Opinion: Broadway Plan is a key part of solving Vancouver’s hotel room shortage

This is Part 2 of 5 in Daily Hive Urbanized’s incremental series on unlocking the Broadway Plan’s full potential as a successful, high-density, diverse, and transit-oriented community and Vancouver’s vibrant second city centre.

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As the City of Vancouver’s population continues to swell, hitting over 700,000 residents today and projected to reach around nearly one million by 2040, the Broadway Plan has emerged as a pivotal part of our urban landscape — a strategy for how to shape growth in this city.

While it strives for transit-oriented development with significant residential and commercial uses, it misses some crucial pieces, with one of them being the expansion of our tourism infrastructure.

Areas of Central Broadway, in particular, with its prime location and burgeoning tech hub in the Mount Pleasant Industrial Area, as well as along the Great Northern Way Corridor, offer a fantastic opportunity to create a vibrant, tourist-friendly extension of the city centre.

Yet, without a solid plan for hotels, a wide spectrum of housing, public amenities ,and cultural venues, we risk squandering what could be a transformative experience for both locals and visitors.

Weaving Commercial Drive into the Broadway Plan

The Broadway Plan’s geographic area spans about six sq km, framed by Vine Street to the west, 1st Avenue to the north, 16th Avenue to the south, and Clark Drive to the east.

Its easternmost border of Clarke Drive is just three city blocks away from Commercial Drive, including the prominent intersection of Commercial Drive and East Broadway — where SkyTrain’s Commercial-Broadway Station, one of Metro Vancouver’s busiest transit hubs, an interchange between the Expo and Millennium lines, is situated.

Commercial Drive is already a lively cultural district, known for its diversity, eclectic coffee shops, trendy restaurants, and artistic vibe.

But imagine transforming this area into a bustling arts hub with small comedy clubs, intimate theatres showcasing local talent, and dance studios.

Vancouver could use a lot more of these cultural and entertainment establishments, and for years community groups have complained about the lack of affordable arts and cultural spaces. Some solutions to catalyze more of these establishments could be to tap into community amenity contributions (CACs) through future development, and to simply provide projects with more flexibility to organically include such venues into their development.

By weaving Commercial Drive into the broader vision for the Broadway Plan, we can enhance its appeal as a destination, attracting tourists looking for authentic experiences that capture the spirit of our city.

Currently, the Commercial Drive strip and the Commercial-Broadway Station Precinct fall under the City’s separate Grandview-Woodland Plan, which is highly limited and flawed, resulting in little to no new housing despite being within a highly accessible area by public transit and situated near downtown Vancouver.

Mount Pleasant could be a creative playground

Within the Broadway Plan area, over the past 20 years, Mount Pleasant has become a trendy neighbourhood bursting with character and culinary delights.

Now known for its vibrant dining scene, this area is home to numerous acclaimed restaurants that make up Vancouver’s Michelin Mile.

There is now an opportunity to further enhance Mount Pleasant’s success as a dining destination by introducing new supporting uses.

With a mix of quirky shops, craft breweries, and vibrant art galleries, Mount Pleasant is the perfect location for performance district.

Imagine a series of venues where local artists can showcase everything from live music to experimental theatre, all the while being surrounded by the buzz of renowned eateries.

The allure of Mount Pleasant is its gastronomic diversity; visitors can indulge in everything from fine dining to unique street food, making it a must-visit destination for anyone looking to explore the city’s culinary landscape. Adding to this, outdoor patios and vibrant street life would encourage visitors to linger, turning dining into a social experience.

By developing hotels in this area, we’d not only accommodate tourists but also provide them with an opportunity to immerse themselves in Mount Pleasant’s unique cultural and culinary scene.

Staff with the City of Vancouver have presented a vision to transform the Vancouver City Hall campus area into the “Civic District” — a vibrant hub that integrates civic functions with cultural and commercial spaces.

In early December 2024, City staff outlined a revised vision that creates a far more ambitious long-term redevelopment concept than what was originally pondered in Summer 2024. This was largely made possible by Vancouver City Council’s decision later in the summer to make sweeping changes to the northward view cone policies that protect mountain views and the southward view cone policies that protect views of the heritage 1936-built heritage City Hall tower from the downtown Vancouver peninsula and False Creek South seawall.

Specific relaxations to both View Cone 3.0, emanating from the peak of Queen Elizabeth Park, and View Cone 9.0, emanating next to City Hall from Cambie Street at the intersections with West 10th Avenue and West 12th Avenue, greatly improve the development possibilities of the site.

Relaxations to View Cone 3.0 enable greater overall height across the site, while the narrowing and repositioning of View Cone 9.0 allows for additional high-rise towers along the western side of the Civic District fronting Cambie Street. This was not previously contemplated in the three options due to the harsh height restrictions of View Cone 9.0, with the early options only positioning new high-rise towers along the eastern side fronting Yukon Street.

Not including the much-needed seismic renovation of the heritage City Hall tower, the new mixed-use building developments would span a total building floor area of approximately 1.152 million sq ft.

That is equivalent to the entire building floor area of the newly completed The Post (Amazon) office and retail complex in downtown Vancouver.

Although the Civic District would be primarily office space, its overall mix of uses would be far more diverse, including hotel uses, City Hall/civic and institutional uses, cultural/museum spaces, music/entertainment venues, and significant retail, restaurants, and possibly bars and pubs on the ground level — all to fully activate the site’s street frontages and the internal public plaza areas.

Key to the Civic District will be its extensive event-friendly public plazas, specifically a north-south linear plaza that stretches from West Broadway to the heritage City Hall tower. In a city with few large public plazas, this will be one of Vancouver’s largest public spaces of its kind, and it also includes a large covered outdoor plaza area fronting West Broadway — not unlike covered outdoor space of The Shipyards on the Lonsdale waterfront in North Vancouver or the former covered amphitheatre plaza of the Plaza of Nations on the False Creek waterfront.

City staff’s envisioned density, uses, and public spaces for the redevelopment of the 8.6-acre City Hall campus are worthy of the site’s immediate adjacency to SkyTrain’s Broadway-City Hall Station.

Overnight in Fall 2027, Broadway-City Hall Station will become one of Metro Vancouver’s busiest public transit hubs, when the Millennium Line’s Broadway extension opens and creates a new major interchange with the Canada Line. This will truly be a game changer for public transit in Metro Vancouver, as not only does it drastically improve the Broadway Plan area’s regional accessibility but it also creates new regional ways to reach downtown Vancouver, Cambie Corridor destinations, the airport, and Richmond — all through the Broadway-City Hall Station interchange.

Similarly, the same is true for Broadway-City Hall Station being the gateway for people travelling from the Canada Line to reach Brentwood Town Centre, Metrotown, and points beyond via the Millennium Line and the Expo Line (via Commercial-Broadway Station).

All of this can be described as a “network effect” on the SkyTrain system’s regional convenience and usability, and it will be further amplified when, not if, the Millennium Line is further extended to the University of British Columbia campus. And Broadway-City Hall Station will be the very nexus of this vastly new and improved regional connectivity.

It should also be noted that City staff’s Civic District concept also provides Broadway-City Hall Station with a secondary street-level entrance from a plaza space.

Catalyzing new hotels in the Broadway Plan area

Encouraging new hotel developments within the Broadway Plan area will not only help address Metro Vancouver’s growing hotel room shortage, but also enhance the area’s appeal and expand tourism-related economic opportunities beyond downtown Vancouver.

City staff’s plan for the Civic District would become an anchor of activity for the Broadway Plan area, compounded by the incorporation of hotel and entertainment uses into the development.

But what about other hotel projects elsewhere in the Broadway Plan area?

Forthcoming amendments to the policies of the Broadway Plan take a big step forward in improving the pro forma of potential new hotel projects. These amendments — generally within areas near the future subway stations — offer to add building height and density for projects with hotel uses, including projects with mixed-use hotel and residential uses.

These new amendments put forward by City staff are projected to catalyze up to 3,000 new hotel rooms — potentially within as many as 18 new hotel projects. This is up from the original 2022-approved Broadway Plan’s potential space for about 1,200 new hotel rooms.

In early 2023, local tourism authority Destination Vancouver released a report that forecasts the need for 20,000 new additional hotel rooms across the Metro Vancouver region, including 10,000 within the City of Vancouver. Without meaningful new significant additional supply, the region will see a chronic shortfall of hotel rooms starting in 2026. These projections are now likely outdated and highly conservative, as they were made long before the provincial government announced its regulations to curb short-term rentals like Airbnb, which now only adds to the demand for hotel rooms.

Further incentives should be considered in exchange for tourism-focused development to create a win-win scenario, where developers are motivated to invest in hotel uses and the benefits from such job-supporting economic activity.

If the updated figure of generating 3,000 new hotel rooms within the Broadway Plan area is reached, it would still only account for 30% of the overall Vancouver-wide shortfall over the coming decades, with further new major hotel developments in downtown Vancouver area increasingly challenged by high land costs. This leaves the Broadway Plan area as the next highly sensible location for major hotel projects.

Tourism is one of Vancouver’s few strong economic strengths, and policies that encourage hotel development are critical for supporting not only tourism-oriented and hospitality businesses, but also retail, restaurants, and services.

Specific areas that would be optimal for new hotel developments include Central Broadway, near the Vancouver General Hospital and BC Cancer precinct — for both tourists and families with loved ones visiting the area for medical care.

With many people across the province traveling to Vancouver for healthcare, there is a growing need for affordable, convenient, and suitable accommodations nearby. For example, a new hotel strip along Oak Street adjacent to this medical precinct could also serve as a health and wellness business district, with spa services and healthier eateries.

New hotel projects would also be ideal within and in the general vicinity of the South Granville district. Not only would such developments be close to SkyTrain’s future South Granville Station, but it would also be in close proximity to the frequent north-south buses that cross the Granville Street Bridge, the Granville Street Bridge’s future north-south “Granville Connector” pedestrian and cycling pathways (this bound to become an attraction of its own), and Granville Island.

Hotel projects along the Burrard Street corridor and in Kitsilano within the Broadway Plan area would be in close proximity to stunning waterfront parks and beaches, and the West 4th Avenue retail strip.

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This is Part 2 of 5 in Daily Hive Urbanized’s incremental series on unlocking the Broadway Plan’s full potential as a successful, high-density, diverse, and transit-oriented community and Vancouver’s vibrant second city centre.

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