CHANCELLOR Tower, Metrotown - the madness begins. Will POLYGON do as good a job with the queue as BOSA SOVEREIGN ?

The CHANCELLOR Tower building site, 4860 Bennett Street, Metrotown. It's April 10th, at 3PM. Realtors have hired these placeholders to stand in line in April showers - for the coming week! The City of Burnaby has deployed plastic barriers to keep passing traffic from hitting pedestrians heading for the Mall or Bonsor Community Centre. The sidewalk is fully covered by real estate squatters.

It was 3PM and I was standing in the pouring rain in Metrotown. My camera didn't like the weather so I had to be fast. Approximately 40 Chinese men and women, many middle aged, covered the sidewalk sheltering under umbrellas or barbecue shelters in front of POLYGON's building site at 4860 Bennett Street, Burnaby Metrotown. An elderly gentleman approached to ask why I was taking photos. He had been here awhile, and was a wealth of information. The line he said, began to form on Saturday. He had counted approximately 100 chairs and stools deployed from the front door of the newly constructed CHANCELLOR Sales Centre to the corner, of which 75 or so have Realtor business cards affixed. He had spoken to several umbrella people in the queue, and all had been promised money by Realtors to stand in line. I photographed a few of the business cards.

These are two of the Realtor business cards taped to chairs at 4860 Bennett Street.

Last month I witnessed the chilled lineup of placeholders in front of SOVEREIGN Tower, Metrotown. BOSA did a superb job with crowd control, before the jostling and angry words could turn uglier. POLYGON will have to hustle because this crowd has assembled much earlier, and so many realtors missed out on selling anything at SOVEREIGN and METROPLACE Towers, that there is a great deal of "face" at stake with exasperated clients.

Taping your business card to a plastic kitchen stool, and lining them up in front of a major developer's sales centre - ONE WEEK BEFORE SALE DATE. Is that all it takes these days to guarantee the chance of writing a contract with condo sales staff?

In my opinion, the extraordinary demand for units in these large tower projects in Metrotown, is encouraging a "feeding frenzy" style of marketing which the City of Burnaby should have foreseen, and which certainly is getting out of hand. (Yesterday's frenzy at METROPLACE was nothing short of bizarre! as were the secret sales the night before.) That left many shaking heads. We are in dire need of municipal Bylaws to govern flash condo sales on this scale. The word of mouth around Burnaby is that Developer Tactics and the Municipal responsibility to manage the boom in Metrotown development, will certainly be an ELECTION ISSUE in 2011.

V for Victory. These happy place-holders are close to the front of the line at the CHANCELLOR building site, in Metrotown.

City of Burnaby employees have deployed plastic barriers to create a space for Metrotown pedestrians to walk around the hundred or so place-holders who have taken the sidewalk. This is a very busy block, and the entrance to Metrotown parking is directly across the street from these ladies.

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METROPLACE - 46 floor Burnaby skyscraper is intended to spearhead mega-development south of Metrotown Mall

PART ONE
Is it just me, or have you too noticed that life on the Pacific Coast is getting truly, truly surreal? I don't refer merely to the skyrocketing cost of living, but to all of the little things. The fixation on hand-held electronic gadgets, the mania to be a Facebook "friend", and the high school science teachers who prefer to screen BACK TO THE FUTURE in their classrooms, rather than bore their pupils with the Periodic Table. In Burnaby high schools even the Chemistry teachers show Hollywood feature films.
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Recently I decided on purchasing an investment condo, and suddenly I began to notice plenty which I used to put on ignore. An example is our shared race to adjust to a massive and significant demographic shift in our resident population. I welcome it, but there is no doubt it will be even more consequent than the many social changes we underwent during the "Countdown to Hong Kong 1997". Twenty years ago BCTV News used to impress us with images of quaint Chinese urban lifestyle. Remember those video clips of Beijing streets awash with hordes of commuters on bicycles? Remember those shots of pencil-thin Hong Kong apartment towers where whole families lived like rabbits in less than 500 square feet? Where are we today? The "people's cadres" running Vancouver City Hall are tenaciously tearing up the traffic grid and installing bicycle paths. Utopia demands its concessions. In "suburban" Burnaby in 2011, ALL new towers offer affordable "homes" of less than 500 square feet. Extraordinary! Come to think of it... we are rushing back to the future!
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Last month I had the opportunity to interview Maurice Pez, who is SVP Development at INTRACORP. He is spearheading the development of Burnaby's second new skyscraper - METROPLACE. In my preliminary research I read the Municipal website and the newspaper archives. Only one paper had been covering the project. Wanda Chow of the BURNABY NEWSLEADER attended council meeting and provided a thumbnail history in her story filed on November 4: 46-storey highrise pitched next to Metrotown station Much of the tower site is currently operating as BURNABY STORE - ALL, renting storage lockers. Intracorp has "been in partnership" with the owner of the property for about six years. Big projects have a very long time-line.

Mr. Pez exuded confidence in his project, which has passed Second Reading and was eager to give a great deal of credit for its genesis to City of Burnaby staff. I wanted to know if he felt well received when he presented METROPLACE at a meeting of open council, but he had no impressions to offer. "We were asked not to present." Who then had "pitched" the proposal to the city and the television audience? Basil Lufkin - Burnaby Director of Planning, a man whom Intracorp meets with regularly. Pez was also very generous in his praise of the Planning Committee. They intend that Intracorp's 46-storey tower be the catalyst for a sweeping redevelopment of the entire Maywood neighborhood, south of Metrotown Skytrain station. "It's their vision...their committee has driven this... they told us - 'You have to hit this out of the park - or we won't bring it forward'." This will necessarily entail the demolition of a few older apartment blocks but Pez doesn't see this coming over the horizon for 5 to 6 years. METROPLACE Tower will front on Beresford, and Pez revealed that Intracorp is already working on a second, shorter tower which will also front on Beresford. It's too early to discuss that project, but I predict that if METROPLACE sells out in a day, emulating the success of Bosa's SOVEREIGN, there is no doubt METROPLACE'S little brother will be fast-tracked.
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I asked Pez how they had come up with such a bland name as "Metroplace", and he assured me that it was the result of very careful deliberation. I was reminded of the name "Centrepoint", an earlier Intracorp project in Metrotown, of which I'll have more to say in PART TWO of this Blog article. The architect for METROPLACE tower is Busby Perkins + Will, which is no surprise, as they have been working for the City on planning Maywood's future and other transit-centric proposals. Mr. Pez, who is himself an architect, assured me that METROPLACE is going to turn heads when completed. Pez disdains the "cookie cutter" designs of Intracorp's rivals and wants to present designs which are fresh. [Mr. Pez explains what makes a great building on an Inttracorp video, here.] The municipality he says, has always been self conscious of Burnaby's lack of a pedestrian friendly "High Street" and they envision Beresford after a 2011-2014 growth spurt, as morphing into something akin to Vancouver's Robson Street where "ceremonial events" can be staged. I enjoyed our conversation.

This CGI rendering of MetroPlace Tower shows the building looming over the current Metrotown Skytrain Station. Beresford Street and the station will each be getting a total rebuild. [Image courtesy of Intracorp]

The METROPLACE Tower site is currently hosting the Burnaby Store-All, located at 6541 Telford Avenue (not "Street" as I mis-labeled this photo). In the background squats the Metrotown Skytrain Station. That much criticized station is a pedestrian bottleneck, and also a constant magnet for the drug trade and assorted petty crime. The train station and the adjacent bus loop will be completely rebuilt, in concert with the construction of METROPLACE Tower. Buses will get curbside access on the south side of the station. [Image via Google Street View]

. "M" for Metroplace Tower - in 2007 a much less ambitious tower was proposed for the corner site. The current commercial building at 6541 Telford will be demolished in mid-2011. METROPLACE Tower will front on Beresford Street (address not yet assigned) and some of the townhouses at its base will get numbers on Telford Avenue. "S" in the upper right corner of the photo is the site of Metrotown's other great landmark - SOVEREIGN Tower, soon to rise at 4509 Kingsway.