Plan for 3 towers next to Commercial-Broadway station finally heads to public hearing – BC

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.

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Ten per cent of those units would be secured at city-wide average market rates, while the remainder would lease for going market rates.

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.”

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Opponents like Craig Ollenberger, chair of the Grandview Woodland Area Council, say the proposed secured market rental requirement is far too low.

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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.

“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.

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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.

“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

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