Last week Wesgroup Properties teased plans on their social media for a five-acre master-planned community in Surrey that they're calling the "Civic District," saying it will consist of four mixed-use buildings with "hundreds of thousands of square feet of restaurants, retail, offices, and amenities" and over 2,000 homes.
This new Surrey Civic District Wesgroup is planning will be located at 10355 King George Boulevard, a site previously occupied by a Safeway that closed in Spring 2021, a few years after Safeway's mass exodus from the Lower Mainland in 2018. The building is being temporarily used by the Surrey Christmas Bureau.
The site also includes a sizeable parking lot, and the development application for the project indicates that the site will be subdivided into four lots, presumably for each of the project's phases.
All in all, the entire Civic District will be made up of 2,299 units of housing and over 477,000 sq. ft of retail, office, civic, and childcare space that will be delivered in four phases.
As the project is in its infancy, details and numbers are subject to change, but Wesgroup Senior VP Brad Jones tells STOREYS the expected breakdown of each phase is as follows:
Phase 1
- Building Height: 53-storeys
- Residential Units: 506
- Commercial Space: 41,000 sq. ft
- Office Space: 155,000 sq. ft
Phase 2
- Building Height: 59-storeys
- Residential Units: 572
- Commercial Space: 12,000 sq. ft
- Office Space: 74,000 sq. ft
Phase 3
- Building Height: 66-storeys
- Residential Units: 671
- Commercial Space: 13,000 sq. ft
- Civic Amenity Space: 67,000 sq. ft
Phase 4
- Building Height: 58-storeys
- Residential Units: 550
- Commercial Space: 25,000 sq. ft
- Office Space: 92,000 sq. ft
This new Civic District would be just north of the master-planned King George Hub around the Expo Line SkyTrain's King George Station that opened to the public this fall, which is itself just north of the burgeoning Health and Technology District being developed by Lark Group.
The Civic District will also be just down the street from 10227 King George Boulevard, which is the site of an impending mixed-use building slated to be 67-storeys -- one of the tallest in British Columbia. A public hearing for that project has been scheduled for Monday, January 16.
Birthed as a family business in BC over 60 years ago, the privately-owned Wesgroup Properties is no stranger to master-planned communities. Aside from numerous residential and commercial building scattered around Metro Vancouver, Wesgroup's two largest (ongoing) projects are both master-planned communities.
