A dilapidated house in Mount Pleasant that's been vacant for many years. It's one example of an unknown number of vacant buildings in Vancouver. A new city task force is seeking to track how many there are.Kerry Gold/The Globe and Mail
Vancouver is responding to the city’s increasing number of empty buildings with a task force that will catalogue the growing problem and try to do something about it.
“The problem is probably going to get worse, so there is some urgency in coming up with an effective solution,” said Saul Schwebs, the city’s chief building official.
In Vancouver, buildings are often left empty or mostly empty by landlord-owners who may be putting off redevelopment due to low demand and high costs. But it’s not known why many buildings are left empty for so long, and empty buildings are a danger and a potential blight that can lead to urban decay.
Mr. Schwebs said that, given the scope of the undertaking, it will take months to determine the exact number of empty buildings, but he hopes to know by fall.
Another empty house in Vancouver, this one with fire damage.Kerry Gold/The Globe and Mail
“It’s coming into focus. We have a lot of issues with vacant buildings in the city,” said Mr. Schwebs, who is also director of building policy inspections and bylaw services.
He said the new task force was formed in response to last year’s demolition of the historic Dunsmuir Hotel at 500 Dunsmuir St. after the city deemed it dangerous. The property is owned by Holborn Properties, which also owns the Little Mountain site – former social-housing project sold by the province in 2007. The 700 or so low-income residents were evicted, their buildings razed, and the 15-acre property left almost entirely undeveloped ever since.
“Essentially, there are a lot of buildings across the city that have been vacated, and in some cases for decades,” said Mr. Schwebs. “And the concern now with the economy and the market, and financing as it is, a lot of projects are being put on hold. So a lot of these buildings are going to be left standing vacated even longer.”
Mr. Schwebs said buildings are being broken into and used as temporary shelters, which was the case with Dunsmuir Hotel, and many others. That’s why he refers to them as “vacated” instead of “vacant.”
“[The] part I’m most excited about is, what are the opportunities to actually keep these buildings occupied? Until the owner is ready to redevelop the property and they actually need to be demolished, can’t we keep people living in them somehow?”
“It’s a very big problem with lots of different issues,” said Mr. Schwebs. “We are taking our time to address it effectively, rather than just rushing.”
There are numerous reasons a property might be left vacant by its owners. It’s difficult to lease a space that’s up for future redevelopment. And an empty residential building is sometimes less costly for the owner than a building filled with tenants who, if the property is redeveloped, may require compensation according to city policy, as well as Residential Tenancy Branch rules.
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Kitsilano West Broadway Business Improvement Area executive director Michelle Barile said high property taxes are a burden for both landowners and tenants. When existing properties are redeveloped, the resulting commercial spaces often much larger than before, and the residential spaces smaller, neither of which is viable, said Ms. Barile.
“The guise of ‘development policies to create more housing’ is destructive rather than constructive, displacing residents and business owners and making both homeless,” she said.
“The issue is development policies that force a rate of development that is imbalanced to meet the city’s needs now, as well as future growth. If we don’t consider both, we’re poisoning the well that we want to drink from in the future.”
Mount Pleasant BIA executive director Neil Wyles, a former restaurateur, said that East Broadway businesses along the future subway are closing due in part to disruption caused by a seven-year construction timeline.
A long-shuttered business.Kerry Gold/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Wyles said he knows of a commercial building on Broadway that’s been vacant for about 15 years. A long-established piano store and bakery have moved, and some bicycle shops, and even the Scotiabank branch at the corner of Broadway and Ontario Street have moved or closed.
“They just leave,” he said. “I think every vacancy has a story, there’s always a nuance to it, whether the developer has run out of cash – which I think we are probably going to see some of that coming … but my main concern is that the Broadway line is definitely skewing my numbers in a direction that I don’t like.”
In some cases, the landlords can’t get the rents they want, so they leave the space empty.
A challenge for the task force, said Mr. Wyles, is the fact that some owners’ identities aren’t readily available, and they may not live in Canada.
“I get a property list of who owns all these properties, and it’s usually numbered companies and lawyers’ offices. It’s hard to trace.
“The development industry wants to open the door to foreign investors again, and that’s how we got into this problem, isn’t it?”
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As for the city’s Broadway Plan, which will add residential towers, he estimates there are about 30 active development applications in the Mount Pleasant BIA district. But with market conditions poor, many projects are being put on hold, resulting in tenant disruption.
Tenant Lindsay Gibson lives further west within the Broadway Plan area, and he and his wife recently moved out of his building at 1270 W. 11th Avenue, because the owner applied to rezone for a tower. The rezoning was recently approved following a hearing at City Hall at which tenants described a contentious tenant-landlord relationship.
Mr. Gibson and his wife were anxious about the rezoning, so they took the lump sum compensation required by the landlord and found a two-bedroom unit nearby.
An empty commercial property with a rezoning application underway.Kerry Gold/The Globe and Mail
But shortly after moving, they found out that their old landlord had decided to put the redevelopment on hold for three to five years.
“Maybe we were impatient, and freaked out a bit, but we needed agency,” said the University of B.C. assistant professor. “It was driving us crazy. And our former neighbours, they now have three to five years hanging over their heads.”
In his case, the previous landlord retenanted his old suite. But other units are left empty, such as the 51 rental units that are vacant after developers Brivia Group and Henson Group began marketing a luxury 60-storey Curv tower downtown on Nelson Street. That condo project recently headed into receivership. There are several older apartment buildings in the West End that are either empty or mostly empty.
“We struggle with that, and we work with the tenants to try to get the owner to comply, but yeah, it’s frustrating,” said Mr. Schwebs. “I want demo-by-neglect to not be an option in this city, and it seems that a lot of owners think that it is, and we need to address that.”