DEVELOPING STORIES
/NEW DEVELOPMENT RISING AT
HARWOOD AND THURLOW
Pair of towers soon to command the view
by Jake McGrail
(click images to enlarge)
The northern tower at 1099 harwood. (Ewan Streit photo)
It’s been a long time coming, but there’s now some steady construction progress happening at the intersection of Harwood and Thurlow. Eight years after the original rezoning application was submitted to the city, there are now two towers making their way up to (eventually) 30 storeys in height.
Owned by Bosa Properties and designed by Henriquez Partners Architects, the plans for the redevelopment have remained fairly consistent since 2017, with one big pivot being a switch from a mix of strata and rental homes to being 100 percent rental (a common evolution for new developments in Vancouver over the few years).
a view across some of the site. (Ewan Streit photo)
The towers sit on the two eastern corners of the intersection, facing each other across Harwood Street. The northern tower might be slightly further ahead in terms of current construction, but they’ll both be the exact same height eventually (although the northern tower will continue to look taller due to the incline of the street). While fundamentally one singular project, the two towers are technically listed as two separate projects on paper (a fact that will come into play later).
The aptly – if a bit boringly – named “Harwood x Thurlow” development replaces a series of four former low-rise apartment buildings, each of which were just three storeys tall. The new buildings will contain a combined 549 rental homes, with 112 designated as “below-market” units.
AN ARTISTIC RENDERING OF THE FUTURE TOWERS. (Henriquez Partners Architects / BOSA PROPERTIES)
To accommodate all the extra vehicles that will call the block their home each tower has five levels of underground parking, although that apparently amounts to just 276 parking stalls. Of course it’s not like it’s a requirement to own a car to live in the West End…hopefully there will be some tenants who will make alternative transportation choices!
Unlike many other big tower developments, this one isn’t promising retail space in its lower levels, or other features like daycare or community spaces. It’s simply taking the site of some self-contained, small apartment buildings, and putting a couple much larger apartment buildings in their place.
In order to get as far as it has, the project did take an infusion of federal funding. Back in the fall, multiple Vancouver developers took out loans from the federally-run Apartment Construction Loan Program, which has had billions of dollars pumped into it to try and push projects like this one towards the finish line.
With Bosa Properties’ pair of towers being listed as two separate projects, each one took out a loan from the government. They total $369.4 million in all, with the money coming in around the same time that the construction began to noticeably rise.
As to when moving trucks might start to arrive on site, there’s not yet an estimated completion date available to the public. However, the fact that there are already several storeys of visible construction is at least a good sign. Hopefully, having passed the delay-ridden stages of financing and permitting, this project will be completed in a timely manner.
And then, once it’s done, there will be another addition to the slowly growing number of medium to high-rise towers along Harwood and Thurlow.
