West End apartment building still empty seven years after a fire

For just about seven years now, the Washington Court apartment building has stood empty at the corner of Thurlow and Nelson, after a fire damaged the structure and forced out more than 80 tenants in 2018. Those tenants had access to some emergency social services in the immediate aftermath of the fire but those quickly ran out, CBC reported at the time. 

That same article quoted the then-building manager who said it would take about a year — give or take a few months — for the building to be ready to accept new tenants. That timeline didn’t quite pan out. 

The primary issue, as it turned out, was that while the building owner – a group called Lucky ZA Investments, owned by Linlin Zhang – aimed to do a simple repair job to get the 44 homes back on the market, a consultation with the city led to a much longer list of upgrades that needed to be done inside the over 100-year-old building, including seismic upgrades and changes to safety systems.

That’s all according to architect Alan Endall, from an interview with Storeys five years after the fire. In 2023, Stantec Architecture, with Endall as project lead, submitted an application to restore the apartments and turn Washington Court from a five-storey building to an eight-storey one, proposing to nearly double the total number of homes from 44 up to 80, in part by shrinking the unit sizes. 

Endall described the task as a total rebuild of the interior, while keeping the exterior the same. That second part is important because Washington Court is a heritage building, meaning it can’t be totally torn down and replaced with a wholly different structure. 

The building definitely deserves its heritage status, as it was built all the way back in 1910. At the time, it was one of the tallest apartment buildings in the West End, although today it’s dwarfed by the decidedly newer towers in its immediate vicinity. 

The 2018 fire was not the first at Washington Court. Back in 1966 a blaze destroyed the then-sixth floor of the building, which was removed entirely in the aftermath. Unlike the ‘60s, however, this decade has yet to see anyone actually live in the building.

The 2023 development application certainly carried some optimism with it. After a long back-and-forth process of refining the design, a permit was issued by the city in January of this year. But now it’s unclear whether there’s a plan in place to actually follow through with said plan.

Zhang, the owner, and their company Lucky ZA Investments have very little information about their organization available publicly, and seem to have no website or social media to speak of. Stantec Architecture doesn’t have any mention of Washington Court on its own site, and Alan Endall (seemingly the last person from the developers’ side who publicly commented on the project) doesn’t appear to work for the company anymore.

Stantec’s Vancouver office did not respond to Vancity Lookout’s request for comment.

None of that is very promising for tangible progress being made towards getting tenants into the historic building once again. Until then, Washington Court will remain fenced off and standing empty.

This article originally ran in the August issue of the West End Journal. Thanks to author Jake McGrail, photographer Ewan Streit, and editor Kevin Dale McKeown for allowing Vancity Lookout to use their work.