Senakw 'welcome centre' for marketing rental homes to be built at Vanier Park | Daily Hive

Concept of the Senakw "welcome" centre at Vanier Park. (Senakw)

A temporary years-long “welcome centre” for Squamish Nation’s Senakw rental housing project will be built at the southernmost edge of Vanier Park — fronting Chestnut Street and a newly-built access road to the development. This site is situated immediately adjacent to the first phase of the complex, now reaching full completion and occupancy.

On Monday, during a public meeting, Vancouver Park Board commissioners approved the request by the development team for the installation of the modular structure, which will be used to provide public information to the public. It will serve some limited functions of a presentation centre by serving some marketing purposes, but anyone interested in renting a home will be taken to a different location to begin the leasing process.

According to Park Board staff, the Senakw welcome centre will “promote the benefits of living at the development and that, notwithstanding any formal paperwork or leasing process may be done in a different location, such as marketing or promotional activity sufficiently constitutes a commercial use.”

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The 3,084-sq.-ft. building will remain in place through the end of 2029. Any changes to the structure’s design and the possibility of an extended lease term will require the re-approval of the Park Board and possibly the federal government, which owns Vanier Park.

Since construction began, the Park Board has already granted temporary access to small portions of Vanier Park for construction-related needs such as equipment staging and utility access. The proposed welcome centre would expand that use — but in a new direction.

Park Board commissioners provided Park Board staff with the permission to negotiate the rent that will be paid for placing the structure within the park area, including the possibility of a reduced rate. For example, a market rate of about $25 per sq. ft. would generate about $77,000 annually, while a reduced rate of about $10 per sq. ft. would carry an annual fee of more than $30,800.

senakw welcome centre vanier park vancouver

Concept of the Senakw “welcome” centre at Vanier Park. (Senakw)

The first phase of Senakw — situated on the west side of the Burrard Street Bridge — will reach the occupancy stage in Summer 2026. It entails three towers — 26 storeys, 31 storeys, and 39 storeys — with a combined total of 1,600 homes, including 960 market rental homes and 240 affordable rental homes. These initial below-market rental homes are dedicated to members of the Squamish Nation.

Senakw’s remaining three phases will be built on the east side of the bridge. Each of these phases will similarly generate roughly 1,500 rental homes, with a comparable proportion of market and below-market units.

When the project was first conceived, prior to the pandemic, it was designed to address the extreme need for rental housing, characterized by very low vacancy rates and rising rents across the region. More recently, however, a historic number of secured purpose-built rental homes began reaching completion in early 2025, with additional completions continuing through this year and tapering in 2027. These projects, similarly driven by earlier strong demand, have contributed to a softening in rents, as the significant increase in new supply has coincided with slower population growth due to federal immigration policies and economic challenges in B.C.

Senakw’s first phase will be the single largest rental housing project to reach completion during the current rental housing construction boom.

April 2026 construction progress on the first phase of Senakw. (Westbank)

April 2026 construction progress on the first phase of Senakw. (Westbank)

Upon full completion, potentially in the early 2030s, Senakw will generate more than 6,000 rental homes for a population of up to 9,000 residents within the 10.5-acre reserve of the First Nation. There will be a total of 11 towers, with the tallest of Tower 9 in the third phase reaching 560 ft. with 58 storeys, containing over 900 rental homes.

The First Nation previously announced it will adopt the same protections outlined in the provincial government’s British Columbia Residential Tenancy Act (BCRTA) for Senakw and all other future on-reserve housing developments.

There will also be 106,000 sq. ft. of local-serving retail/restaurant uses and about 45,000 sq ft of office space.

This is a car-light project, with roughly 890 vehicle parking stalls provided for all four phases upon full completion. To help meet transportation demand, Senakw incorporates measures such as extensive secured bike parkades and new pedestrian pathways and protected bike lanes connecting to the seawall, bridge deck, and other City routes, as well as a new TransLink bus public transit hub on the south end of the bridge deck.

Over the coming years, TransLink plans to split the existing No. 16 Arbutus/29th Avenue Station bus route into two separate routes, with a western route running between Marpole and downtown Vancouver via the Burrard Street Bridge (instead of the current route on the Granville Street Bridge). This change is partly due to the need to provide Senakw’s area with improved public transit.

Squamish Nation’s stake in Senakw is managed through the First Nation’s for-profit company of Nch’ḵay̓ Development Corporation. The first and second phases of Senakw are under a 50-50 partnership between the First Nation and OPTrust, which is a major Canadian pension fund. In August 2025, it was announced that Westbank had exited its ownership by selling its remaining interest in the first two phases to OPTrust. The First Nation owns 100 per cent of the third and fourth phases.

Construction on the first phase began in September 2022, when the federal government — through Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) — provided the First Nation with $1.4-billion in low-cost, repayable construction financing toward the first two phases. At the time, this was stated to be the largest loan ever offered to a housing project by CMHC.

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