Will New West city council reject the Columbia Square redevelopment?

3800 high-rise apartments on a seven-acre site next to a SkyTrain station

[Update: passed third reading 5-2, with Fontaine and Minhas voting against. New West council supports development of Columbia Square plan – but it’s not a done deal. Theresa McManus, New West Record.]

TLDR: On Monday, New Westminster city council decides whether to approve or reject a proposed redevelopment plan with 3800 high-rise apartments for Columbia Square, a seven-acre strip mall just west of New West SkyTrain station. If you’d like to write an email in support (or opposition), it takes literally 60 seconds. Direct link for Gmail or Outlook.

It doesn’t have to be long - it can be as short as “I support the proposed redevelopment. We desperately need more housing.” Please note that your email will be public.

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Columbia Square is a seven-acre site next to the New Westminster SkyTrain station that’s currently a strip mall and parking lot, with a Save-On-Foods. (I used to live in New West, so I’ve been there quite a lot.) It was purchased three years ago by a developer who wants to build residential high-rises.

After extensive negotiation with staff, the proposal is to build eight high-rises with 3800 apartments, 80% strata and 20% purpose-built market rental, with $60M in density bonus revenue.

New Westminster city council met on Monday to decide whether to approve the required rezoning. It complies with the city’s Official Community Plan, so under provincial legislation, the municipality cannot hold a public hearing. Agenda and staff report.

After a lengthy discussion, during which it seemed likely that a majority of council would reject it (two of seven were opposed because of the number of homes, two were opposed because of the lack of non-market housing), the developer offered to include 4% below-market rental (20% of the rental floor space), with no reduction in the density bonus revenue. Staff noted that the developer’s financing would fall through by the end of this week, so the developer is under pressure to get approval.

I’m not sure if this was helpful or not: councillors noted that they were uncomfortable with negotiating in real time. In the end, they decided to postpone the decision to a special meeting next Monday October 28. The developer is going to see if they can get their lenders to give them another week.

It was quite a wild ride, with the outcome still up in the air.

What happens next?

If you’d like to write in support (or opposition) of the redevelopment between now and Monday, it takes literally 60 seconds. Just send an email to clerks@newwestcity.ca, with the subject set to “Columbia Square - support” (or “opposed”). Direct link for Gmail or Outlook.

It doesn’t have to be long - it can be as short as “I support the proposed redevelopment. We desperately need more housing.”

I really liked what the mayor, Patrick Johnstone, said (starting around 2:38:20 in the meeting video):

To me, the discussion is whether we want 3800 homes on what is currently a car-oriented strip mall, next to a SkyTrain station.

We have seen other neighbourhoods - I think of Broadway and Commercial, or even Braid Station - that remain parking lots, because development has never been able to start, because perfection has replaced the desire for good use of the site.

And right now, we’re a city in a region that needs homes. We need all forms of homes, and that does mean that we need market homes as well as non-market homes.

People talk about transportation, about utility impacts, about parks improvements. This project alone will bring something over $10 million in parks improvements to the city, through the parks DCC. As well as transportation and utility DCCs, I think the number was $30 million in total DCCs.

I also wish there was more affordable housing viable in this market on this site, with this project. But we know from the discussions we've had over the last couple months that the market is not there to make that happen right now. We could wait for the market to change, so that we can get more non-market housing on this specific site. But we don't know if that's going to happen. Waiting does nothing to get affordable or market housing built, when we are in a housing crisis.

When we do not build any housing, when we wait for something better to come along on this site, we are pushing people out of New Westminster, we are pushing the growth that is happening in this region elsewhere. People are coming here. We can build housing for them adjacent to a SkyTrain station, in a mixed-use neighbourhood with great retail amenities. Or we can push them out to the edges of Langley, the edges of Surrey, the edges of Abbotsford, into greenfield spaces, when we're trying to preserve greenfield. To places where they don't have access to transit, where their cost of living is impacted by the need to drive through New Westminster because they're not here, driving regional traffic increases.

I ended up sending a long email.

To: clerks@newwestcity.ca
Subject: Columbia Square - support

Hello, my name is Russil Wvong. Thank you for serving on council! It's great to see so much new housing being built in New Westminster, especially near the SkyTrain stations.

I’m a volunteer with the Vancouver Area Neighbours Association. I don’t work in development or real estate. I'm writing in support of the redevelopment plan for Columbia Square.

I think most people would agree that housing in Metro Vancouver is terribly scarce and expensive. Younger people are being crushed and driven out by the high cost of housing. In 2015 you needed a household income of $100,000 or more to move here, and it’s gotten worse since then. Because we don’t have enough housing, prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to force people to give up and leave. High housing costs act like a barrier, keeping people out.

Even for older homeowners who bought 20 years ago and are insulated from rising housing costs, it’s a bad situation. Because younger people can’t afford to live here, the healthcare system is under increasing strain. A friend who worked in operations management at a hospital in Vancouver reported that the last time they had to hire an anesthesiologist, it took 18 months. In most places, an anesthesiologist would be able to live close to the hospital, but not here.

In other words, high housing costs lead directly to labour shortages, which affect everyone. We have a severe mismatch between housing and jobs: it's easy to add jobs, hard to add housing.

To fix this, we need a lot more housing. CMHC's estimate is that housing costs have to rise about 2% in order to reduce housing demand (through displacement, crowding, or homelessness) by about 1%. Conversely, if we could snap our fingers (or go back in a time machine to change our past housing policies) and have about 1% more housing today, prices and market rents would be about 2% lower. If we had about 10% more housing, prices and market rents would be about 20% lower.

We have limited land in Metro Vancouver, because of the ocean and the mountains. So it’s really important to make good use of the land that we do have, instead of leaving it mostly empty. This site is seven acres of underused land (a car-oriented strip mall and parking lot) that's basically right next to the New West SkyTrain station, with easy access to jobs in downtown Vancouver and elsewhere. And because there's no existing homes on the site, the redevelopment doesn't require displacing any renters, unlike redeveloping older rental buildings.

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I understand the desire to get the maximum possible public benefit from this project, including non-market housing. But watching the October 21st council meeting, it seems to me that there's a real risk of the negotiated agreement collapsing entirely, as council pushes the developer to add more public benefit and thus more cost.

Additional costs act like a floor on prices and market rents. There's no free lunch. It's homebuyers and renters who pay the bill. And this doesn't just affect new housing, it also affects existing housing, since they compete with each other. (Just as when Covid disrupted the production of new cars, used cars became more expensive.) In other words, it's all homebuyers and all renters paying the bill.

What worries me about the strategy of taxing new market housing to pay for a small proportion of non-market housing is that you may be pushing market rents further out of reach for more and more people, thus creating the need for non-market housing much faster than you can fill it.

In addition, the pie is shrinking rather than growing. The “land lift” that pays for public benefits is being squeezed by higher interest rates (and thus lower condo prices) and by higher construction costs. If the agreement collapses and nothing happens to the site for several years, the city may end up with less public benefit rather than more. (Not to mention putting at risk the public benefit of the 3800 homes.)

I would also point out that when we have a housing shortage, all housing helps, whether it’s market-rate or non-market. Every time 100 or 200 new apartments open up and people move in, that's 100 or 200 households who are no longer competing with everyone else over the limited supply of existing housing. New housing frees up older housing.

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I sympathize with the argument that public services are overloaded, but I think the appropriate response is to add more capacity to serve a larger population, not to block projects that will add more housing. Adding more housing and more families results in an increase in property-tax revenue, which in turn helps to fund public services.

I recognize that for people who live nearby, they’ll most likely want to minimize change and to keep their neighbourhood the way it is. But this has tremendous costs for everyone else.

If this plan is rejected, the thousands of people who would have lived there won’t vanish into thin air. It’s like pushing down on a balloon. They’ll find somewhere else to live in the area, and other people will get pushed out.

More

• Reddit thread before Monday’s meeting

• Agenda, staff report, and video for April 8 meeting

• Agenda, staff report, and video for October 21 meeting

• 2,400 homes in eight towers proposed next to New Westminster SkyTrain. Kenneth Chan, Daily Hive, June 2023.

• Changes proposed to massive downtown New West development. Theresa McManus, New West Record, April 2024.

• Columbia Square plan leads to 'weird' and 'unorthodox' New West council meeting. Theresa McManus, New West Record, October 2024.

• Mario Polese on public-benefits negotiation as a barrier to entry for smaller developers. “The less visible consequence of impact fees is on the resources, time, and effort required to negotiate and to complete housing projects. The range of charges, for everything from water to transit, can mean that the developer will often need to deal with different agencies—transit authorities, school boards, and others—negotiating fees piece by piece, in addition to negotiating planning regulations with city officials, a bureaucratic steeple run that can take years. Entry into Toronto’s housing market as a builder requires not only deep pockets but also patience, negotiating skills, and technical know-how beyond the means of smaller players. The successive hikes in impact fees in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond killed off much of Toronto’s remaining class of small building contractors. The predictable result is a market dominated by large property developers.”