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Park board commissioner seeks increased oversight on renewals and repairs
Plus, Vancouver is one of many cities looking to convert office towers for residential uses

Good morning,
Nate here with you today. The heat appears to be creeping back up into the low thirties, and I wanted to take this space to remind readers to be wary of their exertion on these long hot days.
I know for myself – with this beautiful weather we’ve been having, coupled with 9 p.m. sunsets, and a litany of activities worth participating in – that I can get burnt out (both literally and figuratively) if I don’t check in on my energy levels and social battery.
It’s so important to arrange for periods of rest and rejuvenation, but I know how easily that can go out the window when commitments or exciting opportunities come knocking. It’s a great time to take those on – whether it be work or play – but just consider this a reminder to check in with yourself before getting swept away in the summer current.
With that, let’s get into the news and arts of the day!
— Nate Lewis, Vancity Lookout
PS - If you find this newsletter valuable, please consider forwarding it to your friends. New to the Lookout? Sign-up for free.
WEATHER
Wednesday: 30 🌡️ 17 | 🌤️
Thursday: 26 🌡️ 17 | 🌤️
Friday: 26 🌡️ 17 | ☀️
PARKS
Park board commissioner seeks increased oversight on renewals and repairs

The park board offices bordering Stanley Park and the West End / Nate Lewis
What happened: Brennan Bastyovanszky, the park board chair, is seeking increased oversight on renewals and repairs to park board facilities, which have been handled by the city since 2009.
Upkeep, renewal, and refurbishment of park board facilities and assets has become a notable topic in local politics the past few years, with several high profile cases of degraded facilities that are — in the case of the Aquatic Centre and Kits Pool — literally crumbling.
Other examples include the Stanley Park Train, the Jubilee Fountain in Lost Lagoon along with the rest of the board’s portfolio of water features throughout the city, and the Britannia Community Centre.
“Initially, it did make sense for the city and park board to do shared services, and that experiment has obviously not worked out,” Bastyovanszky told Vancity Lookout.
The details: Commissioner Bastyovanszky’s motion, coming up for decision next week, aims to have park board staff conduct an initial performance review of the city’s Real Estate and Facilities Management (REFM) Department. REFM are currently responsible for maintaining most park board facilities. Additionally, he’s asking for ongoing public reporting on the efficiency of REFM’s maintenance and repair work (including responsiveness to 311 requests).
He’s also asked staff to provide recommendations for potential changes to the service agreement between REFM and the park board.
Currently REFM has a deferred maintenance bill of nearly $350 million for work at park board facilities over the past 10 years, Bastyovanszky shared.
In previous eras, the park board had their own engineers and maintenance workers who specialized in various elements of parks infrastructure, Bastyovanszky said. Having these staff in-house meant that park board maintenance would be their priority, leading to quicker response times than what we see now, he said.
It’s political: Mayor Ken Sim and his fellow ABC councillors have, at times, leveraged these failures to maintain and upgrade park board infrastructure and assets, into political arguments for the dissolution of the park board itself. Sim has organized press conferences to announce reopenings of the Stanley Park Train and Kits Pool — both park board assets — which were closed due to structural and mechanical issues.
“The current system is broken, and no amount of tweaking will fix it. Bringing parks and recreation under the direct oversight of city council aligns us with how it's done in every other city in the country,” Sim said in January.
However, the city’s Real Estate and Facilities Management (REFM) department deserves some of the blame too, along with city council, who set priorities and are responsible for funding necessary maintenance and repairs.
“It’s the city that determines the priority [of repairs],” Bastyovanszky said, adding — because they’re delivering the service — the cost of repairs should be coming out of the city’s overall budget, rather than from the budget allocated to the park board. Remember, the city ultimately has control over the park board’s budget.
“The city would rather not spend money on parks… that’s why a lot of [infrastructure has] actually fallen down,” Bastyovanszky said.
The city was not able to provide comment before press time Tuesday morning.
Who do you think is to blame for the maintenance deficit? |
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VANCOUVER NUMBERS
🏫30%: The maximum amount of international students now allowed at B.C.’s public universities, as a percentage of overall student enrollment. The B.C. government’s new cap on international student registration won’t impact UBC or SFU, which say they are already below this limit. [CBC]
✏️ $6,729: How much the city would need to spend, per full day meeting, for city clerk staffing costs if council decides to create a finance committee. [City of Vancouver]
📉 300: The number of jobs media giant Corus Entertainment plans to cut by the end of August. They expect to reduce their full-time workforce by 25% compared with September 2022, including about 500 employees who have already been fired. Corus operates CKNW, one of Vancouver’s flagship news stations. [CBC]
HOUSING
Vancouver one of many cities looking to convert office towers to residential use, short-term accommodation
What happened: Vancouver is one of many North American cities joining in on the increasingly popular idea of converting vacant office spaces into residential uses like hotels and apartments.
Some office spaces are vacant because they’re in old buildings without sufficient technology for some industries (tech and healthcare in particular), while others are vacant in part due to the pandemic-induced shift toward remote and hybrid work.
Background: In Vancouver, many companies prefer to sublet office spaces rather than committing to a lease themselves; that’s due to historically high costs to create and outfit modern work space interiors, and uncertainty over how much these spaces will be used by employees, according to a report from Colliers in April.
ABC Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung said Vancouver is experiencing a commercial office vacancy rate as high as 14%, much higher than the two per cent mark before the pandemic, according to City News.
Vancouver's residential vacancy rate for purpose-built rentals and condos sits just under one per cent, according to the latest data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
Local uptake: Kirby-Yung brought forward a successful motion at city council in late May which directed city staff to review the necessary building bylaw changes that would be required to convert existing office space into pod hotels.
Adjusting to the same forces, many Metro Vancouver developers are seeking to change office space to hotel rooms in their existing buildings.
Example: When office space in a Yaletown tower (built in 2021) went unrented, the developer converted the space into 37 hotel rooms, according to the Vancouver Sun. Meanwhile, other developers in Burnaby and Surrey are asking their respective cities to allow hotel use in portions of their new buildings, according to Storeys.com
Bigger picture: With residential space and building costs at a premium in cities like Vancouver, Seattle, and New York City, these municipalities are promoting different iterations of the office space conversion model.
All three of these cities share geographic similarities — they’re all located on peninsulas — which decreases urban sprawl and increases the cost and scarcity of land.
Seattle: Their city council unanimously approved legislation to make it easier for developers and building owners to convert office space into residential units, including a tax break and allowing them to avoid design standards and requirements for affordable housing.
However, Seattle officials are expecting this to result in less than a dozen conversions, or 1,000 to 2,000 new homes, over seven years, according to Smart Cities Dive.
New York: Office-to-residential conversions have become a significant industry in the city, complete with its own cast of specialists, according to this weighty profile in the New Yorker.
In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams launched the “Office Conversion Accelerator Program,” meant to help developers and landlords navigate renovation regulations and encourage owners to convert their empty office spaces into housing, with a goal of creating 20,000 new homes, according to CBS News.
As of this May, four buildings have begun conversions under this program, with another 60 expressing interest to do so, according to Gothamist.
Difference in the details: It should be pointed out that currently, while other cities are pursuing office space conversions to build sorely needed (though still very expensive) housing, municipalities and developers in Metro Vancouver are mostly considering hotel rooms — rather than homes — for these conversions.
DREAM HOME
Next stop on our tour of homes most people can’t afford is this lil’ guy. It’s a Yaletown penthouse, featuring a private terrace with a built-in hot tub, golf green, and fire pit.
From the photos it looks like you could practically bounce onto BC Place (though I wouldn’t recommend that). Luckily this listing has lots of photos, so we can all look around to our hearts’ content.
Call it Stockholm Syndrome, but for the luxury it offers the price almost seems reasonable… almost.
House of The Week is a home selected by the Lookout team and is not a paid advertisement. All ads are labeled as such. If you’re a realtor who wishes to feature your home in our newsletter, please contact our sales team.
THE AGENDA
🚒 A fire in South Vancouver has destroyed one home and damaged another, as a team of firefighters worked to contain the blaze on Monday evening. One person was taken to hospital with minor injuries but, luckily, it appears no one else was hurt. [Vancouver Sun]
⚽🌳 The city has announced they, along with the park board, will use Killarney and Memorial South parks as training sites for teams during the 2026 World Cup. The public will not be allowed access to the site during the construction of new facilities and for the duration of the tournament. Construction will begin in January 2025, with the field being reopened for public and permitted use nearly two years later, in fall 2026. It’s currently unclear how much this will cost or where the money will come from. [City News, COV]
🥤Starting this week, single-use containers, cups, and cartons made of styrofoam or plastic are no longer allowed to be sold in B.C. The change aligns the province with federal regulations, which were delayed in B.C. in an effort to give producers and businesses more time to adapt. [CBC]
🪵 An ad hoc civic group is suing the city and contractor B.A. Blackwell for negligence over their extensive logging of Stanley Park. The city and park board have previously identified an infestation of hemlock looper moths in the park as the reason for the tree removals. The contractor’s report cites potential injury or damage to park users and infrastructure from dead trees falling, and increased fire risk, while the park board said the lack of public consultation was due to it being an operational decision. [CBC, COV]
🌉Bits of debris have been falling onto Granville Island from the bridge above, resulting in area closures in the popular location, which has frustrated business owners. A city spokesperson said there’s no immediate safety concern for the public, either on the bridge or below. [Vancouver Sun]
🚗 A petition against pay parking at Spanish Banks has garnered nearly 7,000 signatures. There are advantages and drawbacks to the program. While Lookout readers had mixed opinions in our May survey, with a majority of you voting “yes” or “maybe, with more transit,” though there were lots of “no” votes as well. Beginning this month, parking at the beach will cost $1 per hour between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m. [Change.org, Vancity Lookout, COV]
🫂 Last week, a UK paper put out a dubious piece of journalism about the Downtown Eastside, paired with gratuitous photos of people actively using and overdosing on drugs. While these realities clearly exist in Vancouver, this sort of reporting only adds to a stereotypical portrayal of the neighbourhood and its residents, says one local writer, without acknowledging the community, connection, and humanity that’s particularly poignant in the DTES. [The Tyee]
🏴☠️ In Friday’s newsletter we featured Colleen Hardwick’s reaction to city council’s view cone decision. Well, TEAM, the political party she leads, is going on the attack, calling it a “piratical theft” by ABC councillors. [TEAM]
⚖️ A man said he was assaulted as he slept at Broadway and Granville on Sunday afternoon. The eight-year resident of Fairview suffered injuries to his face, leg, hand, and teeth, and was taken to hospital by police. A statement from the VPD complicated the story, saying they arrested an unnamed man for public indecency at that location earlier on Sunday afternoon. [City News]
👖Park board staff are recommending commissioners permanently adopt a pilot project that codifies what types of clothing can be worn while swimming at park board facilities. Jeans, sweat pants, and lingerie are among the types of clothing that are not permitted under the policy. [Park board]
ARTS
Theatre
Bard on the Beach carries on their summer season with performances of Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and The Comedy of Errors throughout the week and weekend. Tickets $30+
Music
Vancouver Folk Festival takes over Jericho Beach Park this weekend. You can get tickets to go for an evening, a day, or all weekend. Advanced tickets are available until July 18. Alternatively, the fun and free option is to go sit on the beach and soak up the tunes and atmosphere from afar. July 19 - 21.
Kaytranda, Montréal’s tastemaker de jour will be in town in September, playing his new album for fans at Deer Lake Park. Tickets go on sale July 19.
Dance
New Works Dance has released its programming for the 2024-25 season, beginning with an free event on July 21, with other special pop ups and showings throughout the fall and winter. You can check out the full lineup of events here.
The Vines Art Festival will be taking to Vancouver parks in August for an interdisciplinary series of free events on the theme of art-led land justice. Schedule here.
Art
ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS features 17 provocative self-portraits of artist Martine Gutierrez portraying a multitude of idolized women. The Canadian premiere of this exhibition is presented by Polygon Gallery. Opens July 11. Free admission.
MEME OF THE DAY
What do you think? Are you feeling overcrowded in the outdoors these days or is it just a matter of knowing where (and where not) to go?
COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS
It’s not quite a stairway to heaven but this new installation almost gets you on eye level with the top of the wooden roller coaster [COV]
File this one under the ‘bad date’ tab. A B.C. woman is being ordered to repay the cost of a $450 concert ticket, which she claimed was a gift [VIA]
Looks like those banana boys are not working as they should… Grandview-Woodland residents are now hoping for a crosswalk light on Victoria Drive [Georgia Straight]
Want to get the most out of your happy hour revelries? This curated guide through Vancouver’s menus launches on July 20 [VIA]
Want to have your announcement featured? Learn how here.
GAME TIME

Today’s Vancouver Guesser is the site of a former outdoor pool and community centre in the heart of the city, but now most of its denizens just frolic in the grass. Do you know the name of this park?
What did you think of today's newsletter? |