Grandview Corner. Is this the shape of sustainability in South Surrey?
Recently I was down in South Surrey visiting some friends and on the way to their place, I decided to check out what Surrey is promoting as basically South Surrey’s new Downtown: Grandview Corners near 24th Avenue and 160th Street. I took the 321 bus and got off on 152nd Street and walked a good 15 minutes to this “downtown”. While this development might be designed to look like a downtown, it felt like an adult version of Main Street, Disneyland. This development gives nothing back to the public realm and actually turns its back to 24th Avenue which should be the main high street in the area. As a pedestrian, I had 24th Avenue on my left and a parking lot on my right which does not win the area any points for walkability. There should have been shops fronting 24th Street with some mixed-use to give the area a sense of place, provide a pedestrian-friendly environment, and provide affordable housing in the area. Even within Grandview Corners, there is a lack of mixed-use development. It really is no different than any other power centre I’ve been to except is has a “main street” running through the middle and some structured parking. With no transit and a hostile pedestrian environment, Grandview Corners could only be considered walkable if you considered driving your car to its parking lot and walking around the shops walkable.
Grandview Corners is what they call a lifestyle centre and while Grandview Corners may not be the best example of a lifestyle centres, there are other lifestyle centres that are high streets and create truly walkable areas.
The one thing that Grandview Corners does get right is moving a good chunk of the parking out of surface parking lots and into structured parking. To fix Grandview Corners, the surface parking lots that are fronting 24th Avenue and 160th Street should be converted into mixed-use buildings that face the street. This combined with TransLink’s proposed new bus service in the area would go along way to building a truly walkable area.
Following in the spirit of a similar series by our friends over at 
What began six years ago as the Surrey High School Film Festival has now become a two-day, multi-aged, international event. Re-launching this summer as the 
Rize Alliance, the developer behind “
Last week, Premier Christy Clark said that she would not allow for a vehicle levy or any new taxes to pay for earmarked transit improvements. The package of services that was approved last fall included Surrey’s first B-Line down King George, a RapidBus service for Langley and Surrey across the new Port Mann Bridge, station improvements at Surrey Central SkyTrain, as well as hundreds of thousands of new bus service hours, many of which were for the South of Fraser. All of these may 