Near Burnaby’s Brentwood Town Centre SkyTrain station, a new master-planned, mixed-use development with thousands of new homes has been announced.
This week, international developer Grosvenor revealed its plans for 7.9-acre, six-tower development along Lougheed Highway between Alpha and Beta avenues. The project would deliver 3,500 new homes, the majority of which would be rentals. This would mark Grosvenor’s largest mixed-use development in North America and the tallest all-rental tower in Western Canada, which would reach over 60 storeys.
According to the developer, the proposed project has recently been approved by the City of Burnaby to move forward with the consultation process.
“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,” said Marc Josephson, Grosvenor’s senior vice president of development, in a news release.
Of the 3,500 proposed homes in the project, 2,450 would be dedicated as rental residences. Two thousand units would be reserved as market rental homes and the other 450 residences as below-market rental suites that will meet the City of Burnaby’s non-market housing policy, with rents set at 20 per cent below the CMHC median rental rates for the area.
Grosvenor says that their development will be one of the first projects of this size to be entirely pedestrian. Cars would have access to the site’s underground on the periphery. A public courtyard would introduce a large portion of green space for residents and the community, plus landscaped trails 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,” said Ryan Bragg, principal at 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,” he added.
The development would include about 200,000 square feet of commercial space and a multi-storey, 100,000 square-foot community centre that is expected to attract over one million visitors a year. Grosvenor states that its project will embrace Burnaby’s sustainability requirements while achieving its own corporate commitments to net-zero carbon in operational emissions from all directly managed buildings by 2030.
Virtual open house sessions for the Grosvenor project are scheduled for March 23rd and 24th.
