‘Nemesis’, one of our regular and eloquent contributors, offers these images from the Interior, with his own inimitable commentary.
The first of a series of occasional photo-essays.
Coming soon, to a city near you. -vreaa
Lucaya. Look On My Works, Ye Mighty and Despair!
An abandoned residential, prime water-front property development adjacent to Kelowna’s SkyeTower, which same – in a frantic endeavour to stave off imminent receivership – last year infamously reduced ask on remaining inventory by more than 40% (to the existential consternation of prior/pre-sale contract purchasers).
[Note to ChristianVultures: Lucaya is conveniently located mere steps from Kelowna's legendary, Charismatic Christian 'Living Faith Miracle Centre (Mending Lives - Giving Purpose)' - where Pastor Tracy Weekes together with her husband, 'Apostle' Everton Weekes rapturously promise their acolytes, '[a] fullness of intimate worship, where they can encounter God’s awesome presence and his healing touch’. Or as former TeleEvangelist Jim Bakker once remarked to his ‘shy/reluctant’ (but fetching) personal assistant, “When you help the Shepherd, you’re helping the sheep”.]
Lucaya’s derelict ‘Presentation Centre’.
Broken glass and unclaimed telephone directories litter the entrance.
Lucaya’s Deliciously Ironic LogLine: “Life Beyond Expectations”
Lucaya’s unfinished foundations – a forest of rebar and pre-stressed concrete monoliths – finds new life as combined ‘canvas’ and ‘gallery’ for aspirant local ‘Banksies’.
Lucaya ‘Tagged’.
Kinetic sculpture a la Lucaya.
[Images Ⓒ2011 ‘Nemesis’ – All Rights Reserved]
this is a definite buying opportunity
slap some 8s on that mofo
possibly the best contribution on this website, ever:
“slap some 8s on that mofo”
LMFAO
Nothing beside remains, round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.
Link, for anybody puzzled by the ramblings of the above “traveller(s) from antique land(s)”, to Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. [.... a great name for a condo development].
I wouldn’t make a kingly mountain out of a mole hill made for the commons. This development was stopped in 2008, about 2 1/2 years and counting, and it will most likely remain stopped for a LOT longer. It certainly gives a perspective on how slowly real estate markets move…
Oh cmon vreaa I’m sure half of us here have watched Watchmen.
With humility I have to admit I haven’t.
Is it any good?
I loved it.
I’m living in Marpole, and right around the Marine drive Skytrain station there is a bunch of development being planned – which makes perfect sense with the Canada Line there, which could really use something in the area – but Marpole being what it is, and the bubble being what it is, the residents’ association is having a hard time getting through to council with public consultation. Vancouver’s usually done some neighbourhood consultation, but in this case, not so much. Marpole doesn’t have much money.
The main goal for the residents appears to be to make sure the ground level stuff is walkable and safe (SW Marine isn’t terribly safe), and that the ground level open spaces and retail are positioned so that they’ll be used — so they draw folks other than drug dealers in. The secondary goal is that the towers don’t get so ludicrously high they block all light to the nearby park & school, although I must say, they will be right between the park and the transfer station, so perhaps they’ll strain the smell of dump from the air.
Anyway, looking at the high density plans I wondered if this is the sort of development at the end of a bubble that might be left hanging. Worst option would be that we end up with half done, semi-abandoned plans. So many units! So close to the dump! The registered plans definitely reminded me of all the ugly spiky little clusters of high rises around some of the Skytrain stations in Burnaby & on major traffic and truck routes like SW Marine. Those unwalkable areas strike me as slums waiting to happen.
We’ve had so many years of bubble it’s hard to imagine land being left half developed on a Skytrain route; and yet, Millennium Underwater is closer and had a lot more hype than our wee Marpudlian burg.
“land being left half developed on a Skytrain route” around Marpole is quite unlikely, imho. Because Sir Winston Churchill Secondary is within walking distance or a short drive away. The only risk side is half-empty or a ghost tower.
HAM to the rescue??
I’m sure Kelowna will be ground zero for the popping of the real estate bubble. The market has been bad for years. Prices on the street where I used to live dropped from $500k to currently $300k (this can be confirmed by the assessments which have also dropped). People don’t talk so much about real estate there anymore (though a few years ago it was smiles and high fives all around!). I do think it will get worse though…prices are still too high. There is way too much inventory. And sad to say, I know a few people who lent money to developers who promised the great returns, only to lose it all. Apparently, it was a myth that “everyone wants to live in Kelowna”.
Wine-fed beef, global strife and wealthy Albertans will save Okanagan real estate http://bit.ly/gA4sn9
Chingar Lucaya Kelowna … I like how it rhymes.
Great observation, Nemesis. Thank you.
Indeed, Shelley nicely summed up the ostentatious expectation and desolation in a few lines.
“Builder didn’t have the money to complete the project.”
“Both Octagon and Platinum are based in Calgary.”
hmm.. where did they go wrong, when Bosa’s ‘Sovereign’ sold out in 1 day, Intracorp’s ‘Metro Place’ voicemail-reservation was full within the first hours? Come Saturday the 16th, at the grand opening of Polygon’s ‘Chanchellor’ and Embassy’s ‘Vantage’, their VIP realtors are ready.
The sale modus operandi is simple. First, wine & dine them well. Promise them a huge commission and unlimited allotment of units. Then open the gate and slaughter the sheep. If densification is the solution to house people, developers need to rework their priority.
DanTheMan, et al… it was my distinct pleasure!
But the real kudos should go to my editor, VREAA – without whom, we would not have this GrandTestament to the GreatNarrativeArc that is everything YVR RE…
‘Nemesis’ may be a bit ‘scarce’ over the next few days as I pound the keyboard and over-caffeinate in aid of other causes but I’ll leave you all with the following two anthropological morsels and ‘double-down’ with two amusing ‘Zens’ immediately afterwards…
While they may at first glimpse ostensibly relate to the post-feminist project both pieces actually deal with a far broader socio-economic/political malaise… as well as, of course, RE…
[UK Guardian] – It’s nonsense for David Willetts to say that women have stolen men’s careers
“I had reason to converse with an estate agent this week, and his current difficulties were not at all those that I had imagined. His main problem is that he has a number of clients wishing to spend roughly £1m on large houses, and rather fewer such properties to sell.
Further, the people seeking these palatial south London homes during this economic downturn are often not even families in search of plenty of bedrooms. They are couples, quite often gay couples, he says, who don’t want children, but do want acres of communal space – huge kitchens, living rooms suitable for parties – and also acres of private space – giant bedrooms with enormous bathrooms, roomy walk-in dressing rooms, and a place to house their gym equipment.
The agent showed me the particulars for some of these homes, their expansive interiors filled with beautiful pieces of antique and modern furniture, looking like something out of a film. Lots of pale floors and white upholstery. Not in the least suitable for children…
Maybe David Willetts, the universities minister, knows many more people than I do who live like the clients of this estate agent, because what I was seeing and hearing reminded me immediately of the charmless phrase he used last week in the course of his notorious comments on Britain’s lack of social mobility. The latter, he observed, had largely been the result of feminism and the “assortative mating”, people of similar status pairing off, that it had fostered.”…
http://tinyurl.com/6jcywgc
[NewStatesman/LauriePenny] – Willetts has reminded us that social mobility is a scam
“Have women sold out working men? Have working men sold out women? While the commetariat pondered these questions, everyone failed to draw attention to the solid, foundational fact that it is the rich who have sold out the poor, mortgaging their life chances to pay the debts of global finance.
Over the course of a fortnight, conservative spin-doctors have performed an exquisite feat of repositioning. Framing the initial debate as a whodunnit – which sex killed social mobility? – lays down two important principles as a given. Firstly, that social mobility is the highest possible public good; secondly, that whoever is responsible for the nosedive in social mobility since the 1970s, it definitely wasn’t the free market.
Willetts’s notion that “feminism has trumped egalitarianism” holds no water. Ask any unemployed labourer in any of the thousands of northern towns eviscerated by Thatcher’s maceration of industry what’s really holding them back, and chances are they won’t say ‘women’. The delusion that women selfishly taking the jobs and university places that should have gone to working class men, and then even more selfishly refusing to sleep with them – a practice that Willetts delicately calls ‘assortative mating’ – distracts us from the greater truth that the social mobility experiment of the mid-century is over.”…
http://tinyurl.com/42co33z
And now for desert…
[ChinaDaily] – Jackstraws Come To Life For Spring
“Pre-sale speculators navigate the treacherous “jackstraw labyrinth” in Xianju county, East China’s Zhejiang province prior to embarking on yet another torturously competitive British Columbia property acquisition spree.”….
http://tinyurl.com/3wg977o
and, last up… is the fabled AustralianPropertyBoom finally ending?
[BBCAsiaPacific] – Australian Rats Scurry to Desert En Masse
“”Some of them get up to about 30cm [12in] long – fair lump of a rat,” livestock manager Chris Giles said. “They will run around and hide under a little bit of shrub there, and you can get pretty close to them,” Mr Giles, a stockman on the Northern Territory’s Lake Nash Station, told Australia’s ABC News…
Peter McDonald, acting scientist with Northern Territory Biodiversity Conservation, also pointed out that they were unlikely to stay put in the country’s “Red Centre”… “It’s not really ideal for them,” he said. “The chances are they are just moving through and they won’t set up camp or be too much of a nuisance.” …
http://tinyurl.com/3zs9bl8
what was marc faber’s advice to the UK youth?
oh right, “emigrate now.”
meet a lot of Irish in Van these days – seems like they are fleeing the ship, looking to settle here. will we see an Irish ghetto pop up?
hope so, love the Irish!
“meet a lot of Irish in Van these days – seems like they are fleeing the ship, looking to settle here. will we see an Irish ghetto pop up?
”
it would be a change, wouldn’t it?
(and all their friends with mortgages and maybe their folks all got bit by the Irish housing bubble)
my understanding is the usual situation, 6 – 8 of them to a house sort of thing. i’m embarrassed that anyone comes to canada and has to live in extraordinarily cramped conditions – unless they’re already used to it – lol.
tired of being the best, the biggest, #1, dominate, dominate, dominate zero sum game, etc. etc.
“the shits are killing us.”