Maintaining a commercial capacity

Originally developed in 1996 and consisting of nearly 900,000 square feet, Harbourside is North Vancouver’s premier business park and home to the North Shore Automall. Its strategic location, within 10-minutes of the Lions Gate Bridge and Highway 1, has attracted a variety of commercial and industrial businesses and helped advance the City of North Vancouver’s business development goals. Today, the business park provides over 3,900 jobs to the City.

While Concert’s re-imagined Harbourside entails the addition of a broader range of uses including residential condominiums and rental housing, it has always been our intention to not only maintain the existing commercial capacity, but to build upon it. Concert’s development plans for the remaining waterfront parcels include the provision for a significant amount of high-quality office space. A total of at least 200,000 square feet of “AAA” office space is proposed which would be owned and operated by Concert, and provide for approximately 1,000 additional office jobs.

As it exists today Harbourside lacks the volume of amenities necessary to properly support the workforce such as convenience retail and services, or frequent public transit service. The construction of residential, along with additional commercial and retail space will help create the critical mass needed to make these amenities viable by serving the business community by day and the residential community by night.

Concert is proud to be able to build upon previous success in developing some of the City’s most desirable commercial space, while at the same time being able to add the supporting amenities required to make Harbourside an even more appealing destination for businesses. 

Harbourside progress update: April 23 – May 7

A summary of what’s happening in the Harbourside planning process.

Temporary use permit for additional parking
The Harbourside development team recently applied for a “temporary use permit” which would allow for the development of 50 on-site parking stalls at the northwest portion of 925 Harbourside Drive. While the ultimate plan for Harbourside includes the permanent addition of approximately 50 on-site street parking stalls on a new international street network, these temporary spots will alleviate demand through pre-development and construction. The plan will be to phase out these temporary stalls as the permanent ones are constructed.      

Rainwater management

In February we wrote about the wide variety of sustainably-minded initiatives and elements that are being planned for Harbourside Waterfront. Today we bring you some additional information about one particular element of our sustainability plan, rainwater management. 

In a typical development, the rainwater that naturally falls on a building’s roofs, sidewalks and internal roadways is captured, filtered to remove oil and grit, and then displaced into a body of water - which in the case of Harbourside is the Burrard Inlet. However, in order to achieve Harbourside’s sustainability objectives, Concert is developing a strategy to go well above and beyond the ordinary.  

Our civil engineer, landscape architect and recently-engaged water resource engineer are working on an on-site rainwater management strategy for the mixed-use community. Instead of simply moving the rainwater off-site, the rainwater management strategy will outline a plan for how this rainwater would be harvested, naturally filtered and reused in a sustainable manner. 

Specifically, the rainwater would be collected from the buildings’ green roofs, naturally filtered and captured for use in “rain gardens” which are water features that would be integrated into the neighbourhood. The green roofs and rain gardens would use natural materials and plants to clean and control rain water flows, and in doing so, would provide a natural habitat for pollinators, birds and other small animals to thrive in an urban environment. The rain gardens would further connect the site with its waterfront location and add to the marine-inspired character of the community. Another option the team is exploring is the possibility of capturing some of this excess rainwater as a means of irrigating the community’s landscaping – a particularly innovative strategy which would serve to decrease the community’s water usage. 

By taking a cue from nature and striving for integrated rainwater management design, Harbourside will not only relieve the pressure on municipal sewer systems but it will also begin to return to a more natural cycle that feeds water back into our local ecosystems.