Pile of rubble at site of downtown Vancouver heritage building | Daily Hive

Pile of rubble at site of downtown Vancouver heritage building following expedited demolition work

Demolition progress of 500 Dunsmuir Street, at approximately 7 pm on January 19, 2025. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

In well under 48 hours, the former Hotel Dunsmuir SRO building in downtown Vancouver was reduced to a pile of rubble.

Under an order by the City of Vancouver, due to the building’s extremely poor condition, expedited demolition work at 500 Dunsmuir Street carefully began at approximately 9 am on Saturday and concluded on Sunday evening.

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Over the weekend, a significant portion of the demolished building’s debris extended well onto Dunsmuir Street.

To create the required buffer and staging area for the demolition process, there were major road closures next to the building on Dunsmuir Street and Richards Street.

These road segments reopened to vehicle traffic early Monday afternoon, after the debris spanning the Dunsmuir Street roadway was fully removed.

What is now left of the 1909-built, five-storey building is now an unusual sight of a mound of building debris up to about three storeys high.

Holborn Properties, the owner of the property, is required to cover not only the total cost of the demolition, but also the next steps of removing the demolished debris from the site and filling in the resulting hole in the ground.

Demolition crews are carefully chipping away at the northeast corner of 500 Dunsmuir Street, the former Hotel Dunsmuir SRO.

Much already demolished since work began this morning, with work & road closures scheduled to end Monday. #vancre #vanre #vanpoli https://t.co/EFN4lgoWVL pic.twitter.com/qzbNDNwEgV

— Kenneth Chan (@iamkennethchan) January 19, 2025

A mound of building debris now extends well onto the Dunsmuir Street roadway.

32 hours after demolition first began, all that’s left standing of 500 Dunsmuir Street, the former Hotel Dunsmuir SRO, is a small part of its southwest corner. #vanre #vanpoli https://t.co/EFN4lgoWVL pic.twitter.com/gC6SjpwJfI

— Kenneth Chan (@iamkennethchan) January 20, 2025

As its final decision of 2024, during the last public meeting of the year on December 18, Vancouver City Council approved the City’s Chief Building Inspector’s recommendation to order the expedited demolition of the property.

Recent inspections revealed the building was in a highly precarious state, with its wooden structure severely deteriorated due to significant rainwater leakage. Internal floors had collapsed, and the building was deemed at extreme risk of catastrophic structural failure. According to the City, the building’s rate of decay has accelerated significantly recently.

The building has been sitting vacant since 2013, after SRO residents were relocated due to the building’s poor living conditions.

In its December 2024 decision, City Council had also directed City staff to explore the feasibility of retaining the building’s rooftop cornices. However, a third-party demolition consultant later determined it would take about 14 months to safely remove the cornices, an unacceptably long timeline that prolonged the building’s public safety risk.

Holborn Properties intends to achieve a long-term redevelopment of the entire city block, including the major Hudson’s Bay parkade. Its previous redevelopment concepts explored retaining the heritage building for new integrated uses.