North Vancouver’s ICBC building to be housing project development site

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The province is adding the Insurance Corp. of B.C.’s office building on North Vancouver’s waterfront at Lonsdale Quay to its inventory of sites it is buying up to provide affordable housing near transit hubs.

But the announcement did not include details about price or the number of units that the 300,000-sq.-ft. building could accommodate.

ICBC currently only occupies about half the building. The corporation will be vacating the offices within two years in favour of new, leased headquarters near the VCC-Clark SkyTrain station in East Vancouver, so the province has struck a deal with the Crown auto insurer to buy the North Vancouver building for a mixed-use development including housing.

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Premier David Eby announced the deal on Monday with Transportation Minister Rob Fleming and local MLA and Emergency Management Minister Bowinn Ma. The province will work with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations, the City of North Vancouver, and TransLink to develop the property.

Eby said the province’s goal is to have “shovels in the ground once ICBC moves their last employees over to VCC-Clark.”

“At this point, the best we can say is we’re expecting hundreds of units of housing on this site,” Eby said.

Musqueam Nation Chief Wayne Sparrow said the nations are pleased to be working with the province as partners in the redevelopment to get “concrete results in tackling the housing crisis.

“For decades, our nations have had to kick down doors and fight to regain a stake in our traditional territories,” Sparrow said.

Squamish Nation spokesperson Sxwixwtn Wilson Williams said the site is an important location in the three nations’ shared territory. “We welcome the opportunity to be partners on delivering housing that serves our members and the public as a whole.”

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This will be the third site the province has secured through a $394-million fund it set aside in the 2023 budget with the objective to build 10,000 homes near transit hubs over the next 10 to 15 years.

Government in 2022 changed the Transportation Act allowing it to buy land for redevelopment near transit hubs. Last November, the province purchased a small lot adjacent to land it owns within a master-planned transit-oriented development in Port Moody.

In April, the province paid $9.3 million to buy two properties near the Uptown district of Saanich for future construction of “hundreds” of new homes to be built as either rentals or leasehold properties.

Fleming said the third site, almost on top of TransLink’s North Shore SeaBus station, is “an ideal place to build homes.”

“It’s been home to ICBC for over 40 years, an important employment hub for this community, (and) that will continue,” Fleming said.

Redevelopment will add housing to the convenient location as “one of the key components that is missing from this site,” he added.

North Vancouver Mayor Linda Buchanan said a fortunate aspect of the redevelopment will be that no existing residents will be displaced and it “provides us a really great opportunity to create the kind of housing that people need.”

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The province’s $394-million fund is also under pressure to provide affordable housing sites across the region ranging from Vancouver’s Broadway corridor adjacent to the $2.38-billion extension of SkyTrain’s Millennium line, to the Fraser Highway in Surrey and Langley along the 16-km, $4.1-billion extension of its Expo Line to Langley.

The province’s announcement about the ICBC headquarters came on the same day Vancouver was rated as “impossibly affordable” on the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Report, which rates the affordability of real estate in nine countries.

Vancouver was rated third least affordable only before Sydney, Australia and Hong Kong.

depenner@postmedia.com

x.com/derrickpenner

With files from The Canadian Press

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