Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood braces for 23 new towers

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The eclectic beachside community of Kitsilano is often ranked among Metro Vancouver’s favourite neighbourhoods, appreciated for its boulevard trees, old homes, low-rise rental apartments and character. It was the epicentre of hippie culture in the 1970s.

But a wholesale reconstruction of Kitsilano is in play — a vertical upzoning of the neighbourhood’s eastern edge, adjacent to Burrard Street.

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As a result of the city of Vancouver’s two-year-old Broadway plan, and the construction of a new SkyTrain station at Arbutus, developers have set in motion at least 23 highrise projects, mostly in the 20-storey range.

Critics, including residents, retired architects and planning consultants, say it’s overreach. It’s out of scale. And the Broadway plan should be placed on hold.

There is already high population density in this four-block-wide zone of Kitsilano apartment buildings, which falls inside the boundaries of city council’s massive Broadway plan upzoning scheme.

Yet the development application signs spreading rapidly through east Kitsilano are going up in front of many 50-year-old, four-storey apartment buildings. They’re also being erected in front of the gardens of charming, renovated duplexes and triplexes.

Overall, the Broadway plan encompasses 500 square blocks between Vine Street in Kitsilano in the west and Clark Drive in the east, bounded by 1st Avenue to the north and 16th Avenue to the south. More than 120 building proposals, almost all for residential towers, some as high as 35 storeys, have already been approved or proposed under the Broadway plan.

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“It’s time to pause the Broadway plan and conduct a serious review,” says Grant Roberts, who has lived for two decades in a modest three-storey, walk-up apartment building in Kitsilano at 1855 West 2nd Ave. It is slated to be replaced with a 20-storey tower.

In intense fear of being forced out of his long-standing home, Roberts last month told city council: “You have gift-wrapped the Broadway plan and turned it over to greedy developers. This will displace thousands of people.”

Michael Geller, a veteran Vancouver developer, planner and retired architect, also believes a moratorium should be placed on the Broadway plan.

“It’s overreaching. It’s wrong,” Geller said.

“In principle, I advocate for higher density development close to public transit,” Geller said , noting he’s not overly concerned with tower proposals for the blocks immediately adjacent to Broadway Avenue. For him, that includes around the Kitsilano SkyTrain station scheduled to open in 2027 at Arbutus and Broadway.

“Instead, my concern relates to the high density, 18-20 storey buildings proposed along leafy, duplex-lined streets four or five blocks away from Broadway, in Mount Pleasant and Kitsilano,” Geller said.

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“Many of these proposals are at 10 times the existing density and height.”

As an illustration, Geller expresses shock at the blocky, angular, out-of-context 18-storey rental tower proposed for a tree-lined hill of detached character multiplexes on the 2100-block of West 14th, between Arbutus and Yew.

“This is absolutely absurd. How can anyone think this makes sense? It doesn’t belong,” Geller said in a recent YouTube interview with former B.C. city councillor, cabinet minister and talk-show host, Carole Taylor.

When the Broadway plan was first drawn up, Geller said most residents of Vancouver “missed the consequences” of how it would radically alter many livable neighbourhoods that already enjoy healthy mixes of renters and owners.

The tall mostly-rental towers now being planned for east Kitsilano are much different from the handful of 10- to 12-storey highrises that were built in Kitsilano before the early 1970s, before such buildings were eventually blocked.

The city council of that era demanded that developers make sure their medium-rise buildings retained about half of their grounds for gardens, trees, tennis courts and other amenities.

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But virtually all the towers now put forward under the Broadway plan, like the one on 14th, have no green space. They abut directly up against city sidewalks, perhaps with a token planter or bench.

Stephen Bohus, who works in the visual-effects industry and has a degree from the University of Toronto’s school of landscape architecture, is working to help citizens comprehend how Kitsilano, Fairview and Mount Pleasant neighbourhoods will look and feel in the near future because of the Broadway plan.

In response to widespread complaints and petitions from Kitsilano and elsewhere that Vancouver city’s website and staff are not being transparent about the scale of the vast changes coming to the Broadway corridor, Bohus has created an online interactive map that includes 23 tower proposals for east Kitsilano.

Ten of the projects are in late stages of rezoning, five are in the midst of rezoning and eight are at an early stage, according to internal Vancouver city figures. Bohus also uses 3D technology to graphically illustrate how towers will impact the Broadway corridor.

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Altogether, the 23 towers already in the pipeline for the section of Kitsilano under the Broadway plan — which includes a London Drugs on Broadway, St. Augustine’s elementary school and church on 8th, and a Whole Foods on Fourth and the Arbutus Greenway — would provide roughly 3,000 living units, mostly for renters.

That would be in addition to the roughly 20,000 new units in the highrises proposed under the rest of the Broadway plan.

Unfortunately, Geller said, it’s a myth that such widespread upzoning leads to affordability. He believes civic politicians have been “seduced” into approving bad projects by the prospect that 20 per cent of the dwellings built within the Broadway corridor will provide “below-market” rental rates, a term that too often goes undefined.

One of the many problems with this scheme, Geller said, is that most of the taxpayer-subsidized units designated below-market are tiny, and almost unlivable on a long-term basis.

For what it’s worth, Geller believes some Broadway plan towers won’t get built, since some land assemblies and zoning changes are being led by speculators.

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Given the ups and downs of the real-estate industry, he said there is a significant chance many speculators won’t be able to sell off their upzoned land to developers who are ready to pump tens of millions of dollars into a project.

dtodd@postmedia.com

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