Tall & Urban News

Development Targeting Essential Workers Proposed in Vancouver

The proposed rental tower at 1075 West Georgia Street’s rear would provide over 100 affordable units. Image credit: Reliance Properties.
The proposed rental tower at 1075 West Georgia Street’s rear would provide over 100 affordable units. Image credit: Reliance Properties.
07 May 2021 | Vancouver, Canada

A Vancouver parking structure could be redeveloped into a 46-story, 100 percent rental housing tower, if the project can clear rezoning requirements.

The proposed development site, at the southeast corner of the intersection of Dunsmuir Street and Thurlow Street and just west of SkyTrain Burrard Station in downtown Vancouver, is the rear of the 26-story office building at 1075 West Georgia Street. Reliance Properties wants to turn the northern parcel of the property into a tower with a total of 478 rental homes, including over 100 affordable units dedicated to workforce housing for essential workers — people earning between (CA$39,200 (US$32,327) and CA$78,500 (US$64,736). 

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In recent years, employers downtown have increasingly stated that housing affordability challenges had affected their ability to recruit and retain staff, who are otherwise forced to commute long distances from where they are able to find more affordable housing. However, the site is currently zoned for commercial use, and allowing this scale of residential use would be a significant departure for the intense employment-centric, commercial-only uses of downtown’s Central Business District (CBD).

About a decade-and-a-half ago, the municipal government enacted a moratorium on any further residential developments across much of the CBD to preserve future employment space. Currently, there is an office building boom in the downtown peninsula, totalling about a half-million square meters (5.5 million square feet) of new office space that will reach completion towards the middle of this decade.

Over the short term, and during the recovery period after the pandemic, at least, it is expected there will be softened demand for office space, but downtown Vancouver’s office vacancy rate is the lowest in North America and this is anticipated to continue for the foreseeable future.

Reliance Properties’ rental housing tower is currently in the pre-application stage with city staff; so far, they have been unable to proceed with a formal rezoning application.

There are two other major office projects within the immediate area of the intersection. Oxford Properties’ The Stack just to the west at 1133 Melville Street will be a 36-story office tower with 50,200 square meters (540,000 square feet) of AAA office space when complete in 2022, while Hudson Pacific Properties is planning to add about 42,000 square meters (450,000 square feet) of AAA office space to Bentall Centre as part of its plan to overhaul the complex.

For more on this story, go to Vancouver Urbanized.