Planners for new hospital near Downtown Eastside focus on integration

Theglobeandmail.com
Jan. 18, 2016
By Frances Bula

Planners working on the huge, new state-of-the art hospital near Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside say minimizing the impact on local neighbourhoods will be a key goal.

“There’s not a doubt a hospital this size will cause an impact,” Vancouver’s assistant planning director, Kevin McNaney, said as the city prepares to approve an expensive and labour-intensive new planning process on Wednesday for St. Paul’s Hospital.

And a spokesman for Providence Health Care, the organization that runs St. Paul’s, echoed that.

“We have to look at how to integrate the new hospital and make sure it’s not just an institution plopped down in the middle of a neighbourhood,” Providence spokesman Shaf Hussain said.

The new hospital will be built on a 7.5-acre former industrial site near the city’s train station, the historic neighbourhoods of Strathcona and Chinatown and a major wholesale-food-distribution area.

It will shift the centre of gravity in the city from the old St. Paul’s on Burrard Street in the West End, and is expected to bring pressure on housing, as well as requiring new roads for the 1.5-million square feet of hospital campus and other buildings around it.

Mr. McNaney said planners have already worked to protect Strathcona and the Downtown Eastside from too much housing pressure as hospital workers look for places to live nearby, through policies that protect existing social housing and require more of it in new developments.

He expects that many future employees will choose to live in the neighbourhoods being developed in Northeast False Creek, a short walk away.

City engineers will also need to do a lot of work planning new roads in the former industrial area and assessing the geotechnical issues.

The site is on land that was created in the last century by dumping fill into the eastern end of False Creek, and special construction techniques will be needed to ensure it and the roads around it can withstand an earthquake.

City staff have spelled out in the planning report that no housing, either market or subsidized, will be allowed on the new hospital site. However, planners will consider facilities such as seniors’ long-term care or residential addiction treatment as part of the hospital complex.

They will also be considering allowing uses such as hotels, doctors’ offices, shops and a whole cluster of other facilities.

And, even though it is not Vancouver’s job to oversee health care, city planners and councillors will also be asking St. Paul’s for assurances that residents of both the old and new neighbourhoods will get services similar to or better than before.

“We see the city being the lead on the land-use planning and we’re participating in the St. Paul’s-led clinical planning,” Mr. McNaney said.

But, he said, the city ultimately decides whether to grant a rezoning, and that gives politicians the leverage to ask for guarantees about health care.

Mr. Hussain said the biggest issue for the hospital is how to provide people in the West End and Downtown Eastside the services they need.

Many residents of the West End are nervous about the hospital leaving, saying they use it regularly for their health care.

But hospital planners have said sometimes local residents end up using the emergency ward when another type of clinic would be more useful and more efficient.

There are no immediate plans to redevelop the current St. Paul’s site on Burrard Street, although hospital leaders are counting on that as a major source of their $700-million share of the new $1.2-billion hospital. The province has committed to the other $500-million.

The complex process to plan the roads, land use, parks and public benefits for the new hospital will require the equivalent of six city staff working full-time for eight months. The city is charging St. Paul’s $810,000 to cover the costs of doing it in time for a fall deadline, which Providence is trying to meet so it can present its business case to the province.