The Vancouver Art Gallery announced on Tuesday that it has scrapped the design plans for the new gallery and prominent Vancouver real estate marketer Bob Rennie is crying foul at the premature decision to dismantle the temporary modular housing at the new gallery site earlier this year.
The new gallery plan has been in the works for a decade and construction was once scheduled to start this fall, but the gallery recently postponed construction due to the anticipated budget escalating from an initial $400 million to $600 million.
The new gallery is set for Larwill Park, a three-acre downtown parking lot that used to be a longstanding Greyhound bus depot. Since 2018, two three-storey modular housing structures on the northern end of the site had offered safe, supportive housing for people at risk of homelessness, operated by a non-profit. It was part of a provincial homelessness strategy launched in 2017 and, at the time, was considered a creative, albeit temporary, solution to the region's growing crisis.
It was one of 13 temporary modular housing sites built in Vancouver. Each private unit had a bathroom and kitchen, and the buildings had communal areas. Six months after opening, BC Housing released a report that showed most residents were benefitting from their new housing, including their job prospects, emotional well-being, and community relations.
The Larwill Place modular housing project had provided homes for 98 at-risk people, but it was removed earlier this year to make way for the construction of the new gallery at 181 W Georgia Street. The residents who'd formed a community there were forced to disperse to accommodations elsewhere, such as single-room occupancy hotels and market-rate units topped up by subsidies, according to a housing advocate.
Rennie, Founder of real estate marketing and services firm rennie, says the displacement of the residents at Larwill Place was therefore unnecessary, especially amid a growing homelessness crisis. The region's homelessness number has gone up 32%, according to the most recent count.
An avid contemporary art collector and Tate Americas Foundation President, Rennie was set to give a major chunk of his valuable art collection to the new gallery, but is now rankled enough that he's thinking of giving his collection to the National Gallery of Canada instead.
"All I can say at this point is we are looking at the National Gallery as probably a better custodian than the Vancouver Art Gallery," said Rennie on Tuesday.
“My angst has always been — and I live in museum world and this is the city where my business is — the addiction to the building rather than to the contents," he added. "I’ve been told that it will now be scaled back and they will get me white walls. ‘Let’s build a simpler building.' But we have taken 98 units out of the system when shelter is the number one problem. This is an addiction to 'star-chitecture' and cocktail party management," referring to the hiring of Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to design the new gallery, which was planned to span 310,000 sq. ft and include 85,000 square feet of gallery space, a 350-seat auditorium, a workshop, a library, and archives.
“It's not just bad decision making — it's a particular sort of decision-making because now the community is gone, and now that space is sitting available,” says Ashley Shapiro, Chair of the BC Housing Action Coalition, which represents community groups, non-profits, and labour unions that work on affordable housing in BC.
Shapiro, who's met with people displaced from Larwill, said their quick displacement was unnecessary.
"The piece that’s most damaging to people is they come from homelessness across the city, and they are placed into this community, and they form bonds with their neighbours," added Shapiro. "So, when these buildings get shut down it’s not just a tragedy for the individual, it's also a tragedy for the community itself. It's ripping apart a community that's been around since 2018. And what’s interesting is there is a misunderstanding of the temporary nature of this modular housing...[most] of these buildings can last for decades when properly maintained, and they do. The temporary nature is not the building or the community, but the land usage."
The City-owned site is also destined for office towers and Shapiro points out that with remote work now the norm, office space isn't in huge demand.
"We have parking lots across the city just sitting empty 99% of the time that would make great locations for putting up permanent housing," Shapiro said. "Our land usage is directed towards more profit-seeking behaviour that is leading to this temporary [housing]."
When asked to comment, a Vancouver Art Gallery spokesperson said the gallery was "not directly involved in this decision," and “We do not have any decision-making authority when it comes to housing issues."
In an email response, the City of Vancouver Deputy City Manager Armin Amrolia said: "The Temporary Modular Housing (TMH) program was intended to be a temporary measure to provide housing while permanent supportive housing was being built. To facilitate construction and staging needs as required at the time for the new Vancouver Art Gallery, the City did not extend the TMH lease. Following the deconstruction of the TMH buildings at Larwill Place in February 2024, the Vancouver Art Gallery immediately commenced site preparation for construction. The Vancouver Art Gallery paused construction shortly after site preparation began."
The ABC-majority city council has recently indicated a preference for permanent housing rather than the pricey dismantling of temporary structures, which can end up in storage.
Housing advocates such as former City of Vancouver councillor Jean Swanson have argued that they continue to serve a vulnerable population, while Rennie argues that if people responsible for the VAG budget had calculated costs more accurately, residents would still be living at the site today.
“They didn't know what the cost was and they wasted tens of millions in architecture fees and had no idea of the cost to build," said Rennie, who has previously sat on BC Housing's Board of Commissioners. "The Board, the City, nobody asked the tough questions— they moved all the container housing off. The VAG is looking at redesigning a smaller building with different architects and it will be two years minimum before construction ever starts, so that's three years of housing need that is needlessly gone."
