The public comments heard at this week’s council meeting all offered support for a new proposal for Snug Cove, the creation of a three and a half-story apartment building with the space on the first floor dedicated to a community medical centre. The Bellringer family, owners of Village Square, have hired James Tuer to design the project, located at 980 Dorman Road, land that currently provides overflow parking for Village Square.
David Bellringer told The Undercurrent that the property came as part of a package-deal with the purchase of Village Square back in 2012, and has been underutilized as a parking lot.
“We did not acquire the property with the intention to build on it,” says Bellringer. “But as we’ve seen the demand for housing grow, we started considering what might be feasible there.”
Bellringer says that when they first purchased Village Square, there was a waiting list of roughly five people for the one and two-bedroom apartments above the shops.
“At the time, there was a lot of turn-over, people would find other options and move out so the list was constantly changing,” says Bellringer. “Now we have a list of 30 people looking for apartments, and nobody is moving out of their current rentals because there are no other options.”
He adds that from a development perspective, it is hard to make the cost of building come in line with affordable rental prices.
“In Vancouver, the cost of a rental is roughly $2.30 to $2.50 per square foot and rising rapidly, whereas building costs are $200 per square foot or less,” says Bellringer. “Here on Bowen, our rental prices are lower, and building costs are higher. But we know that a number of our local businesses are struggling to find people to work for them, and I personally would like to see more people living in the Cove, just to bring increased life and vitality.”
The idea of including a medical centre as part of the project came through conversations with Tim Rhodes and Colleen O’Neill, members of the Bowen Island Health Centre Society.
“There were a number of sites recommended to us for a health care centre, but some of those we did not like because they were not walkable, or particularly inconvenient for older people,” says Rhodes. “We considered municipal lands, but were concerned about the time it would take for them to be subdivided and rezoned for our purposes. The idea of teaming up on this project offered us the opportunity
Rhodes says that based on statistics gathered from the Bowen Island Health Needs Assessment survey, conducted in January of 2016, 88 percent of Islanders say they are in good health, yet 41 percent of respondents felt their health was at risk because they lived on Bowen Island. He told council that people going off-island for healthcare purposes also represented a loss of $1.1 million to the local economy each year. If a health care centre were built, he said, an estimate $550,000 of that could be recovered annually.
Rhodes says he understands that things move slowly on council, and often for good reason. However, he adds that he would like to see rezoning be completed within 6-9 months so that a healthcare centre on Bowen could be a reality by some time in 2018.
