What Vancouver’s Broadway area could look like with 7,200 new rentals

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For decades, Vancouver’s major east-west thoroughfare — Broadway — has been largely defined by a ho-hum mishmash of low- and medium-rise residential and commercial buildings.

But at the corner of Broadway and Granville, a soaring 39-storey tower now under construction is a sign of the transformation about to hit this corridor.

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“It’s an awesome view, right?” a visibly excited Tim Grant, president of PCI Developments, commented on a recent tour of the penthouse suite. “It’s going to be a pretty significant change in a pretty short period of time.”

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What kind of change? Taller, denser, and more urban.

Almost two years after Vancouver’s previous council adopted a plan to turn the Broadway corridor into Vancouver’s “second downtown,” city hall has been flooded with dozens of major development applications.

PCI Developments’ 39-storey tower above the future South Granville subway station is the only residential project already being built under by the plan.

But dozens of other major projects are in the planning and approval pipeline along the under-construction subway line.

City planners say they show the plan appears to be rolling out largely as had hoped, giving priority to market and below-market rental housing, rather than condos, and job spaces in this corridor of roughly 500 city blocks extending through Kitsilano, Fairview, and Mount Pleasant.

Postmedia News’ analysis of city data shows developers have submitted 50 rezoning applications for a range of projects that could produce:

• 6,215 new market rental apartments
• 1,322 new below-market rental apartments
• 125 condos
• 1.37 million square feet of office space
• 287,000 square feet of retail and service space
• 780,000 square feet of industrial space
• 282,000 square feet of hotel space
• 49,000 square feet of child-care spaces
• 46,000 square feet of cultural spaces

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And this only represents the earliest round of development interest.

While there is no guarantee all of these projects will be built soon — or at all — all signs indicate many more will follow. In addition to the 50 full rezoning applications submitted, the city has also received another 94 inquiries about rezonings. Details about those 94 inquiries are not yet publicly available and not included in the tally above.

All this change will inevitably be challenging for some people — especially longtime tenants facing displacement when their homes are demolished and redeveloped.

Postmedia’s review of the public rezoning applications show about 430 existing rental homes could be lost through this first round of rezoning applications. These include old apartment buildings providing many of Vancouver’s more affordable rentals, as well as land assemblies seeking to redevelop houses and duplexes. Projects still in the early stages will also add an unknown number of existing homes that will be lost through redevelopment.

A primary goal of the Broadway plan is “minimizing displacement impacts by ensuring renters can remain in their neighbourhood at affordable rents.”

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To some, this will seem a tall order.

Before and after the Broadway plan’s approval in 2022, planners and politicians pointed to Burnaby’s

Metrotown

area as something to avoid: older, more affordable apartment buildings being torn down and replaced by expensive condo towers. That development rush added homes, but yielded a net loss in rentals,

displacing many longtime tenants

who got relatively meagre compensation and were forced to leave the region.

Matt Shillito, who oversaw the Broadway plan’s development and is now Vancouver’s interim director of planning, is both pleased with the surge in development and confident tenant displacement can be minimized.

This is because of the Broadway plan’s tenant protections, which then mayor Kennedy Stewart and others heralded as the strongest in Canada. The new rules mean any tenant displaced by redevelopment will have right of first refusal for a similar apartment in a replacement building, at the rent they were previously paying. Pplus the developer is responsible for finding an interim home during construction, and topping up their rent.

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“I don’t want to be glib about the existing tenant situation. … Even being displaced for two or three years from your home is a major disruption,” Shillito said. “It’s too early to declare victory on the tenant displacement piece. Because yes, the protections are in place — but we’ve not yet had any buildings knocked down yet. The proof is through that process. But we’re still optimistic.”

Grant’s company, PCI, has a lot in the pipeline for Broadway. In addition to the Granville rental tower, PCI is also proposing a 30-storey rental project across from the future Arbutus subway station, a new multi-tower development combining rental homes, retail, office, daycare and public park at the under-construction Emily Carr-Great Northern Way transit station, and another major project beside the existing VCC-Clark station, including rental homes, industrial, grocery, retail and daycare.

PCI’s projects at those four station locations would combine for 1,550 rental homes, including 308 below-market units.

Notably, none of those projects would displace residential tenants.

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For city planners like Shillito, that kind of result — producing hundreds of below-market rentals without losing one existing home — is what they want.

This is one key factor providing at least a sliver of optimism for longtime Mount Pleasant renter Mike Hanafin.

Hanafin predicted in his comments to Postmedia in 2022, before the Broadway plan’s approval, that he and many others would likely face demoviction through redevelopment.

Last month, Hanafin received confirmation: Developers are considering redeveloping his apartment building.

“I don’t want to be perceived as a NIMBY, or resisting the future,” he said. “The future is coming. But what is the collateral damage going to be for certain people?”

Hanafin, who has been demovicted before, says displacement will inevitably be difficult even if all tenant protection policies work as advertised — and, he says, “that’s a big if.”

Despite Hanafin’s unease, the protections adopted by Vancouver’s previous council give him some optimism for the long run, he said, and the idea of a new, rent-controlled apartment in the neighbourhood is appealing. And, he points out, projects seem to be advancing despite some developers’ predictions in 2022 that onerous tenant protections would kill development.

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“Not often I say ‘Thank goodness for Kennedy Stewart and the previous city council,’ but I say it now,” Hanafin said. “It’s still going to suck for some people — most people? But at least there are some potential good outcomes down the road.”

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