildings with parking underneath, commercial at grade, and residential above. The residential part is mixed – live/work studios as well as more conventional residences.

The difference in other places is the way the zoning is written. When most city planners allow a tower, they want a large lawn around it. Just look at some of the arterials in Toronto where you’ve got these towers. They’re standing like pencils in a field of grass with large surface parking lots. When somebody decides they’re going to come out of their tower, unless it’s downtown, they have to drive – through the parkade, out to local malls and the local Cineplex, then they drive back home. At Newport Village, instead of having a large piece of grass at the base of a tower, there are four-story apartments, and they are in turn attached to services. People can come out through the lobby and walk out to a street that is full of life and energy.

Q: Are families with kids part of that energy?

GR: I have two daughters, 9 and 18, living with me in my building. It’s not predominantly families with kids here but I’d say about 25% of the apartments have kids.

Q: Are the developers making good profits?

GR: They’re selling homes like hotcakes. At one building, The Sentinel, they had people camping overnight for two nights. The sales office opened at noon on Saturday. By 3:00 p.m. they had sold out 133 units. This is unheard of in the suburbs. And our property values have gone up 23% from June 2004 to June 2005.

Q: How does compact urban development work better for the environment?

GR: We’ve achieved a much smaller environmental footprint for the number of people being accommodated. A community like Newport Village makes very efficient use of the water and sewer and electrical services. One hundred feet of water line on a street can serve one family in a suburb or 50 families here. It is basically costing the same to install and build and maintain.

The Greater Vancouver Regional District has growth targets for each community. We are supposed to absorb about 43,000 people. If we were to absorb that in single-family housing and townhouses with back yards, we would end up consuming many times the amount of land than we’re currently consuming. People here have access to a huge back yard – our beautiful Shoreline Park that’s 90 acres we’ve dedicated, with trails and easy access to recreation. We’ve got more soccer fields per capita than anyone.

When you look at a family’s view of a back yard, there is still a lot of appeal to ground-oriented, single-family housing, and certainly we’re not dictating to people what their lifestyle should be. There is still some single-family development taking place in Port Moody. But when you look at the amount of use, if the owner is not a gardener, there’s about five years in family life where that back yard might be used intensively by the kids. After that, it’s used maybe once a week by one of the family members to mow the lawn.

Q: Is this a model that others in B.C. are looking to emulate?

GR: We’re now seen as a standard in the region. People talk about Newport Village and the kind of planning we do here as a standard to achieve. We’ve been invited by Smart Growth B.C. to make a presentation, one of only two municipalities in B.C. invited. We’ve made a presentation recently at the Urban Development Institute, focusing on our future development plans and the way we manage our relationship with developers, which can be summed up in two words, firm but fair. Internationally, we’re getting inquiries. We hosted official visitors from China recently. There’s a lot of interest.

Q: Where are the politicians on this now?

GR: They are very supportive and proud. We’ve got an election coming up. I don’t see the type of development and community we’re building is going to be an election issue. People are saying we want to continue going in the same direction. There’s going to be other issues, like commuter traffic through Port Moody. I’m very involved in the community through volunteer associations and so on and nobody’s questioning the premise of how development is going. It has made for a really good feeling for our politicians.

Q: What’s next?

GR: In terms of compact urban development, there are a couple of major projects currently underway. One is the more advanced – residential predominantly, mixed use, some commercial. It’s a combination of low-rise townhouses – very urban and compact – with low-rise apartment buildings, and four-story condos with elevators. There are two high-rise towers. It also has an economic zone and that will allow commercial and office use.

The other development is major mixed use – a truly urban, truly mixed-use development. It combines low-rise apartments, four-story condos, and a total of five towers, one of which is going to be a hotel. They are all somewhere between 24 and 26 stories. Compared to the kind of development I’ve seen in Toronto and suburban areas around Toronto, this is a very closely integrated commercial and residential complex, very similar to Newport Village. It will also create a bit of a village feel.

There are some truly unique features designed into this complex. They wanted to have a large surface grocery store as part of the development. Typically, if this grocery store was in a suburban area, it would be a box surrounded with parking. What we’re going to end up with is extremely limited surface parking, some street parking, and no large expanse of asphalt. The parking is going to be underneath the development, and because of our concern with appearance, there’s no possibility of creating a large grocery store in a large stand-alone bulky building. Instead of a flat roof similar to what you find everywhere else, we’ve worked with the developer and convinced them to put housing on top of the complex. If you can imagine, it will look like your typical Safeway but with a parkade underneath and a sidewalk with trees all around it, using brick pavers generously as opposed to asphalt. When you look at the building you’ll see some store front, not the usual blank walls and loading base, and you’ll see residential housing above it. As your eyes go up the wall there’s going to be balconies and living room windows etc. Much of the store’s roof itself is going to be a courtyard for the apartments with trees and grass. It’s going to be a leisure area for residents. Can you imagine that?