Latest news with #BroadwayPlan
Global News
21 hours ago
- Business
- Global News
Trio of towers next to Commercial-Broadway station approved
Vancouver city council has approved a rezoning application for a contentious housing development next to one of the region's busiest transit hubs. The approval comes after nearly a decade of proposals, pushback and debate for the site adjacent to the Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station. The approved plan will see a Safeway supermarket and large parking lot redeveloped into 1,044 rental homes in three towers with heights of 44, 38 and 37 storeys. View image in full screen A rendering of the trio of proposed towers for Commercial and Broadway in Vancouver. City of Vancouver The approval comes about a month after a public hearing that saw about 100 people turn out to speak, with passionate feelings on both sides. Story continues below advertisement On Tuesday, the proposal passed, with Mayor Ken Sim and most councillors in support. COPE Coun. Sean Orr voted against the rezoning, while Green Coun. Pete Fry abstained. 'I worry that we are giving the developer double the height and we're not seeing the public benefits that we could be seeing at the site,' Orr said during the debate. 2:14 Drastic changes made to Broadway-Commercial Safety redevelopment plan Under the rezoning approved Tuesday, 10 per cent of the rental units will be held at the citywide average of market rates, while the remainder will be leased at going market rates. Get breaking National news For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen. Sign up for breaking National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy During the public hearing, the affordability of the rentals planned for the development was a key point of contention for project opponents. Critics called for the development to mirror rules under the Broadway Plan, which require 20 per cent of units to be held at 20 per cent below market rates. Story continues below advertisement ABC Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung said the city simply needs more rental housing of all types. 'These are not condos that are going to stay empty,' she told council. 'These are rental homes that people are going to live in. They're not affordable for everybody, but they are more affordable than other options.' Some supporters argued that the project actually doesn't go far enough, noting that it is adjacent to the hub of two SkyTrain lines and the busy 99 B-Line bus route. 2:05 Public hearings on controversial East Vancouver development postponed again It's an argument that appears to have held sway with the mayor and councillors. 'It's by the third busiest transit hub in the region, so it just makes sense that we build there,' Sim said. Story continues below advertisement Councillors also approved an amendment aimed at maximizing public access to a 12,000-square-foot courtyard space in the project. The decision comes after years of back and forth and controversy about a development at the site. Previous drafts that faced local pushback were focused on condos rather than rentals, and included a version with two towers, the tallest of them 24 storeys, and a 2022 version that envisioned a pair of towers with one reaching 30 storeys. That version nearly made it to a public hearing in 2022, but was sidelined by the 2022 municipal election.
Vancouver Sun
04-06-2025
- Politics
- Vancouver Sun
The most beautiful block in Vancouver is for sale
In 1976, the City of Vancouver handed out its first-ever heritage plaque to an 1891 house at 166 West 10th in Mount Pleasant. 'We received that from Art Phillips, who was mayor at the time,' recounts John Davis, whose family restored the house. 'We got (a plaque) ahead of the Marine Building. That's how enthusiastic the city was then.' The Davis family had purchased the house in 1973 for $30,000 and did an immaculate restoration. When four more old homes went for sale on the same block for $177,000, the family bought them, as well. 'They were being sold as a development site,' he explains. 'And we thought, 'Wow, let's just buy them, redo them and restore them and carry on.'' Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The Davis family's heritage homes helped spark a revitalization of Mount Pleasant, which was a bit rough in the 1970s. Over time, more homeowners restored their old homes, turning their part of Mount Pleasant into Vancouver's most acclaimed heritage neighbourhood. When the Vancouver park board had a contest for the city's most beautiful street in 1999, the winner was the 100-block of West 10th, where the Davises had restored nine homes. What makes it special? The homes may date to the 1890s and early 1900s, but they look brand new, with colourful paint jobs that evoke San Francisco's famous 'painted ladies' and heritage touches like elaborate Victorian lattice work, dentil mouldings, large verandas, bay windows, wood windows, steep gabled roofs and an arched upper floor balcony. But times have changed. With the city's Broadway Plan and the province's transit-oriented density legislation, Mount Pleasant has been earmarked for high-rise towers. One proposal is for an 18-storey building at 121-129 West 11th, a stone's throw away from the four homes the Davis family owns at 140, 144, 148 and 150 West 10th. If the tower is built, the Davis homes will literally be in its shadow. So John Davis and his brother Geoff have decided to sell and retire, after a half a century of heritage preservation. 'They want to build an 18-storey tower back there, which we just see as a huge insult,' said Davis, 77. 'It's an insult to us, it's an insult to the entire neighbourhood. It's unacceptable they (would) even think of it.' The 100-block of West 10th is an oasis of heritage houses, giant Chestnut trees and gardens, as much like a park as a street. 'It's kind of like the lungs of the city,' said Davis, who sees the tranquillity on West 10th as 'a little pocket of sanity' is the rush and non-stop construction of contemporary Vancouver. The asking price for the four homes is $13.8 million. They come as a single 128.5 by 132 ft. lot, which could make it tricky to sell. The houses all have heritage designation, and are divided into 15 apartments. But they could still be torn down with council approval, although the city said in an email 'demolition is usually not supportable, and designated properties generally must be appropriately conserved at all times.' Davis had hoped any future owner might be able to take the undeveloped 'air rights' on the site to another property, but the city email said 'we don't 'sell' air rights, nor is 'density transfer' applicable in this case.' Retired Vancouver planner Sandy James said the Davis family's 'stewardship' of the neighbourhood has been exemplary. 'At a time when you could sell your single-family house and do a three-storey walk-up, they chose to make apartments inside a house,' she said. 'They also were the first people to look at a laneway house and redevelop that. 'That became the pattern language for what happened in west Mount Pleasant. It became a way to show what an Edwardian and Victorian street looked like, but at the same time, provide housing where people could actually have the amenity of having a yard, being able to sit out and be in a neighbourhood.' The Davis family have had some run-ins with authority. Davis notes that his late mother Pat fought with the city and B.C. Hydro when they wanted to cut part of the street's giant Chestnut trees into a U shape for power lines. (There are no lanes in the 100-block of West 10th.) 'My mother came out here and asked them not to cut until we could sort out a solution to the problem,' he recalls. 'But they wouldn't stop. They were up in their bucket, and she got in the cab of the truck and got the keys, and the guy was stuck up in the bucket. The crew phoned the police, and there was a big kerfuffle.' Hydro wound up installing taller poles so the power lines were out of the tree canopy, and one of Vancouver's leafiest streets is the result. Pat Davis seems like a force of nature. 'My mother stripped and refinished the wood in all of these houses by herself,' said her son. 'She worked like a tiger, but she loved it.' The Davis family did all their restoration without any economic help from the city — they financed everything through mortgages, rents and selling off some of the houses they restored. They haven't even received any heritage grants for painting their houses. 'The city now has the True Colors (heritage paint) program, and you can get a grant to paint your house,' he said. 'But we don't qualify because we won't paint it their colours.' jmackie@
Global News
16-05-2025
- Business
- Global News
Plan for 3 towers next to Commercial-Broadway station finally heads to public hearing
After nearly a decade of proposals, pushback and debate, a plan to build a set of towers next to one of Metro Vancouver's busiest transit hubs is getting a public hearing. About 100 people have signed up to speak for and against the proposed redevelopment of a Safeway lot next to the Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station. The plan before council envisions three towers, with heights of 44, 38 and 37 storeys, comprising 1,044 rental homes. 2:14 Drastic changes made to Broadway-Commercial Safety redevelopment plan Ten per cent of those units would be secured at city-wide average market rates, while the remainder would lease for going market rates. Story continues below advertisement The proposal has generated strong feelings on both sides, with supporters arguing more housing is critically needed, particularly near transit, and opponents arguing the units won't be affordable. 'Vancouver has a crushing shortage of housing. For decades, we have not been building enough housing, and this neighbourhood, Grandview Woodlands, is a great example of this, we basically haven't built much new housing there since the 1970s, and as a result the population there is actually declining … despite the fact this SkyTrain station we are talking about is one fo the busiest transit hubs in the country,' Peter Waldkirch, director of Abundant Housing, told CKNW's The Jill Bennett Show. 'Burnaby just proposed an 80-storey tower … it's actually quite perverse, it's backwards that we are building bigger and taller buildings than this in the suburbs than we are in the heart of the city.' Get breaking National news For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen. Sign up for breaking National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy Opponents like Craig Ollenberger, chair of the Grandview Woodland Area Council, say the proposed secured market rental requirement is far too low. View image in full screen A rendering of the trio of proposed towers for Commercial and Broadway in Vancouver. City of Vancouver 2:05 Public hearings on controversial East Vancouver development postponed again Speaking on CKNW's The Jas Johal Show, he said the city should look to replicate what it did in the Broadway Plan, which is 20 per cent of units at 20 per cent below market rates. Story continues below advertisement 'It is bringing nothing but 1,000 luxury rental units to our community, suites that nobody will be able to afford. And for that the city is only asking for 10 per cent of the units to be at market rent,' he said. 'This community, the majority of people can't afford market rent.' The proposed redevelopment would also include a 37-space child care facility, a ground-level public plaza and an upper-level courtyard. The development has been contentious ever since it was first put forward in 2016, as part of the broader Grandview-Woodland Community Plan approved by the council led by then-mayor and now federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson. Neighbourhood groups had rejected a previous version of the community plan, arguing it would radically change the neighbourhood's character, and the pushback led to a municipal citizens' assembly whose feedback was eventually integrated into the revised 2016 plan, which included a maximum tower height of 24 storeys. A proposal for the Safeway site envisioned two towers, one of them hitting that threshold. 2:04 Grandview Woodland development tour A subsequent version of the proposal, with the tallest tower reaching 30 storeys and composed mostly of condos, nearly made it to a public hearing in 2022, but was sidelined by the 2022 municipal election. Story continues below advertisement 'The economics have changed. Rents were lower a few years ago … interest rates were lower … community expectations were different. I think when this project started getting negotiated, you could argue against the need for more housing more successfully,' said Tom Davidoff, an associate professor of economics at UBC's Sauder School of Business. Davidoff said the pressure to get new units built and to comply with the provincial and federal governments' transit-oriented density requirements will likely weigh in the project's favour. The site would sit virtually on top of the intersection of two SkyTrain lines and the 99-B Line bus route. It's TransLink's third-busiest transit hub, and saw more than 6.2 million boardings in 2023. 'If you can't have density at the intersection of streets named Commercial and Broadway, where there is a major transit intersection, I don't know where you want people to go,' Davidoff said. With scores of people signed up to speak, Wednesday's hearing could go late into the evening, — with files from Alissa Thibault
Globe and Mail
13-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
B.C. Insider: Problems with Vancouver's Broadway Plan
Vancouver's Broadway Plan envisions a forest of towers lining that central thoroughfare and the blocks on either side of it, a plan that accommodates 20- to 30-storey buildings offering multitudes more housing. The Broadway Plan was created in part to address the desperate, indisputable need for more housing in Vancouver. So it's vivid irony that the same development community that is supposed to be providing this surge of new supply is finding itself with hundreds of units that can't be sold. Frances Bula reports today that one of them, Boffo Developments, has refunded – with interest – buyers of its presales efforts on the first of four towers it had planned in a Burnaby development. Only 44 of the 318 units in the first tower sold between July and December last year, and then sales fell off a cliff completely in the new year. Ordinarily, said Karen West, vice-president for marketing and sales with the company, Boffo would see about 90 sales in the first three months. The company paused the project, is returning deposits with interest, and waiting for better conditions. In another telling sign of trouble, Rennie Marketing, one of Greater Vancouver's major presale marketing companies, last week laid off 25 per cent of its staff. 'It's like this cascading waterfall of bad news,' said Ryan Berlin, Rennie's chief intelligence officer. In metropolitan Vancouver, there are currently 2,500 condo units completed and unsold, and that number could climb to 3,700 by the end of the year, Berlin said. Central 1 Credit Union economist Bryan Yu said Monday the industry is in recession. As Kerry Gold reported, it's a problem that has been brewing for months. Developers have been hit with uncertainty and elevated costs because of the U.S.-instigated trade war, as well as regulations designed to dampen a market once driven by speculation and investment. All those factors have driven away investors. Berlin said that from 2020 to 2023, investors represented half of Rennie Marketing's buyers. By 2024, they made up one-quarter of buyers. This year, only 7 per cent of buyers are investors, he said. The investor buyer has kept the condo market going for decades, Kerry writes. Willing to put up the deposit far in advance of the completed building, the investor enables the developer to obtain financing to construct. Once completed, the investor finds tenants for the unit, and investor landlords became a significant source of housing in the rental market. When lucrative rents were achievable, and borrowing money was cheap, the investor could easily cover costs, known as positive cash flow. For the non-investor, the buyer who wants a place to live, Berlin said, his company is seeing a lot of those people adding family members to their presale contracts as a way of qualifying for mortgages. Market conditions mean many buyers are finding their units assessed at less than what they paid for them, which means banks are reducing the amount they will lend and buyers are having to make up the difference with additional cash of their own, Berlin said. For those who can't manage a larger down payment on a lower-valued condo, some presale buyers are simply walking away from their very large initial deposits. That's another squeeze on developers, and in Toronto, some are fighting back: Developers there have initiated more than a hundred lawsuits in efforts to get their full purchase price from presale buyers. Prices have come down, which should be good news for some. Berlin said that in downtown Vancouver, where prices pre-COVID could reach $3,000 a square foot for a luxury condo, now those rates are no more than $1,800 a square foot. But demand has dried up, leaving thousands of units unsold at prices too high to meaningfully tackle the housing shortage. This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you're reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.
Vancouver Sun
01-05-2025
- Business
- Vancouver Sun
Opinion: Tenant rights shouldn't be an afterthought during redevelopment
Article content Vancouver city council voted 5-4 against a motion brought forward on April 16 by Councillor Pete Fry on behalf of the city's Renters Advisory Committee that sought to expand Broadway Plan tenant protections across the city. The Broadway Plan protections provide existing renters with the right to a replacement unit at a similar rent to their previous unit plus interim rent top-up support during the redevelopment of their buildings. Article content Article content Article content The city's general policy, however, does not include these specific protections, and tenants elsewhere in the city are at greater risk of being displaced into core housing need (i.e., unaffordable, substandard, or overcrowded housing) through the redevelopment of their buildings. Article content Article content The co-chairs of the Renters Advisory Committee, Nick Poppell and Colleen Wickstrom, both made presentations to council describing the challenges of tenants facing displacement and urged them to approve this motion in order to help protect tenants in other areas of the city not covered by the stronger policy. Article content But Councillor Mike Klassen, and the rest of the ABC councillors present at the meeting, found these arguments unconvincing. Indeed, Klassen cited Landlord B.C. CEO David Hutniak's concerns that the costs of the Broadway Plan protections on developers were preventing projects from pencilling out and moving forward. Article content Klassen argued that the best rental protections are to continue increasing the supply of new rental housing as much as possible and that expanding the Broadway Plan protections across the city risked conflicting with this goal amidst challenging market conditions for new development. Article content Article content Councillor Lucy Maloney countered that, while new supply is important, tenant rights should be seen as an essential part of the city's housing policies and not an option to include or remove depending on market conditions. Article content Article content Furthermore, Councillor Sean Orr argued that the focus should not just be on expanding the Broadway Plan protections across the city but also on further strengthening the protections themselves — such as by removing potential loopholes that could allow developers to avoid their obligations to tenants. Article content On the other hand, we can strengthen tenant protections to prevent displacement, but this makes it harder for redevelopment projects to pencil out and move forward, which limits the growth of much-needed housing supply in our region.
