Artist rendering of proposed towers.

Image Credit: SUBMITTED

KELOWNA - The Capri Centre Mall is Kelowna’s oldest shopping centre, occupying a prime 20-acre site on the edge of downtown.

In January, mall owner RG Properties put forth an ambitious proposal for a planned community that could ultimately see 15 buildings on the site and would include an outdoor skating rink amongst other park amenities.

Because of the multiple mixed uses, the size of the site and its importance as one of the largest chunks of land in downtown Kelowna, the developer and city planners have agreed on a master plan known as a comprehensive development zone.

A CD zone, as it’s known, is a special building zoning that goes into great detail on how a development will unfold; what it will look like, maximum building heights, park spaces and amenities and so on.

Or not.

“A CD zone can be very prescriptive and customized to the specific project at hand,” urban planning manager Terry Barton explains. “We don’t have very many in Kelowna and it usually takes some extraordinary development to trigger one.”

However, Barton says the CD26 zone that covers the Capri site was deliberately written with flexibility in mind, given the 15- to 25-year timeline for the project to build out.

“If written with very detailed oriented regulations, then the developer is simply going to come forth every 5 or 10 years and say ‘oh, the market has changed, trends in development are different we need to change this’,” Barton says. “The Capri site has specific principles the developer must adhere to, but how they get there is up to them. If you create a very flexible zone and that’s what was done here, you're dealing with a bit more ambiguity but you allow the developer to be able to shift things around and still follow the zone.”

The Capri CD zone was first presented to Kelowna council in January. They were supposed to approve it this week, but instead councillors balked at some of the details and deferred it, asking the developer for clarification on some details of the plan.

So what’s the point of a master plan that can be changed seemingly at will?

“When council adopted the zone, they didn’t want a detailed master plan they knew was likely to change,” Barton explains. “They wanted to provide a flexible zone that allows the developer to continue to come in from time to time and continue to revise their original vision.”

Barton says changes in development trends, the current state of the real estate market and even the economy at the time all play a role in how a CD zone unfolds.

“The market absolutely plays a role amongst other factors,” he adds.

Barton says the city has 30 active CD zones, but probably the most famous one was the CD21 zone. It was paid for by Westcorp Development, but was ultimately denied by the council of the day in 2010.

The ambitious plan would have covered much of the downtown core and involved multiple property owners, which Barton says was one of the reasons why it failed.

“That was an incredibly prescriptive zone, location dependent and obviously very sensitive being in the heart of downtown,” he says. “Urban design objectives were paramount so it defined everything including specifically where the buildings would be and their density.”

Most large-scale commercial or residential developments in Kelowna fit into one of several existing zonings, so CD zones are the exception rather than the rule.

The new proposal, again by RG Properties, to build a cluster of residential towers beside Prospera Place arena is actually governed by CD5, an old zone put in place when the arena was built in the late 1990s. Tower Ranch golf community and McKinley Beach are other examples, as is the Conservatory project on Gordon Drive.

Barton says there aren’t many major tracts of land left, at least in the core of Kelowna, where a CD zone would be needed.

“Orchard Plaza could be one, if they decided to redevelop but I can’t think of another one,” he says. “It all depends on the development ideas that come forward. If it’s an out-of-the-box idea that we like but doesn’t fit into our current zoning, it would probably need a unique CD zone."

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