West End residents organize against Barclay Street hotel proposal

Editor’s note: This story originally ran in the October edition of the West End Journal. Thanks to the TWEJ team, particularly Jake and editor/publisher Kevin Dale McKeown, for their continued collaboration. You can subscribe to their monthly newsletter or donate to support their coverage of everything west of Burrard. 

Deep in the West End, beside Stanley Park, a large hotel is being proposed to replace the old Rosellen Suites hotel. The current four-storey hotel is famous for frequently hosting Katharine Hepburn in its penthouse, which still bears the star’s name today. More recently, West End residents have been organizing in opposition to the rezoning of the property. 

The proposal in question — a 27-storey hotel with 270 rooms, a ground-floor restaurant and bar, and an upper-level patio with a pool — has drawn opposition from nearby residents since it was first introduced. Submitted by real estate developer Marcon, the proposal is a massive shift from the original redevelopment plan, a 10-storey condo tower, approved for the site back in 2018. 

Mark Jan Vrem is one of the co-founders of the Stop 2030 Barclay campaign. Jan Vrem was quite dismayed when he first saw the developer’s sign for a massive hotel proposal out in front of the Rosellen, and he wanted to try and do something about it.

“This big hotel, it just doesn’t fit. It’s like a 10-pound package in a five-pound bag,” Jan Vrem told The West End Journal (TWEJ). “It’s traffic congestion, it’s noise, it’s safety issues, it’s parking, it’s blocking views, it’s shadows…and it just doesn’t fit the scale of the neighbourhood.”

The campaign took a little while to gain traction, but eventually more people took notice and wanted to take a stand as well. Jan Vrem credits the work of a number of people for helping grow the vocal opposition to the proposed hotel, and expanding the group’s organizing efforts. 

Jane Murphy Thomas is the community participation facilitator for the campaign. Thomas took to this task with aplomb, given her past experience as a community organizer. Since the end of August, Thomas has hosted petition-signing tables at the West End Farmers Market each Saturday and outside Denman Mall each Sunday.

Thomas said the public reception has been “very, very enthusiastic.” Tabling in the community helps raise awareness of the issue and hear perspectives on the proposal from other local residents. “A lot of people are in disbelief that the city is even entertaining this proposal, they’re shocked that something like this is proposed for this neighbourhood, and really angry about it,” Murphy Thomas told TWEJ.

The complaints from West End residents can be seen across many platforms – from the petition tables, the group’s website, on TWEJ’s own Facebook page, and on the Shape Your City Q&A page.

Many of the most common concerns about the proposal can be boiled down to worries about the logistical strain a massive new hotel could cause in the middle of the residential parkside area. Those include more traffic congestion and increased noise, both during the building’s construction and from the proposed restaurant, rooftop pool, and bar. There are also concerns over building height and changes to the character of the neighbourhood.

Currently, everything west of Denman Street has the RM-5B (Residential) zoning tag. That would change should the 2030 Barclay proposal be approved, as it calls for a rezoning to CD-1 (Comprehensive Development). Only a handful of sites anywhere in the West End have a CD-1 designation, outside of the “commercial streets” of Denman, Robson and Davie.

When Marcon initially submitted its application for a nearly 30-storey hotel back in the summer of 2024, the city itself stated that the application “is not consistent with Council-adopted policies.” How have things changed since? Well, a revised application dropped the proposal from 29 to 27 storeys. But the more important shift was city council passing a new Hotel Development Policy earlier this year.

ABC Vancouver, the party holding a majority on council, has placed a big emphasis on creating more hotel rooms in an attempt to match demand and bring in more tourism dollars. ABC’s hotel policy allows for extra density for specific hotel projects, and allows hotel developers to count private facilities as part of their community amenity contributions. The latter was a last-minute change brought by ABC Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung, who was warned by staff that the policy could further diminish the city’s ability to generate revenue for new city facilities, according to Vancity Lookout.

With the application under review, the city’s planning department told TWEJ they are unable to comment on it. However, city staff did release plenty of statements in answering the nearly 150 questions posed by the public during the project’s Q&A period. One answer that came up repeatedly was that the new hotel policy “takes precedence” over other council policies when it comes to height and density considerations for replacing existing hotels. 

In other words, there’s no point referencing the West End Community Plan or any other previous city-enacted development policies, because in the case of replacing an existing hotel (like the four-storey Rosellen Suites) with a bigger hotel, the new hotel policy is the only thing that matters.

Both Marcon and representatives of the city have stated that this proposal at 2030 Barclay is more of a one-off than anything else, since the extra height and density considerations only apply in cases where there’s already a hotel on the property. Vancouver currently has 78 hotels.

“I think at this point, there are so few opportunities to do this in the city, that we may see one of these every few years, maybe less,” said Nic Paolella, Marcon executive vice president, in an interview on CBC’s The Early Edition on September 16. 

“I think you can see the challenge the city will have to try and get anywhere close to its goals…because of how few places you can do spot-rezonings on existing hotels where it would make any sense to do that. These end up being unique and one-off moments inside of communities — I don’t think there are many communities in the city that have so many of these types of hotels,” Paolella said.

Kirby-Yung spoke about 2030 Barclay on the same radio program the following day, where she avoided directly expressing either personal support or disapproval of the specific project. Rather, the ABC councillor focused on the pressing need for more hotels in Vancouver.

“With respect to desperately needing new hotels, that’s something that’s been well-quantified in the city,” Kirby-Yung said. “We’ve got about 13,000 hotel rooms right now. The estimates and all the studies show we’re short about 10,000 rooms. Demand is going to outstrip supply by next summer,” she explained. 

However, Kirby-Yung’s comments are slightly misleading. The 10,000-room figure comes from tourism promoter Destination Vancouver, which estimated the city “could support the development of an additional 10,000 hotel rooms” over the next 25 years. According to a 2025 study by Destination Vancouver and the B.C. Hotel Association, hotel occupancy “can be as high as 95 per cent” during the peak summer season, with average occupancy sitting just below 80 per cent.

While this is “just” one application, Jan Vrem, the campaign organizer, worries it could be a sign of things to come, should the proposal pass in its current state.

“There’s something that’s sort of existential about this application, because you’re dropping a CD-1 zoning into a residential neighbourhood,” Jan Vrem said, adding he’s concerned that, if the rezoning goes ahead, it could set the tone for other redevelopments.

Of course, under current guidelines, it doesn’t seem feasible that a bunch more proposals like this would pop up in the West End (especially west of Denman). However, the new hotel development policy demonstrates the current council majority’s appetite to shift the rules and requirements in an effort to spur more development.

That brings up another major concern with the project and the rezoning it would need to happen, according to retired architect and former Vancouver City Planning Commission member Rob Grant. 

“I think the fact that a developer is getting such an uplift in land value is almost unconscionable,” Grant said. “What are the negotiations? It’s all behind closed doors. What kind of community amenity contributions are going to go with this thing, the up-zoning of this land?”

“You’re getting clever architects and developers who really know how to game the system, being able to do this almost Hail Mary sort of thing…and it’s got nothing to do with what we need in the West End, which is affordable housing,” Grant remarked.

Grant also feels that there simply doesn’t seem to be a unified plan for how the city is approaching development across the board.

“If the planning department was so serious about these hotels, what about the Empire Landmark — the tallest building in the West End, on Robson Street. It was a hotel. It took two years to demolish, and then they put up two condo towers,” Grant said. The former 357-room Landmark hotel was replaced by two new buildings, completed in 2024, boasting 237 condos, 83 social housing units, and ten commercial spaces, according to Urbanized.

In a similar vein, multiple commenters on TWEJ’s Facebook page pointed out how the Coast Plaza Hotel also closed down and was turned primarily into apartments, with a small “boutique” hotel also in the building.

While many people certainly have made their voices clear to the city with regards to the 2030 Barclay proposal, it remains to be seen whether staff will recommend any changes to the application once it’s referred to city council for a public hearing and decision. With the application currently under review, there’s also no clear timeline for when staff will complete that referral report.

While Thomas isn’t the most pleased with the level of engagement the Stop 2030 Barclay campaign has received from the city, she plans to keep working to make sure public engagement doesn’t die down while waiting for the report. 

“We’re assessing things now and looking at the answers they gave about timing, and thinking how do we keep people interested and what do we do next…there’s lots of things that we still can do, and those are what we’re strategizing about,” Thomas said.

For the time being at least, the Rosellen Suites remain at 2030 Barclay. But for how much longer? We’ll just have to wait and see.