Condos will Dominate Oceanfront Landscape

By Gagandeep Ghuman
Published: April 6, 2013

The new owners of Westmana want to revive the Mireau, thousands of homes are planned for Makin lands, and affordable small-lot subdivisions are fast becoming the flavor of the season.

And then we have the Oceanfront condos, lots of them.

Brochures pitching the Oceanfront to developers reveal residential, and particularly condos, will dominate the Oceanfront landscape in years to come.

SODC makes a provision for 1,136 housing units on the Oceanfront lands; there will be 870 condos, of which 663 will be low rise condos, and 207 will be midrise condos.

Nearly 266 townhomes are also planned.

SODC manager Jonathan Silcock says the majority of the condos are phased towards the latter half of the project.

“The demand and absorption of the residential product is anticipated to grow with the population growth for Squamish,” he said.

This is a plan phased over a 20-year period, he added.

It’s more like 30 years, says former district planner, Cameron Chalmers.

“It’s a lot of condos, but it’s a long term plan and these are maximum densities that can always be scaled back,” he said.

As a former high-ranking district official, Chalmers guided the sub-area plan, working, he says,to create a balance between community expectation and economic viability.

He says there are people on the development side who would have loved to see more residential, and there were those who would have liked to restrict it.

“We came to a balance, somewhere in the mid-way,” he says.

Now a consultant with an office on Second Ave, Chalmers says while the residential sector might seem to dominate the Oceanfront, it’s a plan community embraced through an ‘exhaustive’ consultation process.

“I mean hundreds and hundreds of hours were spent on public meetings,” he said.

The process took 2.5 years and cost $500,000 to complete, he added.

Yet, there are Squamishers like Eric Andersen who believe perhaps the process wasn’t nearly as exhaustive.

A passionate proponent for well-paying jobs and industry in town, Andersen said condos isn’t what we need on Oceanfront lands.

“Our local planning has not enabled the public to be properly informed of the trade-offs in planning Nexen lands use,” he said.

Coun. Ron Sander said he is looking forward to see proposals come forward.

He said he is committed to personally look at all to see which will deliver the best return to Squamish in jobs and taxes etc.

“The last time downtown was economically healthy, we had a lot of good industrial businesses that contributed to a healthy economy,” he said.