With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1512670
18 B C B U S I N E S S . C A J A N U A R Y 2 0 24 by Frances Bula Frances Bula is a longtime Vancouver journalist and the 2023 recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation. thought would be a two-year process. So was the $300-per- square-foot subsidy needed for all the below-market- price rentals. Four years later, the con- struction cost is now estimated at $580 million. That will add an average of $100,000 to the cost of every condo, something the company will have to ab- sorb to stay price competitive with every other developer around. (Having more condos at higher floors will generate a small amount of extra revenue, but nowhere near enough to pay the $100-million bill.) It's not just because the price of materials has gone up or even because of the additional interest costs that are punching everyone in the gut. Those were factored in. It's been the extra time and the surprise changes that Anthem has had to adapt to. It shouldn't be that difficult to build a 66-storey building with almost 600 apartments—some of them for-sale condos, some of them rentals, some of them subsi- dized rentals—plus a few floors of office space, an indoor lounge, an outdoor area with a barbecue, a gym, a ground floor filled with interesting restaurants and shops, storage for about 1,500 bikes, un- derground car parking and a children's play area. Should it? Should it? Of course it's complicated— it takes a team with a couple dozen specialists to make that mini-world function well, to find and coordinate the hundreds of building details, from ordering glass to figuring out how many EV plug-ins to install to running the projected costs and revenues for decades ahead. That means building in a cushion for unpredictable bumps: the way the price of steel skyrocketed after Russia invaded Ukraine, for example. Those are all twists and hur- dles that the team at Anthem Properties—one of B.C.'s top 10 private developers—is used to. Eric Carlson's company has 96 projects on the go in B.C., Alberta and California. It has 4,300 apartments and town- houses under development in Coquitlam alone. Definitely not a rookie. But, as the firm's experi- ence with just one of those developments has shown, all of that intense planning can hit a chassis-bending road bump in a minute. The story of Anthem's Citizen complex in Burnaby— where pre-sales are just start- ing—is not a case study of the worst development muck-up ever. But its evolution has been an unforgettable roller- coaster for Melissa Howey, vice-president of development at the company, who has been steering it through since 2019. It tells a story about the cur- rent state of the art and science of development, one that the Anthem team offered to share with me when I asked to get taken through the process of building a single project. When the planning for Citizen started, the projected cost was $480 million for two 33-storey towers on a large site on Kingsway a block from Metrotown, near Anthem's successful Station Square de- velopment. The carrying costs were estimated at $150,000 to $300,000 a month, and that was included in the building pro forma for what everyone CITIZEN CRANE Vancouver developer Anthem Properties has dealt with its share of setbacks for one of its latest projects L A N D V A L U E S