The ThunderBlogs

Condos are springing up all along Kingsway, introducing not only a new landscape to the nearby neighbourhoods but also new dynamics.

Kingsway is a high-traffic road. The road is like an urban desert between 10^th avenue and the northern tip of Collingwood. Despite the wealth of stores and services along the road, cars dominate the scene and few people are on the sidewalks.

Local stores, restaurants and auto-repair shops sporting multilingual signs like “Dong Thanh Supermarket” and “Do Most Auto Repairs” line either side of the road. There are also various religious centres hidden under the disguise of commercial spaces, including the Gold Buddha Monastery, which is housed in a three-storey brick building that looks nothing out of the ordinary aside from a golden awning. But there are few residential buildings along the way, except for the rare upper-levels of stores that have been turned into homes.

Most stores have parking at the rear and other services like TD Bank offer drive-thru. There are few green spaces along the road. The sole purpose of the road seems to be for people with cars to get in and get out – quickly.

But this commercial and robotic landscape is about to change.

Between Mount Pleasant and Collingwood, new condo developments have started to appear. There are the King Edward Village high-rise condos at the corner of King Edward and Knight. These condos were built in 2008 and are modern glass-clad structures ranging from five to 17 floors. There is a mid-rise condo with a modern exterior of glass and brick currently under construction at Gladstone and Kingsway across from a large Canadian Tire. And there are two condo towers of Kingsway 2300, which will be constructed upon demolition of the El Dorado Motor Hotel currently at that location. The El Dorado Motor Hotel, now empty and dilapidated, used to be a popular spot for business travellers and also was a neighbourhood music venue and pub.

In matters of a couple years, the landscape on Kingsway has changed from only two to three-storey flat-roofed commercial spaces, to an interspersion of contemporary and swanky condos. But alongside these developments came corporate logos and large chains. For example, a Starbucks coffee was built into the ground level of a King Edward Village condo – in contrast to the rest of Vancouver, this is the only Starbucks to be found along Kingsway before passing into Burnaby; it is a newcomer.

According to Vancouver-Kingsway MP Don Davies, densification of Kingsway with condos could improve the use of space by densely housing many small households while allowing existing or new stores to occupy the ground levels.

But on the other hand, the transformation of a street that has historically been used for transportation purposes to one for housing a dense population could have negative consequences. How will this new and large population affect the day-to-day interactions of the families living in homes quietly tucked behind Kingsway? What Davies calls densification is known as gentrification to many others, which is often blamed for drastic increases in prices of residential and commercial property. The rapidity of change has created an undeniable possibility that wealthy corporations like Starbucks might slowly conquer Kingsway while small family-owned businesses gradually disappear. Already, there are many empty store windows along Kingsway with large “For Lease” signs hanging, making room for larger businesses to move in.