Developers of Vancouver’s Olympic Village challenge post-Games narrative in new book

Vancouver’s Olympic Village ran into financial trouble but became a vibrant neighbourhood. Its developers want to challenge the narrative with a new book. Not everyone is convinced.

In the weeks and months after the completion of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the site of the former athletes’ village along False Creek was described by many as a “ghost town.”

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People were slow to buy into the Olympic Village condos. It didn’t help when the City of Vancouver invited reporters into a suite in a recently completed building to show water damage from an overflowing toilet upstairs.

Such a move, which had the effect of hindering marketability of the development’s other units, was unusual, given the city itself was the project’s sole lender.

“It seems fair to say that no for-profit financial institution would call a press conference to trash a project on which they held the only mortgage,” Richard Littlemore writes in his new book.

There was a perception at the time that brothers Peter and Shahram Malek, whose company Millennium Development built the Olympic Village, had gotten in way over their heads and had to be bailed out by the city at taxpayers’ expense.

But Littlemore’s book, City Builders, released last week and commissioned by the Maleks, tries to correct what the brothers feel was an inaccurate narrative about the village.

When the city pushed the project into receivership in late 2010, it wasn’t only unfair to the Maleks, but also shortchanged taxpayers, Littlemore argues. The city, he says, was guided, at least in part, by the political opportunism of Vision Vancouver, the party that ran the city from 2008 to 2018.

The book tells the story of Peter and Shahram’s father, a successful businessman who ran a large construction company in Iran before that country’s 1979 revolution forced the family to flee with little more than they could fit into a suitcase, and draws a parallel with the brothers’ own experience running into another “hostile” government.

In the brothers’ case, it was the City of Vancouver that acted as their regulator and their banker, and, Littlemore writes, eventually, “declared the Village to be an economic disaster zone by pushing the project into receivership.”

Others flatly reject this assessment. One former Vision councillor says the new book sounds like a work of fiction.

After Vancouver won the right to host the Olympics, Millennium was selected in 2006 to develop the patch of former industrial land on False Creek’s south shore into a village to house more than 3,000 athletes during the Games, and then become Vancouver’s newest neighbourhood with a mix of housing, businesses and amenities.

But 2008 brought the global financial crisis, and Millennium’s lender for the Village, a New York hedge fund called Fortress, stopped advancing money. The city stepped in and bought out Fortress’s share in 2009, becoming the project’s sole lender. By late 2010, the city pushed the project into receivership.

Littlemore doesn’t dispute that the city, as the lender, had the legal right to place the project into receivership, but he believes it was the wrong move.

The book quotes one expert who suggested the costs of the receivership may have outweighed the benefits, considering the project was already completed and was selling, albeit more slowly than the city and the developers may have hoped.

Even before the receivership, the city didn’t help the project’s sales. In addition to the overflowing toilet news conference, Vision Vancouver city council “never stopped treating the Village like a poisoned holdover from their political rivals,” the NPA council that ran Vancouver from 2005 to 2008, Littlemore writes.

In 2014, the city announced it had retired its debt on the Village, with the last 67 condos sold to the Aquilini Group for $91 million. Littlemore says Vision used this announcement to tout their financial acumen heading into that year’s municipal election, when the party won a third majority.

Geoff Meggs, a Vision councillor from 2008 to 2017, completely rejects the notion that the city’s handling of the Village was guided by political calculations.

“It was all-hands-on-deck to save the taxpayers from a staggering blow, which we succeeded in doing,” Meggs said this week. “People can make their own judgments about the Maleks. But the reality is the city had a huge problem on its hands.

“Everybody’s entitled to hire an excellent writer — and Richard Littlemore is an excellent writer — and tell him what story to write. And I think that’s what’s happened in this case,” said Meggs, who wasn’t contacted by Littlemore for the book. “My advice to booksellers would be to put this book in the fiction section.”

The Maleks declined to be interviewed.

Littlemore worked as an editor and editorial writer for The Vancouver Sun in the 1980s and 1990s, and has since worked as a journalist, ghostwriter and author.

He was introduced to the Maleks in 2020 by their mutual friend Larry Beasley, Vancouver’s co-director of planning in the 1990s and 2000s. The Maleks were initially looking for a ghostwriter for their family and corporate history, Littlemore says, but he convinced them that the book would be better and more credible as a work of journalism, and they eventually agreed.

The Maleks had editorial oversight of the book, Littlemore said, but “did not interfere” with the “central political part of the book.”

“I’m happy to take this as a piece of journalism in front of anybody, including any libel lawyers,” Littlemore said. “It’s a story I absolutely stand behind, and I still have my name to carry forth in the world, so that’s worth more to me than whatever the brothers paid me.”

Meggs and Littlemore agree on one thing: The Olympic Village ended up turning a former industrial no man’s land into a vibrant community that has added to the fabric of Vancouver. The two appear to agree on little else in connection with this chapter of Vancouver’s history.

“Meggs says they did the right thing and they saved the city,” Littlemore said. “I mean, they certainly saved Vision. But whether the taxpayers and the City of Vancouver actually got a benefit from that is a thing that he and are destined to disagree on forever.”