By: Josh Fellman
Harrison Street and PC Urban Properties will this year break ground in Vancouver on a first for Canada: fully furnished rental housing aimed specifically at health-care workers. The Chicago-based manager is already moving ahead with similar opportunities.
The C$265 million project will be comprised of 507 apartments, mainly studios but with some one- and two-bedroom units, in twin 22-story towers across the street from Vancouver General Hospital (VGH). The developers will set rents at a discount to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp citywide average- which stood at C$1,705 a month for a studio in October.
The project seeks to address Vancouver’s high housing costs- the city was ranked fourth- least affordable globally by Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy, which make recruiting nurses difficult, Harrison Street and PC Urban executives said. It also provides a low-risk use for the site as Canada’s condo and rental markets weaken.
“We can create environment that the hospital as trying to create for its employees” in addition to providing cheap housing, said Jonathan Turnbull, senior managing director and head of Canada at Harrison Street. “A community atmosphere can help with mental health and all those other factors.”
The firm is deploying finds for the project from its open-ended, core-plus Harrison Street Canada Alternative Real Estate Find, which has more than C$1 billion of assets, according to company materials. Its 24 properties include 4,200 beds of student housing, which is the model for the VGH project.
This “is like graduate student housing,” Turnbull said. “The furniture is a little nicer and the bedrooms are a bit bigger” than undergraduate accommodation “but we’re still creating community,” including a childcare center and other amenities.
Turnbull said Harrison Street is excited by the project and is evaluating opportunities to deploy the model near five hospitals in Ontario. There are no existing developments of this exact type in Canada, he added.
The JV is developing the project on land that PC Urban owned and had previously planned to develop with 354 units of conventional multifamily housing, including a greater proportion of larger units, Brent Sawchyn, the Vancouver-based firm’s CEO, told PERE Deals. The partners plan to break ground in October, with completion scheduled for mid-2029.
While the project has a nomination agreement with VGH, it is not receiving any direct government or hospital subsidies. That said, build-to-rent generally is back on the agenda in Canada in a way it had not been since 1970s, when it was supported by the federal government, according to Sawchyn.
“There’s been a perfect storm, finally of recognition by the approving authorities in our various levels of government to help facilitate rental housing, also recognition from some of the larger investors within Canada to also support more housing by way of rental housing,” he said in a phone interview.
Additionally, many developers have been caught out by the condo market downturn, with some projects formerly planned for sale reemerging as rental housing, Sawchyn said. “The good effect is that we’ve created a lot more homes, and the rents have actually gone down a little but,” he added, citing this as a positive development.
“A lot of developers are lamenting that it’s difficult making the economics work, which is true, but at the end of this it’s going to be much better for all of us,” Sawchyn said. “We need to deliver housing, not just for hospital and healthcare workers, but all over the place.”
