DEVELOPING STORIES
/Artist’s drawing of Tower planned for 1450 West Georgia.
MULTIPLE DEVELOPMENTS STALLED
by Jake McGrail
(click images to enlarge - see Related Links below for cited documents.)
Now does not seem to be the best time to be a Vancouver condo tower developer, or at least not the developers of four projects in the West End. Those four projects — at 1450 West Georgia St., 1157 Burrard St., 1640-1650 Alberni St. and 1668-1684 Alberni — are all behind schedule, both in terms of getting the towers built as well as paying their community amenities contributions (CACs) to the city.
Between them, the four projects combine for 991 planned housing units, with about 75 per cent of them being strata and 25 per cent rentals. They also owe the city just under $90 million in CAC payments — a substantial sum, and important dollars for the West End, given those payments are meant to fund community facilities in the neighbourhood.
Artist’s model of tower planned for 1157 Burrard.
On June 25, Vancouver city council approved a motion to delay the payment deadline for CACs until May 31, 2026, with the previous deadlines for three of the sites falling between April and June of this year, and the fourth previously being due in November 2024. This comes after the city had already extended the payment deadline for three of those projects by six months back in October.
The council report recommending the two-year extension cited “escalating construction costs, more stringent lending criteria and higher interest rates” as the reasons for the project delays. The report also says that these “macro economic conditions” might continue into next year, so it might be a little while yet before we see physical progress on construction of these new buildings.
We previously covered the slow-moving 1450 West Georgia development in our October issue, while the other three developments are in a fairly similar position. All four had their rezoning applications approved — in principle, but dependant on their CAC payments — in either 2021 or 2022, and none of them have an estimated completion date.
artist’s drawing of Towers planned for 1640 - 1650 Alberni (centre) and 1668 - 1684 Alberni (right).
These long delays are part of a worrisome trend for major real estate developers. This year, a number of project sites in the West End have either been foreclosed on (like a planned condo tower at 1458 Davie Street) or seen their developers placed under receivership (like the project at 1045 Haro Street, which we covered in our March issue).
In a city that continues to grapple with a housing crisis, developers, city council, and West Enders will hope that things don’t get any worse before they get better. Otherwise this new 2026 deadline will simply be kicking the can down the road… for a second time.
