130 West Broadway
More than 500 rental apartments and childcare on the site of the old MEC building
TLDR: There's a public hearing coming up Thursday evening: Vancouver city council will decide on a rezoning for a high-rise rental project replacing the old MEC building on Broadway, close to two SkyTrain stations, with more than 500 market rental apartments and with a 37-space childcare. It looks like there’ll be quite a lot of opposition. If you'd like to counterbalance the opposition (or if you think this is a terrible idea and you'd like to voice your opposition), it takes literally 60 seconds to submit a comment. It can be as simple as "I support this rezoning - we need more housing." Just select “5. CD-1 Rezoning: 130-150 West Broadway and 2520 Columbia Street” as the Subject.
The city of Vancouver is holding a public hearing for five spot rezonings this Thursday, starting at 6 pm.
Spot rezonings are needed because the city uses restrictive zoning to suppress the value of land as much as possible, making it illegal to build apartment buildings, and then takes 70-80% of the increase in land value whenever a site is rezoned for a project. This allows the city to keep property taxes low (benefiting both incumbent homeowners and investors), but of course this reduces the incentive for landowners to sell their land for redevelopment. Other municipalities in Metro Vancouver have a similar policy.
Spot rezoning is an extremely slow, labour-intensive, and expensive process. To get an idea of how much work goes into the process, check out the staff reports. This is why housing in Metro Vancouver is so scarce and expensive: it takes a tremendous amount of time, effort, and expense to allow underused land to be redeveloped. See the MacPhail Report.
Thursday’s agenda. It’s typical for the least controversial rezonings to appear earlier on the agenda (“shortest job first”).
1805 Victoria Drive - replacing an existing fire hall with a new fire hall.
5350-5430 Heather Street - replacing five single-detached houses, just south of the Heather Lands, with two 18-storey rental buildings. There’ll be a total of about 340 apartments, 20% below-market. It doesn’t look like there’s much opposition - see Frances Bula’s comments on the difference between the intense opposition to the Jericho Lands and the lack of opposition to the Heather Lands.
8815-8827 Selkirk Street - replacing an old industrial building in Marpole with a six-storey rental building, with 36 market apartments.
4635-4675 Arbutus Street - replacing a strip mall and parking lot with a six-storey rental building, with 74 apartments, 20% below-market.
130-150 West Broadway and 2520 Columbia Street - replacing the old MEC building on Broadway with two rental buildings, 28 storeys and 21 storeys, with about 510 market apartments. The city offers higher density (10.0 FSR) for projects which include 20% below-market rental, but the project will be market rental only, so it’s limited to 8.5 FSR (15% less floor space).
It looks like the city is requiring the project to provide a $6.5M childcare facility as a supposedly-voluntary “Community Amenity Contribution.” (The Goodman Report observed in May 2021 that purpose-built rental hasn’t traditionally been subject to CACs.)
The applicant has also offered an in-kind CAC consisting of the construction and delivery of a purpose-built, 37-space childcare facility, turn-key to the City (valued at $6,492,000), within a fee-simple airspace parcel to be transferred to the City on completion of construction, which will help contribute to the Broadway Plan Public Benefits Strategy.
Real Estate Services staff have reviewed the applicant’s development pro forma and conclude that the CAC offered by the applicant is appropriate and recommend that the offer be accepted.
Because 130 West Broadway is in the Broadway Plan area, I expect it’ll run into the most opposition. Comments in support and opposition haven’t been posted to the agenda page yet, but you can get a sense of the opposition from the Q&A section of the city’s web page for the rezoning (“Shape Your City”).
Reilly Wood on the absurdity of the fire hall rezoning
Reilly Wood of Abundant Housing Vancouver is planning to speak at the public hearing, in support of the fire hall rezoning. His speaking notes, posted on Twitter:
Good evening mayor and council. My name is Reilly Wood, and I live in East Van not too far away from this proposed fire hall. I think fire halls are good, let’s build them, but let’s also talk about the planning process that brings us here today.
To start off, there’s already a fire hall on this site. It was built in 1959, and it was built under the same residential zoning as the surrounding neighbourhood. That makes sense, because residential neighbourhoods need fire protection. But today, when the fire department wants to renew that fire hall, the planning department has decided that that will require a new, unique zoning bylaw. This has involved roughly a year of process, where the fire department submits very lengthy applications and renderings, the planners do tons of public consultation and write a 31-page referral report, we all deliberate this here in-person today, and at the end of it we’ll get a new zoning bylaw that only applies to this one site. If the fire department needs to do this again for another fire hall, we’re back to square one.
And so I’d like to ask: does this process make sense to you for some boring, essential city infrastructure? Is this a good use of your time, the fire department’s time, and the planning department’s time, all to build a new fire hall on a site that already has a fire hall? Why have we gone backwards, such that in 1959 this could be done under existing zoning and now it requires a new unique zoning bylaw and a year of process?
Vancouver’s nearly at 1000 zoning bylaws because this kind of thing is just how the planning department operates these days. It doesn’t matter whether something’s a boring bog-standard building, they will waste everybody’s money and time creating a new, unique zoning district for it.
When I see this kind of blatant waste and red tape, I am just so embarrassed by my city. And the worst part is, this doesn’t even seem to be on council’s radar. Please do something about this. Don’t just tell staff to write a report exploring better options: tell them to do better and tell them how. The culture of the planning department is fundamentally broken, and it’s not going to get fixed unless you provide strong direction. Thank you.
More
Staff report for 130 West Broadway
City website for 130 West Broadway rezoning
Rezoning application prepped for key Broadway site. Peter Mitham, Western Investor, October 2022. Quotes Jon Stovell of Reliance: “The design … is not that much different from the one we drew up back in 2017, 2018. It’s just that we couldn’t move it forward because it couldn’t be supported under the existing zoning.”
Proposals for new towers in Vancouver’s Broadway Plan worry homeowners and tenants. Frances Bula, Globe and Mail, March 2024. This is a site that’s right on Broadway, with zero displacement of tenants - but I still expect it to be opposed by neighbours. Canadians generally don’t like change. This site-by-site approval process is like a mini-referendum, and nearly every referendum and plebiscite held in Canada in the last 150 years has failed. (The only exceptions I know of: Prohibition in 1898, conscription in 1942, and the plebiscite for the 2010 Olympics.)
Spent that 60 seconds! Easy as pie. Thankyou.