A vision and a plan for the redevelopment of the Tsawwassen Town Centre is starting to come into focus.
On Thursday night, Sept. 28, a good response from the community was shown at an open house at Town Centre Mall hosted by Century Group.
Century Group president Sean Hodgins said the vision for Tsawwassen Town Centre is to transform what is now mostly a parking lot into an urban neighbourhood with homes over retail. This would include a lot of public pedestrian space focused on a new public library and central plaza.
With regards to the open house, Hodgins said there was a good energy amongst the crowd with a positive exchange of ideas.
“You always go into these things wondering how the mood would be. It was generally positive,” he said. “What negativity, was not very strident. We understand that something needs to happen in the community. We tried to talk about planning principles. The interaction we had four years ago and this notion of 20 stories has stuck in peoples’ minds. Twenty stories might be possible, but if you want to preserve open spaces like a library plaza, you have to go up, so getting into the nuisance of that.
“Most people seemed like…get on with it…this has been ongoing for too long.”
Hodgins said over the next month their team wants to finalize the form and character of the retail and what possibly a new grocery store would look like.
“That is the big technical planning thing we want to resolve in the plan and the density,” he said. “We already know that the retail will shrink a fair bit. The mall is now about 135,000 square feet of retail and it may be about half of that…I think that is what is supportable. Then after resolving that, having a discussion with the City of Delta and what they would support in terms of form and character of housing is really important.”
He said there will continue to be more opportunities for the public to comment and be a part of this planning process.
“We are determined to get an application into Delta as early as possible in 2024,” he said. “We got a lot of good feedback and some of it we will absolutely incorporate it.”
