Twenty-two elected officials and their staffs visited the city and suburbs of Vancouver British Columbia during the last weekend of September. The purpose of the trip was to see how that region was implementing its own regional strategy of focusing growth in centers and corridors, in both the city of Vancouver and the suburbs.
The effort to integrate green design into the Olympic Village (which will become a new waterfront neighborhood of 1,200 homes after the Olympics) was one of the highlights of the trip. But another set of projects that generated serious picture-taking was two big box stores, Home Depot and Canadian Tire and a grocery store that had been developed with several stories of housing overhead. These stores serve several neighborhoods in the south part of Vancouver. Rather than being surrounded by a parking lot each of the stores provided parking in or below the building. Many of the customers arrived by bus, on foot and the new station on an extension of the region’s rapid transit system.