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The challenge of finding good spaces for child care in downtown Vancouver has led to a location one city staffer described Wednesday as “very unusual” — the roof level of Gastown parkades.

The plan to build child-care facilities on the rooftop levels of the seven-storey parking facilities “seems to make sense on many levels to us,” Danica Djurkovic, Vancouver’s director of facilities planning and development, told council.

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“This is a very unusual treatment, having child care on a parkade,” Djurkovic said. “It actually came about from our restrictions and challenges around finding good sites for child care downtown, while there is growing need and demand. So we came up with what we thought was a very creative solution, which is putting child care on top of the existing parkade that the city owns.”

The two linked city-owned parkade facilities are at 150 Water St. and 151 West Cordova, across the alley from each other in Gastown.