Density plan for SkyTrain's Rupert and Renfrew stations approved by Vancouver City Council

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The entire Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan is roughly framed by Parker Street to the north, Boundary Road to the east, East 27th Avenue to the south, and Nanaimo Street to the west. The area plan encompasses the southern area of the Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood and the northern area of the Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood.

As can be expected, the highest-density developments will be concentrated around the SkyTrain stations, with core areas allowing towers ranging from 29 to 45 storeys — significantly taller than the provincial minimum standards — and designed to include below-market rental housing and childcare facilities. Surrounding these cores, buildings will range from 22 to 40 storeys, gradually stepping down to mid-rise forms.

“This part of East Vancouver has sat dormant while the region around it has grown. Just look at one stop away, the Brentwood SkyTrain Station in Burnaby is a clear example of what is possible. There we see the transformation of a formerly under-built neighbourhood into a thriving urban centre, anchored by high-density housings, shops, offices, and public spaces,” said ABC city councillor Lenny Zhou during today’s deliberations.

“This kind of ambitions is what we need to embrace in Vancouver, and this plan gives us that opportunity.”

Other areas envisioned as “villages” will see low-rise residential and mixed-use buildings up to six storeys, with new shops, hotels, and community services introduced along key corridors. Existing industrial/employment lands will be protected and transformed through various new typologies up to about 3o storeys, including new offices, hotels, large-format retail, creative industrial uses, and film and television production studios, such as an expansion of the existing Vancouver Film Studios campus.

“We have huge needs for housing, but we also really need to protect our industrial land. That doesn’t mean leaving it frozen in time. We need to modernize it. We need to intensify it. We do need to consider looking at mixed use and other uses in conjunction with it, but we cannot just become a city of housing and not have economic driving engines and employment driving engines that are actually going to give people jobs so that they can actually afford to live in the housing that we’re actually building,” said ABC city councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung.

“And so, things like looking at providing the opportunity for Vancouver Film Studios to expand and intensify, to bring in new real drivers like that, to prioritize things like artist studios on the sort of employment land space, I think is critically important.”

While residential uses are excluded from these employment/industrial-focused zones, an exception has been made for the massive First Nations-led redevelopment proposal at the former BC Liquor warehouse site at 3200 East Broadway, located immediately west of Rupert Station, where towers up to 60 storeys are proposed, which will potentially be some of Vancouver’s new tallest buildings.

Just northeast of Rupert Station, BC Housing is also redeveloping its Skeena Terrace social housing complex into 1,900 affordable homes within towers up to 36 storeys.

Although the area plan will notably introduce significant new density near the SkyTrain stations, the vast majority of the new land uses for single-family neighbourhood areas that are away from the immediate area of the stations call for low-rise residential apartment uses up to six storeys. Further out on the northern and southern peripheries of the area plan, the area plan introduces new multiplex allowances for these neighbourhoods.

Later in 2025, following the approval of the area plan, City staff will return to City Council to seek approval for City-initiated rezonings covering a substantial portion of the area, specifically to enable new low-rise apartment uses. This accelerates potential developments by removing the need for property owners and developers to submit an individual rezoning application for their project site, effectively enabling them to skip to the development permit application.

Additionally, the area plan considers floodplain restrictions due to the presence of Still Creek within the low-lying areas near the bulk of the employment/industrial uses, including higher building elevations for ground levels, limited underground parking to enable groundwater to seep into the creek, and other design considerations, such as further naturalization and daylighting efforts for the creek.

During the deliberations, some livability impact concerns were raised about Canadian National’s potential long-term plans to twin its heavy freight/passenger railway running through the area plan, which parallels the SkyTrain guideway. The area plan stipulates that developments near the railway must consider design mitigations for noise, vibrations, and other impacts.

“I do worry about the rail situation. You know, these rail projects, I do suspect, given where we’re at with national infrastructure needs and tariffs and trade, that we will see expansion of this rail corridor,” said Green Party city councillor Pete Fry.

It was also suggested that increased railway capacity/traffic would further impede on the area plan’s north-south transportation connectivity, with ABC city councillor Lisa Dominato stating, “The public and I think even City Councils feel that the rail companies are not necessarily accountable to the cities,” before referencing rail/road grade-separation projects elsewhere in the region as a measure to improve connectivity and safety.

Significant investments are also planned to support the new growth, with infrastructure costs estimated at $1.2 billion over the next decade, including new higher-capacity water and sewage infrastructure, redesigned streets that improve and introduce new pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, and improve the speed and reliability of TransLink buses.

Reforms to the City’s Community Amenity Contributions (CACs) framework will exempt certain types of projects — such as market rental buildings that include below-market units and childcare facilities — from some added project costs, making it more financially feasible to deliver affordable housing. A comprehensive update to the City’s financing tools is anticipated in 2026.

But similar to the challenges seen with the Broadway Plan, generating more community and public benefits under the Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan could prove difficult. This is because the extra fees paid by developers of strata market ownership condominiums have traditionally been a major revenue source for funding such amenities. In contrast, secured purpose-built rental housing projects yield lower returns for developers, and as a result, the City does not require the same level of contributions from these projects as it does from strata developments.

“Now we’re starting to feel it with respects to the shift in housing tenure types. And we’ve been prioritizing as best we can, affordable housing and rental housing. And that comes at a cost in terms of the city creating the viable conditions for that and giving up community amenities that we traditionally received when we were building, for example, a lot more strata housing,” continued Kirby-Yung.

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For Daily Hive Urbanized’s full detailed rundown of the Rupert and Renfrew Station Area Plan, click here.

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