A "monstrosity" in "beautiful and exclusive Arbutus Ridge"
2156-2174 West 14th Avenue
TLDR: There’s a public hearing coming up this evening. Vancouver city council will decide on rezonings for four rental high-rises in the Broadway Plan area. So far opposition is highest for a project on West 14th near Arbutus, about a 10-minute walk from the new SkyTrain station at Broadway and Arbutus. If you’d like to counterbalance the opposition (or if you think this is a terrible idea and you’d like to add your voice to the 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 “CD-1 Rezoning - 2156-2174 West 14th Avenue” as the Subject.
If you’d like to support (or oppose) the other projects as well, they’re 523-549 East 10th Avenue, 701 Kingsway, and 2175 West 7th Avenue. Agenda and reports.
Land in Vancouver is both limited and underused. It’s limited by ocean and mountains. It’s underused because the city has extremely restrictive zoning laws, and getting approval to change land use is a painfully slow, labour-intensive, site-by-site process, often with vocal opposition from neighbours. (“It’s easier to elect a pope.”)
The result is that we have a terrible shortage of housing in Vancouver, with vacancy rates near zero. Prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to force people to give up and leave. A lot of people are living in overcrowded, insecure housing. To fix this, we need a lot more housing. The usual estimate is that prices and rents have to rise about 2% in order to reduce demand by 1%; equivalently, if we could snap our fingers and instantly have 1% more housing, prices and asking rents would be about 2% lower. (If we had 25% more apartments, prices and rents would be roughly 50% lower.)
As part of the funding agreement with the provincial and federal governments for the Broadway Subway, the city agreed to allow more height and density close to the new SkyTrain stations, passing the Broadway Plan policy 7-4. But they didn’t actually change the zoning laws, so every project in the Broadway Plan area still needs to go through the slow and painful rezoning process.
Some people ask why we need high-rises. Location matters a lot. In a central location with easy access to lots of jobs within about a 30-minute commute, more people will want to live there, and land values will be particularly high. So it makes sense to build taller buildings there.
It’s totally understandable that people want their neighbourhood to change as little as possible, but when they succeed in blocking new housing, it imposes tremendous costs on everyone else. It’s like pushing down on a balloon: the people who would have lived there (and who have the money to pay market rents) don’t vanish into thin air - they look for somewhere else nearby. The result is increased pressure and higher rents. Conversely, every time a new building opens up with 100 or 200 apartments, that’s 100 or 200 households who aren’t competing with everyone else over the limited supply of existing housing.
A lot of opponents are saying that high-rises should only go on main streets. Land values are actually highest (indicating demand is highest) just off of main streets - renters are people, they aren’t somehow immune to noise and pollution.
Next Tuesday evening, Vancouver city council is going to decide on four rental high-rise projects in the Broadway Plan area. Unlike condos, purpose-built rental buildings owned by a pension fund or REIT provide secure housing, without your having to be rich enough to come up with a giant down payment. (With a condo owned by an individual landlord, you can still rent it, but then the landlord can always reclaim it for personal use.)
The Broadway Plan requires that all rental high-rises have to include 20% below-market rentals, with the market rentals cross-subsidizing the below-market rentals. (There’s a lot of renters living in low-rise rental buildings in the Broadway area, built back in the 1960s and 1970s, and planners wanted to make sure that they’re protected and don’t end up getting displaced. That would be really hard to do if all the cheaper rentals are replaced with new, more expensive rentals.) The four projects are adding a total of 730 rental apartments, about 150 below-market.
The four rental high-rise projects, with some comments from opponents:
523-549 East 10th, a couple blocks west of Fraser. Nearest station: Broadway and Main. 180 apartments replacing 12 secondary suites. 12 comments in opposition so far. “A smaller, 6-8 storey building would be much more suited to the neighbourhood.”
701 Kingsway. Nearest station: Broadway and Main. 200 apartments, replacing a strip mall at Fraser and Kingsway. Eight comments in opposition. “This project is completely out of scale with the neighborhood. It will impact privacy of residents consisting mainly of families and unduly shadow existing homes.”
2156-2174 West 14th, just west of Arbutus. Nearest station: Broadway and Arbutus. 170 apartments, replacing three houses. 48 comments in opposition. “Many trees will have to be cut down to build this oversized tower. This will destroy the bird population - hummingbirds, flickers and finches and other bird species.”
2175 West 7th, also just west of Arbutus. Nearest station: Broadway and Arbutus. 180 apartments, with 35 below-market, replacing a 35-unit low-rise apartment building from 1970. 14 comments in opposition. “The homeowners (at least three) who live adjacent to the property to the west will be unduly impacted by permanent shadow from this tower.” Same person: “There are at least two, possibly three old growth deciduous trees that will inevitably be cut down to construct this building. These trees are a habitat to squirrels, crows, and songbirds. They also provide crucial shade we know is going to be ever more relevant in a rapidly changing climate. There is extensive science and research in urban planning that maintains that mature trees are essential for street-level cooling and must be protected.” New shadows are bad; existing shadows are good.
I’m planning to attend the public hearing and speak in support of all four projects, while emphasizing the need to protect renters who are living in older buildings that get redeveloped (like the last one). The Broadway Plan includes protections for renters - a project that replaces a low-rise rental building with a new high-rise has to include 20% below-market apartments, it has to cover any increase in rent while people are living in interim housing, and when the new building is complete they have to be able to return at their previous rent (plus any legal annual increases) as if they never left. But the real test of this policy is going to be when the first redevelopment of an old low-rise building actually happens.
Besides the four Broadway Plan rezonings, council is first going to decide on a five-storey rental building in West Point Grey, a hotel on Broadway near Oak, and a social-housing project at Main and Union. (I’m somewhat skeptical that they’ll be able to get through everything in one evening, but I guess they might as well get started.)
Posted to r/vancouver on Reddit.
More
City website for the rezoning
18-storey Kitsilano rental housing tower proposed near SkyTrain's future Arbutus Station. Kenneth Chan, Daily Hive, December 2023.
171-unit rental tower envisioned for Broadway Plan site. David Taylor, Vancouver Market, December 2023.
The opposition view: 18-storey tower rezoning for 2156-2172 West 14th Avenue. CityHallWatch, February 2024. Also: Michael Geller, Changes need to be made to 'flawed' Broadway Plan, March 2024.
When “bottom-up” planning failed Vancouver. Michael Mortensen, January 2024. CityPlan (1993-1995) was a major public consultation effort, consulting more than 100,000 people, to determine people’s city-wide priorities. But it didn’t define land-use policies, leaving that to a subsequent 12-year Community Vision process (1998-2010). The Community Vision for Arbutus Ridge, Kerrisdale, and Shaughnessy (2005) rejected nearly everything in the City Plan.
very important and informative post. Thanks Russil
Didn't the province pass a law that there can't be public hearings for rezonings that follow the community plans? Or does this somehow not apply? I'm a bit out of the loop.