Tag Archives: Port Moody development

NewPort Village and its clone

May 27, 2012 By in Tricities, Urban Villages Project Tags: , , Leave a comment

Port Moody’s NewPort Village is evidence of a substantial market for high-density living in the suburbs of B.C.’s Lower Mainland.

Bosa, the project developer, opened NewPort’s first mixed-use  buildings about 1997, squeezing them against the butt end of an existing shopping centre.  The owners of the Heritage Mountain plaza clearly refused to play ball with Bosa; but NewPort’s Whistler-style streetscape,  complete with cute upmarket shops, proved popular with consumers and home buyers from the start.  Within a few years the village was ringed with apartment towers. Continue reading →

Tri-Cities towers: built on promises

October 20, 2011 By in Planning and Development, Transit, Skytrain, LRT, Tricities Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Of all the Metro Vancouver suburbs, Port Moody has worked most diligently in the past 15 years to manufacture city-like environments, based on the expectation that rapid transit was coming soon.  Thousands of people are waiting for that first train.

NewPort Village, a pedestrian-oriented ring of retail shops and condos protected from through traffic (some might call it “Whistler-style development”) opened about 1997.  It’s been almost freakishly successful, attracting a cluster of residential towers.

More recently, development jumped to the west side of Ioco Road, where a kind of mini-Yaletown has sprouted up.  In 2009, however, Mayor Joe Trasolini imposed a moratorium on high-density development in Port Moody.  “The population in the last 15 years has doubled . . . we’re being criticized for growing too much without infrastructure in place.” Continue reading →