The City of Vancouver is holding an online Q&A consultation session (https://www.shapeyourcity.ca/215-229-e-13-ave) in order to receive feedback on a proposed 21-storey tower at 215-229 East 13th Avenue. This Q&A will run between April 10 and April 23, 2024. No in-person Open House is planned. A full demoviction of the rental building at 229 East 13th Avenue is proposed in this site redevelopment. The 21-storey tower violates the Broadway Plan’s solar protection policies for Main Street. The applicant has submitted falsified shadow diagrams that claim that solar access on Main Street is not impacted during the protected times (more on that later).
The rezoning proposes a total of 193 rental units, with 20% of these as below market. Commercial uses would be contained at grade and a total of 64 parking spaces for residents (85 total) would be located on 3 underground levels. A total building height of 64.6m (212 ft.) is being proposed with a FSR of 6.8. To put the height into perspective, “The Independent” at 180 Kingsway is 215 ft. in height. There is a mezzanine level and some of the floor to floor heights are in excess of Broadway Plan maximums (such as 3.25m for level 5).
The owners are listed at Five Mile Holdings Ltd. and Prospero International Reality Inc., the applicant is JTA Development Consultants while Studio One Architecture are the designers. There’s a concurrent Q&A period for another rezoning at 1190 West 10th Avenue, with the same owners, applicant and architect. JTA has at least 10 different sites in the pipeline in the Broadway Plan area, with 6 of these sites having an active rezoning application (please see our previous post for a list of these sites).
According to residents living at 229 East 13th, the City will be meeting with them soon. Affected renters are encouraged to know their rights before speaking to the City and developers, and to reach out to experts and resources provided by organizations such as the Vancouver Tenant’s Union. There is a City of Vancouver letter-sized information page taped onto the rezoning sign (click the image to enlarge, this is a recent addition) with links to government websites. The City is of course the organization that brought in the Broadway Plan in 2022 and put thousands tenants in living in rental apartments at risk of demoviction; the previous Mount Pleasant Community Plan (revoked in 2022) generally did not support the rezoning of mature apartment zones.
Fake shadow studies and Broadway Plan Solar Protections
The Broadway Plan has an entire section devoted to Solar Access; we’ve reproduced this section further below as a PDF. Main Street between Broadway and 16th Avenue is designated as a “Village High Street” and this site at 215-229 East 13th Avenue falls into the “Solar Priority Areas” that are shown in yellow. The Shadow limits section of the Broadway Plan notes:
- Proposed new development should avoid creating new shadow impacts on the opposite sidewalk in village high streets (see Character Areas Chapter 6 for locations of villages) from the spring to fall equinoxes between 10AM and 4PM.
- For new buildings east of a village high street, protections apply to the western sidewalk.
Planners could have caught something like this issue with shadows on a high street in a few minutes during the “letter of enquiry” stage, before any formal rezoning application was made, by simply referring to their own Solar Access map.
For other Broadway Plan rezonings that are far away from Village High Streets, parks and public school yards, you may hear comments from planners such as “there’s going to a shadow impact anyway from a tall dense building” and that they don’t protect solar access for nearby residents (nor do they care if the shadow studies are correct as it won’t matter to them). However, in this case for 219-229 East 13th Avenue, the shadows do make a material difference, as this is the way that the Broadway Plan was written and sold to Council.
The direction of the shadows in the shadow study for the 21-storey tower proposed for 1190 W 10th Avenue, created by the same architectural firm, extends much further to the west at the March 21, 10AM time. Here’s a comparison with 215-229 East 13th Avenue:
To examine the shadows around 215-229 East 13th Avenue, we’ve made the following comparison:
If City staff take the stance that that they just post materials as is from the application, and then will look at it later, after consultation, that logic is entirely disingenuous. They know full well that this site is very close to Main Street and that the City has solar protection policies. This rezoning also brings into question other issues, including transparency, professionalism and general competence. Is it publicly acceptable that government would try to excuse itself saying, “We just posted what we received”? Or is it basically an admission that staff don’t know what they’re doing? Or just don’t care? Who would approve a ‘policy’ of posting drawings for public feedback without doing the most basic checks first? Why bother to even do a letter of enquiry stage then? Hanlon’s razor will only get you so far. Does anything here constitute professional misconduct by staff or by the applicant? Is there a culture that fosters dishonesty?
Are City staff ready to demovict the residents 229 East 13th Avenue based on a lie? That lie being that this rezoning follows the Broadway Plan. If City staff are unwilling to follow their own Broadway Plan when it comes to solar protections for designated high streets, then are they going to provide renters with protections? Or are the renters going to find out that the City will leave them out in the cold?
This proposed demoviction of renters from a mature rental apartment (and of many others like it) highlights the key mistake made in the Broadway Plan, which was to open the apartment zones (RM) to full scale redevelopment (rather than to exclude most of the RM zones from rezoning, as was done for the West End Community Plan and the now-revoked Mount Pleasant Community Plan).
Solar access pages from Broadway Plan (above), Mount Pleasant South Apartment Areas – Area B (MSAB) policy below.
CityHallWatch: Tools to engage in Vancouver city decisions 
Why isn’t the city checking these shadow diagrams? Every architect is pulling a fast one on planning. Is this co-ordinated effort from Vancouver architects to dupe the city into allowing their buildings?
Hello; A few questions: