Grosvenor has unveiled its master plan for a pedestrian-focused development that will include one of the largest rental housing components in Metro Vancouver. The proposed development is poised to transform a 7.9-acre site in Burnaby into a thriving, inclusive, mixed-use community with approximately 3,500 new homes, including 2,450 rental homes, a new urban, multi-storey community centre and approximately 200,000 square feet of commercial space on transit. This will be Grosvenor’s largest mixed-use development in North America. 

The development, located within one of Metro Vancouver’s fastest-growing communities and one block from the Brentwood Town Centre SkyTrain station in Burnaby, takes an innovative approach and aims to be a model for future large-scale, pedestrian-focused, transit-oriented developments. 

Featuring the tallest all-rental tower in Western Canada at over 60 storeys, the development will deliver approximately 2,000 market rental and 450 below-market rental homes that will meet the goals of the City of Burnaby’s non-market housing policy, with rents set at 20% below CMHC median rental rates for the area. 

Marc Josephson, Senior Vice President, Development with Grosvenor said “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. These sorts of projects are usually exclusively for residents, but we’ve maintained from the beginning that it has to be for the entire community. Burnaby has shown leadership in encouraging the development of rental housing and housing of all forms for everyone. That opened up this great opportunity to deliver much needed rental housing at a significant scale.” 

This will be one of the first projects of this scale to be entirely pedestrian, with all cars accessing the underground from the site’s periphery. The master plan also incorporates an abundance of green space in a public courtyard for both residents and the general public, including landscaped trails for pedestrians and routes for cyclists and a new, approximately 100,000 square foot community centre for the City of Burnaby that is anticipated to attract well over one million visitors a year. 

Ryan Bragg, Principal, Perkins & Will added “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. 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.” 

In addition, the environmental impacts of the site were taken into careful consideration and upon completion, the development will embrace the City of Burnaby’s sustainability requirements, as well as achieve Grosvenor’s corporate commitment to net-zero carbon in operational emissions from all directly managed buildings by 2030. 

The Grosvenor master plan is a manifestation of many years of careful planning and collaboration with the City of Burnaby. The resulting vision strives to be a game-changer not only for the city, but for the region as a whole.

For more information, visit grosvenorbrentwood.com or read the recent Globe and Mail article here.