After decades of languishing in disrepair and inciting angst-filled debate, the City of North Vancouver’s Shipyards District is set for its grand opening on Saturday. We could not be more pleased with what we’ve seen.
Not everyone got everything they wanted from the site. The new North Vancouver Museum will be located a short hike up the hill and we’ve yet to see that ferris wheel. But what is there today and coming tomorrow has something for everyone.
We offer praise to the current and past councils who saw opportunity and pursued it, despite some cantankerous naysayers. It would have been incredibly easy to just build condos to the maximum allowable setback to feather the tax base.
Increasingly, the single-family home with a private backyard is becoming a thing of the past. That’s why it’s so important municipalities recognize the need to transform underutilized public spaces. Waterfronts and city plazas are the community’s backyard, and should be cared for accordingly.
We’ll be watching closely to see how the operation runs, especially the outdoor rink and water park. But for the most part, the city did extremely well in its agreement with Quay Property Management, which paid the bulk of the capital costs.
This is as a major step forward for Lower Lonsdale, which has morphed from a seedy post-industrial ’burb to the envy of the Lower Mainland. The city’s North Shore neighbours are reticent to build denser, walkable, transit oriented communities, fearing they’ll become concrete hellscapes. The Shipyards prove that great things can happen when municipalities set out to design a slice of urban paradise.
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