Vancouver’s last undeveloped waterfront site could house convention centre, hotel, according to city memo

Dan Fumano: The different public and private entities with interests in Downtown Vancouver’s Central Waterfront are — finally — together at the table to plan the future of this crucial property.

A convention centre, hotel and homes could be coming to Vancouver’s last significant piece of undeveloped urban waterfront, an internal city memo shows.

It’s a property of especially high public interest, value and complexity.

Plans to develop this site — the stretch of downtown between CRAB Park and Canada Place — have been discussed for decades, but it remains a no man’s land of gravel lots and railway lines. The stalemate was not due to lack of effort, but largely blamed on the absence of cohesion among several big players with interests in the area, including the port authority, companies, and the municipal, provincial and federal governments.

An internal City of Vancouver memo reveals that the interested parties have signed a memorandum of understanding and expect to complete a vision for the site by early 2025.

Even if this effort does come to fruition — which is far from guaranteed — any development is years away. But observers say it’s significant that these public and private entities, after so many decades, are finally working on a shared vision.

The memorandum of understanding was signed in May 2024, but it was not made public. It bears the signatures of officials from the city, the province, Transport Canada, Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railway, as well as two landowners in the area: Cadillac Fairview and the holding company of the Vancouver Whitecaps owner, Greg Kerfoot.

In an email to Postmedia News, the planning alliance representing those parties said it is working to see if it can reach a shared vision that could lead to detailed planning work.

Redeveloping the area “represents a significant opportunity to create a special mix of supply chain activities, commercial spaces, a transportation hub, housing, and public amenities and parks,” the statement said.

The site’s planning will take several years and will include opportunities for public input, the statement said, adding that collaboration with the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations will be “essential.”

In an email, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim said he was excited about recent progress.

“Revitalizing this key part of Vancouver has been a long-standing council commitment,” Sim said. “This area has incredible potential to become a vibrant hub for our city, and this milestone brings us closer to making that vision a reality.”

Former Vancouver chief planner Larry Beasley recalls fruitless efforts to develop this site when he worked at city hall in the 1990s. The memorandum’s signing, Beasley said Thursday, represents “a profound breakthrough.”

Beasley, who now does private consulting, had worked in recent years on trying to advance this development after being hired by Kerfoot. He has not been working on the project in recent months.

“The big story here … is that these governments are talking,” Beasley said. “They have never been able to talk together, they have never been willing to, they’ve never been motivated to.”

The idea of housing in this area concerns Christina DeMarco, a former lead planner for Metro Vancouver who spent years volunteering with a working group focused on the central waterfront.

Because the area lacks infrastructure such as schools, community centres and child care, the addition of homes would need to be “done very carefully,” DeMarco said.

While detailed planning and any actual development is still a long way off, the high-profile site has inspired a number of architecture and planning firms to produce unsolicited illustrations and concepts for its future.

The Vancouver studio of architecture firm Perkins & Will spent years producing a series of conceptual designs, which were released over last year and this year.

More recently, another speculative concept was produced through a collaboration between Farrells, an architecture and urban planning firm headquartered in Hong Kong and London, and London-headquartered engineering firm Arup.

Matthew Donkersley, a project director with Farrells who moved this year from the firm’s Hong Kong office to Vancouver, said this waterfront transportation hub has the potential to incorporate additional technologies in the future.

The firm’s work in Asia has shown that waterfront sites are increasingly useful as hubs for low-flying drones that can deliver goods and, potentially in the future, transport passengers, he said. And autonomous, driverless boats could connect the area near Waterfront Station to different destinations on the densifying North Shore, relieving congestion on the Lions Gate and Ironworkers Bridges at a lower cost than a new bridge or tunnel.

Last month, Vancouver-based Civitas Urban Design & Architecture released its own unsolicited illustrations for a proposed concept for the area. This vision includes residential and office towers of up to 60 storeys as well as public parks, beaches, a First Nations community centre, and a 30-metre-tall Indigenous-designed harbour-front statue described as a “welcoming figure.”

Civitas founder and president Joe Hruda, who worked on the planning of Coal Harbour more than 30 years ago, said he believes the central waterfront could be a high-density neighbourhood for up to 3,500 new residents, including affordable housing.

“The conceptual idea,” Hruda said, “is bringing life to that part of the city that nobody knows is there.”