In Vancouver, at least half a dozen older buildings along Barclay, Thurlow and Nelson streets near Burrard Street are empty or look to be in the process of emptying out.
Empty building at 998 Thurlow St., in Vancouver.Kerry Gold/The Globe and Mail
At 998 Thurlow St., the building is empty and surrounded by fencing, damaged by fire in 2018. The owner has plans to restore the heritage façade, upgrade the building, reconfigure the 80 rental units and add another storey. Another developer has applied to rezone 1040-1080 Barclay St. for two towers at 60 and 57 storeys each, including 871 market-rate rental units and 229 below-market units, with retail, according to architect and researcher Brian Palmquist, who checks the city’s building permits data regularly.
Four purpose-built rental buildings on Barclay Street affected by redevelopment, all built between 1954 and 1962, had a total of 146 units.
The empty looking buildings are rundown, with cracked steps and overgrown gardens. Some have lights on and windows open so there might be a few remaining residents. Most of the buildings are part of an ongoing rezoning to allow towers between Burrard and Thurlow streets, called the Burrard Corridor. Initially, the West End Community Plan of 2013 allowed for strata housing with a requirement of 25 per cent social housing. The market changed and market rental became an option as part of an interim policy in two areas of the corridor, with 20 per cent of units below market. The policy, which ended in December and recently became permanent, resulted in seven projects and 1,749 rental units, according to the city’s website.
“All of this has resulted in the clearing out of existing buildings, even while applications are being prepared and processed, including those that were renter-occupied, to make way for new ones,” says community activist and a director of West End Neighbours, Randal Helten, who estimates that hundreds more renters are being thrown into the crosshairs of redevelopment that takes years to build.
”It’s tragic,” Mr. Helten says. “With a housing crisis, especially a rental crisis, there should be no empty rental units in the city, basically … all those buildings that are empty should be filled until the last minute, when they have to be emptied for redevelopment.”
Another 24 rental buildings with 803 units will be impacted now that the policy is permanent.
”North of Davie in the same corridor, just last month council made the interim rezoning policy permanent, so there is going to be a rush there of tall towers going in and we figure 1,500 people could be evicted,” Mr. Helten said.
Housing policy expert Steve Pomeroy says a big part of the affordable housing crisis is the net loss of affordable units. For every new rental unit built, several more are either demolished or renovated so the landlord can find a tenant who will pay more. Mr. Pomeroy is executive advisor and industry professor for the Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative (CHEC) at McMaster University. In a paper for the CHEC from October, 2022, he cited an annual rate of loss of 46,000 truly affordable units since 2016, which was double the number of new units added annually under funding from the National Housing Strategy. The trend will only hit renters harder, he says.
And older buildings are collateral damage because of their low densities.
“There is a way to manage that, and other cities have done a reasonably good job of saying that if we are going to knock down a three-storey walk up with 12 units to build “X” number of new units, let’s make sure in the new building that 12 of them remain close to what the rents were previously.”
Nathan Edelson, former senior planner for the City of Vancouver, is concerned that a similar emptying out process will play out in the Broadway Plan area, which has 25 per cent of the city’s rental stock.
“To go from 16th Avenue all the way down to 1st Avenue in the name of rapid transit is so extreme, and it destabilizes all that affordable rental housing and other housing and the result isn’t thought out in terms of urban design. You need to build neighbourhoods as if people are going to live there,” he says, referring to necessary amenities. “We did that in Yaletown and we did that in Collingwood.”
He says the Broadway Plan could first focus 20- to 30-storey buildings around the transit stations and then look at corner sites for some density, with an eye to housing for the low- and moderate-income workforce.
“If it were me, I wouldn’t even allow the rezonings to be developed by the private sector at this point. I would say, ‘let’s build up the non-profit development sector.’”
Prof. Pomeroy has also supported the idea that funding for the non-profit acquisition of existing low-rent apartment buildings could save the loss of existing rentals. As well, he supports tenant relocation policies, such as the one proposed for the Broadway Plan area, when renters are displaced due to redevelopment. Under the city’s tenant relocation and protection policy, developers would have to relocate tenants at the same rents and then invite them back to the new building at up to 20-per-cent below assessed market rates, or their previous rent. When the previous council passed the policy last year, it was touted as among the toughest tenant protections in Canada.
“It’s do-able, but it does mean the developer has to take a bit of a haircut on the profit,” says Prof. Pomeroy. “And they will push back on it, but it’s better than the alternative, which is a moratorium on development.”
Vancouver city council recently decided not to go ahead with a pace of change policy that would have controlled redevelopment within rental areas of the Broadway Plan. Staff had recommended limiting redevelopment of existing rental buildings to five projects a year, in order to protect renters from too much displacement. The development industry spoke out against more red tape.
Signs are that a natural pace of change is already underway in the private development industry, and it’s a snail’s pace, according to commercial broker Mark Goodman. Rental housing development is stalling, which could explain why older apartment buildings are sitting half empty.
Mr. Goodman says apartment building sales have dropped 71 per cent this year. He counts at least a dozen listings in the Broadway Plan’s Kitsilano and Fairview areas with more than 100 feet of frontage. Some of the parcels for sale have more than one building. Seven of the listings are for rental buildings. Three other rental sites, including a three-building parcel that allows up to 20 storeys, have been taken off the market. Goodman’s business partner Cynthia Jagger said that if they included Mount Pleasant listings, there would probably be 10 to 15 more active listings.
“We are getting calls from developers who are either walking from their sites or are concerned that they cannot proceed, and asking us to review the numbers, wondering whether they should pivot from rental to condo,” Mr. Goodman says. “And it’s happening all over the city.”
Mr. Goodman blames taxes, interest rates, construction costs, city fees and regulations such as the city’s new tenant protections for making rental buildings difficult to develop.
“We know from developers that have tied up these sites that they face a very long, daunting process. Many of these developers will have sent in their application for review, a letter of inquiry, but it will take months for the city to respond. And once they respond, at that point, the developer will decide whether or not they want to apply for a rezoning,” Mr. Goodman says.
“Even if that happens and they start going through the process, it doesn’t mean they will do the deal. We know developers who may have half a dozen [deals] in the hopper they are going to go through, but they may end up renegotiating or walking from five out of the six at the end.
“Really, there is already a natural pace of change, and that is just how difficult it is to get a project through. Everything is slow.”