Below is a summary of current rezoning applications going before the City of Burnaby council.

2422 Alpha Avenue

The proposal for this 41,770 SF Brentwood town centre site, by Monark, was originally submitted back in September 2015 and calls for a 23-storey condo tower, that includes:

• 160 units, including 4 townhouses
• 59 one-bedrooms, 80 two-bedrooms and 21 3-bedrooms
• underground and structured parking
• total density of 3.6 FAR
• 176 parking spaces

6050 Sussex Avenue

The plan for this 2.9 acre site that includes an existing apartment building and church on the North side of Metrotown is for two towers including condos and rental apartments, under the RM5s designation in the Metrotown Centre Plan.The site is owned by Townline, and a preview of the proposal can be seen here.

Details of the proposal include:

• a 41-storey condo tower and a 31-storey rental apartment tower
• a redevelopment of the existing Burnaby West United Church
• 321 condo units
• 238 new rental apartment units
• a total density of 5.0 FAR
• retention of existing 18-storey and 15-storey apartment buildings with 254 units
• 362 underground parking spaces

3700 Hastings Street

The plan for this 10,000 SF site in the Hastings Heights area is for a 4-storey mixed-use development, including:

• 21 market rental apartment units
• 3-studios, 12 one-bedrooms, 6 two-bedrooms
• 6,278 SF of ground floor retail space
• 28 parking spaces

SOLO District Phases 3 & 4

Rezoning for Appia’s four tower SOLO District project was approved back in 2012, and since that time two towers have now been substantially sold out, with tower one having been completed, and tower 2 currently under construction.

Appia is now seeking a rezoning amendment to tweak some of the details of the remaining two towers. The design changes include:

• Phase 3 tower:
  • increase height form 39-storeys to 42-storeys
  • decrease unit count from 328 to 280
  • increase commercial area from 18,000 SF to 45,000 SF
• Phase 4 tower:
  • increase tower height from 43-storeys to 48-storeys
  • decrease unit count from 365 to 319
  • increase commercial area from 35,000 SF to 60,000 SF

The architectural design, by Chris Dikeakos, has also been amended.

While the City of Vancouver grapples with worsening housing affordability conditions, increasingly contentious area plans, and an excruciatingly slow planning process for even modest density increases, Burnaby is quietly going through what is likely one of the most dramatic suburban transformations in the history Metro Vancouver, if not Canada.

Most people have only really begun to take notice more recently with higher and higher towers starting to pop up in Metrotown and now Brentwood. With a strong condo market fuelling demand for new towers near transit, most of Vancouver’s large developers have been active securing sites in Burnaby in the last several years. While the rezoning applications tend not to attract as much attention as those high profile projects in Downtown Vancouver, the magnitude of activity can’t be ignored, particularly when one ponders the scale of projects like Shape Properties’ recently approved Lougheed Town Centre.

How did Burnaby become a hotbed of highrise construction at a scale that dwarfs even the City of Vancouver? You have to go back a few years to understand how the plans were put in place.

The City of Burnaby put plans in place several years ago to concentrate growth in and near major rapid transit (Skytrain) nodes, particularly in four town centre areas they identified as follows:

• Metrotown
• Brentwood
• Lougheed
• Edmonds

Furtheremore, unlike homeowners in Vancouver that have been increasingly vocal against even midrise developments, towers in Burnaby have faced less public opposition during rezoning, in part due to the fact that many highrises are being being built in former industrial areas that are being lost to residential, or in areas that are primarily occupied by older rundown apartments where tenants have, seemingly, less influence with the City than single family homeowners.

So far, about 30 highrise towers have been built in these four town centre areas (including 2 office towers), primarily in Metrotown, where projects such as Sovereign by Bosa – a 45-storey hotel and condo tower, and Metroplace by Intracorp – a condo tower near the Metrotown Skytrain station, have each taken advantage of sizeable density increases per the Metrotown Town Centre plan. The sales velocity and pricing of each new development spurs even greater interest for new projects and generates more and more rezoning applications. Land speculation is now commonplace, particularly in more mature areas such as Metrotown.

The City of Burnaby’s willingness to allow fairly substantial density on previously underutilized parcels of land previously dedicated to commercial and industrial use has vaulted Burnaby far ahead of any area in Metro Vancouver in terms of highrise construction. Shape Properties’ two mall sites: Brentwood and Lougheed, are the largest and most well known, but others such as Onni’s Gilmore Station (rumored to include BC’s new tallest tower) and Concord’s Brentwood projects are massive themselves and in terms of height and scale, tower over Vancouver’s most ambitious plans such as the recently scaled back Oakridge.

A review of current and forthcoming developments in the City of Burnaby shows over 100 highrises in various stages of development (under application or construction), almost all of them intended for residential condos, with a handful of commercial office towers usually required on the larger scale developments to preserve job space. A few stats show the scale of this wave of development in Burnaby:

• 106 highrises under development (compared to 68 in the City of Van)
• 47 highrises of 40-storeys or more (compared 13 in the City of Van)
• Over 30,000 units under development (excluding lowrise and townhouse units)

Here is a breakdown of all of this activity, by each area of Burnaby:

Brentwood

East Burnaby/Lougheed

South Burnaby

Metrotown

The above floor & unit counts are best estimates unless otherwise confirmed in City of Burnaby planning/rezoning application documents.

It is anticipated that there will be more rezoning applications forthcoming in the near future, particularly as the Town Centre Plans are further refined; however, it can be argued that the majority of the most central and logical development sites have now been secured by developers. With a very active presales market and continued upward trajectory of condo prices, it can be anticipated that land costs will continue to increase for these Burnaby tower sites in the future, with areas such as Port Moody and Coquitlam seeking to catch some of the spillover of this growth in conjunction with the 2017 completion of the Evergreen Line.

With the height and scale of these projects in Burnaby, it will be interesting to see what, if any response the City of Vancouver has while it struggles to create even modest height and density in increasingly expensive and largely unaffordable areas.

For the record, I am not espousing the virtues of density as the primary means of increasing affordability. In fact, if Burnaby is behind in an area, it is in the creation of new rental units for which there is currently no coherent or substantive policy. This, in part, has helped the viability of several projects since rental replacement is not a requirement like it is in other municipalities. The City of Vancouver has been more proactive in the provision of affordable housing which has hopefully had at least a moderate impact in terms of affordability.

Here is a construction update on the second phase of Appia’s Solo District project in the Brentwood Area of Burnaby.

The first phase of the project included a tower branded ‘Stratus’, a 367-unit 45-storey tower which has just recently completed and which is substantially sold out. Burnaby’s first Whole Foods is an anchor of the retail component of the project.

The second phase of the project is ‘Altus’, a 48-storey tower at the corner of Lougheed and Willingdon that includes 284 condo units above 250,000 SF of office space on 12 floors. Pre-sales launched in 2013 and this phase of the project is also nearing sell-out.

photo courtesy mcminsen http://po.st/RDvsVU via @imageshack

photo courtesy mcminsen http://po.st/avE0BU via @imageshack

photo courtesy mcminsen http://po.st/ut93EP via @imageshack