The Broadway and Birch Fiasco. It's time for a Forensic Audit.

I read this week that Jameson's Broadway & Birch project is now a court-ordered sale. I opposed that development back in 2020 when I learned about it from a SFU professor who lived near the property. From day one, I had several concerns. For one thing, There is no doubt that we need to allow higher densities to achieve greater affordability. But when is big too big? Some will argue that FSR is just a number. It’s meaningless. I disagree. It is a measure of a building relative to its surroundings and while some argue one building may not destroy the neighbourhood, a row of similar scale buildings might. That’s why I would like to see an overall study completed for the Broadway corridor before allowing such dramatic FSR and height increases. 

So why did I oppose it? Because at 10.28 FSR it was more than 3 times the allowable FSR at the time, and was being proposed in advance of the Broadway Plan.

But also, I thought the below market family units that justified this excessive FSR were not very livable, especially for lower-income households with children for whom they were intended. Here are just a few examples.

I once worked with someone who said his four least favourite words were "I told you so." That's how I feel about this project and so many more recently approved projects that are completely out of scale with their context and offering very little livability for those in greatest housing need.

While th developer did not seem to care whether the suites were livable or not, as long as the governments were willing to fund the project, recently it become known that this project was not working as  a rental housing development, and was supposedly going to be sold to an entity planning a hotel for aboriginal visitors to the nearby Vancouver General Hospital. An appraisal was used to justify a much higher value and sales price. But fortunately, the sale fell through. Now the project is a court-ordered sale, and I can't say I feel sorry for the developer one bit. Indeed, if anything I feel a certain schadenfreude. They wasted a lot of public money.