The former Dunsmuir Hotel has been vacant since 2013.
The demolition of the red-brick heritage building at 500 Dunsmuir St. is to begin Friday morning, but unlike some earlier cases, the facade of the 115-year-old former hotel will not be preserved.
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In the past, the city has encouraged developers to preserve the facades of heritage buildings. The 1901 Terminus Hotel at 36 Water St. was largely destroyed in a fire in 1998, but the facade was saved and propped up by steel beams for several years before it was incorporated into a condo development in 2006.
There’s also a heritage facade project currently being built at 150 Robson St., where a 29-storey condo tower will rise behind the facade of the 1928 Catholic Charities building.
The order to demolish 500 Dunsmuir came from the city’s chief building official due to public safety concerns.
But planner/real estate consultant Michael Geller still believes part of the facade could have been preserved.
“I’m not a chief building official, so it’s dangerous or foolish for me to contradict him,” said Geller. “But going down to the site and looking at it, yes, there were portions of that building that were in terrible shape and the walls were cracking, but the most important facades along Dunsmuir look just fine.”
Civic historian John Atkin said that saving the facade would be tricky, and costly.
“Part of the problem is the design of the building,” said Atkin. “It’s not a single facade across the front, it’s actually three narrow facades with two sides in an end piece … The structural damage is such that the complexity of the steel work to hold that brick work up would mean you wouldn’t be saving anything really worth saving.”
Still, Atkin said the facade could be rebuilt in a new development.
“You would say to (the developer), Holborn, ‘This building is dangerous, you have to demolish it,’ ” he said. “ ‘And a condition of any development permit for anything you do on the site is the reconstruction of the side and front and inset facades as accurately as can be done.’ ”
In an email, the city of Vancouver said “the property owner may be required to incorporate or replicate heritage features as part of their redevelopment plan. The details will depend on what is being proposed by the owner.”
But, it added, “due to concerns about potentially hazardous building materials, the property owner will not be required to retain building materials.”
The pending demolition of 500 Dunsmuir is a case of what heritage activists call “demolition through neglect,” where a building owner lets a building sit vacant for several years, it deteriorates and is torn down.
In this case the building had been vacant since 2013. Holborn owns most of the block around 500 Dunsmuir, including The Bay parkade.
“It’s a heritage building but the company that owned it really wanted to see it demolished so that they could then redevelop the entire block,” said Geller. “And so they simply neglected it, and for reasons that are harder to understand, the city just simply allowed the building to deteriorate.”
Geller said heritage doesn’t seem to be a priority with the city.
“There just doesn’t seem to be the same interest in protecting heritage or protecting views,” he said. “Everybody is simply obsessed with trying to bring down the cost of housing to the point that we’re going to lose all of the things that made Vancouver so special.”
The city said in its statement that it was “disappointed that the owners of Dunsmuir House, a building with significant heritage value, neglected the building to the point where demolition became the only viable option to ensure public safety.”
“Property owners have a responsibility to keep their buildings safe, and allowing a property to fall into disrepair and become a hazard to public safety is unacceptable.”
A message to Holborn CEO Joo Kim Tiah wasn’t returned by deadline.
The company has been at odds with the city and province before. It owns the controversial Little Mountain site, where hundreds of low income residents were displaced and the site is largely vacant, almost two decades after Holborn purchased it.
The block around 500 Dunsmuir is zoned commercial but Holborn has been angling to build residential. The company released architectural renderings with three condo towers on the block in 2020, including one that went up to 900 feet, the equivalent of 90 storeys.
But that plan included the retention of 500 Dunsmuir, which started out as the Hotel Dunsmuir tourist hotel, became a Salvation Army men’s shelter called Dunsmuir House and was last rented as an SRO to B.C. Housing in 2013.
After it became vacant, the City of Vancouver tried to collect an empty home tax on the building, which had 187 SRO units in 2013. But The Tyee reported Holborn took the city to court, arguing the city had rezoned it commercial. The city dropped the empty homes tax request.
“You can charge the empty home tax (for residential apartments or houses), but you can have an empty (commercial) building,” said Atkin.
The city can charge a developer a $300,000 per lost SRO unit. If the city charged that for 187 units, it would be $56,100,000.
The Union of B.C. Municipalities has asked the provincial government to allow municipalities to charge a tax for empty buildings.
