Still recovering from the math lesson that city manager Penny Ballem gave us media types Monday over the Olympic Village numbers.
Had a flashback to elementary school with most of us sitting there in the front row and Ballem at the white board with the dry erase marker.
OK, we didn’t have white boards back then and Madame Heineke used chalk and never uttered the word “debenture” but you get the picture.
Anyway, one question we didn’t ask after hearing the city paid off its $630 million debt, is who actually owns all that land at Southeast False Creek.
Simple question, right?
Maybe, but it brings a complex answer, as I discovered in a response from the good folks in the city’s communications department.
As I understand it, the Southeast False Creek Official Development Plan area is divided into three main pieces. So, since I’ve got elementary school on my mind, let’s get out a pen and a piece of paper.
Draw a rectangle, then draw two vertical lines that divide up the rectangle into three parts. On the left side, write 1A, then 2A in the middle piece and 3A and 3B on the right side.
With me?
Good.
The city owns Area 1A, which is undeveloped, and Area 3A (not sure what’s going on there) while Concert Development owns 3B and is building condos there right now.
Area 2A is the Olympic Village property.
So who owns it?
The city owns the streets on the land, the waterfront, community plaza, parks, habitat island, Salt building and the community centre.
The commercial spaces that are home to London Drugs, Terra Breads and others, plus the market rental buildings and the affordable housing are subdivided into something called “airspace parcels” and owned by different entities.
That is correct — “airspace parcels,” which I believe has no French translation and would certainly blow Mme. Heineke’s mind in trying to explain what it means.
I won’t even try.
Anyway, the city owns the affordable housing in parcels two, five and nine. Real estate investment group Bentall Kennedy owns the market rental housing in parcels three, six and nine.
First Capital Realty owns commercial spaces in parcels five, six, nine and 10. And, finally, the market condos — 67 of which were bought by the Aquilinis for $91 million — are subdivided by stratas and each lot is owned by the buyer. The strata council owns the common property and represents each of the owners.
Got all that?
To add to the complexity of ownership at Southeast False Creek, there are other properties referred to in the city plan as Area 1B and Area 2B, which run along Second Avenue and includes the 147-unit social housing building known as the Marguerite Ford Apartments.
The building is one of the so-called 14 social housing properties around Vancouver that saw the city provide the land and the provincial government pay for the construction and operation.
So, yes, you have people who were once without a home living next to people who can afford to plunk down more than a million bucks on a condo the size of a small classroom.
And that experiment, from what I hear, isn’t exactly getting top marks.
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