The tallest all-rental tower in Western Canada has been unveiled by Grosvenor and approved by the City of Burnaby to move forward to consultation. The 60-storey tower is part of Grosvenor’s master plan for a pedestrian-only development that will deliver more than 3,000 homes including approximately 2,000 market rental and 450 below-market rental homes.
The proposed development will transform a 7.9-acre site into a thriving, inclusive, mixed-use community which will include a new urban, multi-storey community centre and approximately 200,000 square feet of commercial space on transit.
As Grosvenor’s largest mixed-use development in North America, the project takes an innovative approach and aims to be a model for future large-scale, pedestrian-focused, transit-oriented developments.
“We are really excited about what this large-scale community will mean for residents and for the general public, for meeting the housing and sustainability challenges facing our region, and for the opportunity to create a genuine sense of community in one of Metro Vancouver’s fastest-growing and most exciting neighbourhoods. These sorts of projects are usually exclusively for residents, but we’ve maintained from the beginning that it has to be for the entire community,” said Marc Josephson, senior vice president, development with Grosvenor.
This will be one of the first projects of this scale to be entirely pedestrian, with all cars accessing the underground from the site’s periphery. The master plan also incorporates an abundance of green space in a public courtyard for both residents and the general public, including landscaped trails for pedestrians and routes for cyclists.
“This is a truly unprecedented development with more than half of the site dedicated to open space including landscaped plazas and courtyards, around which all buildings are focused,” says Ryan Bragg, principal, Perkins & Will. “Typically in this type of development, instead of plazas and courtyards there would be streets and space to support vehicles, but here there will be no cars, just trails and green space. It’s a complete paradigm shift for the region.”
In addition, the environmental impacts of the site were taken into careful consideration and upon completion, the development will embrace the city’s sustainability requirements, as well as achieve Grosvenor’s corporate commitment to net-zero carbon in operational emissions from all directly managed buildings by 2030.
