More than six years after it was approved by council, the largest mixed-use commercial and residential development project on the North Shore in recent decades will soon become a reality.

City of North Vancouver council approved Concert Properties’ request to build 800 strata and rental units and ground-level commercial space on the waterfront property along Harbourside Drive in 2014. But the land has largely be been left fallow since then.

Now Concert president and CEO Brian McCauley says things are about to get rolling.

“It’s a multi-phase project that is ultimately going to land 800,000 feet of residential density and 290,000 feet of commercial density, in frankly, 17 different buildings. So it’s a complex project for sure, and is bound to take some time,” he said.

In 2015, council agreed to allow the land to be temporarily used by Hawker’s Wharf, a hub for foodie startups, but those plans were formally scrapped a year later.

In 2017, Concert came back with a request to swap out a hotel that was originally planned for the site with seniors housing, which council granted. At the end of that year, the company applied for their first permits, McCauley said.

“It has taken us longer to get a development permit approved for Phase 1 than we had anticipated but some of that we chalk up to the realities of COVID,” he said.

Also setting things back was it being the first development approved that would have to anticipate for and mitigate sea level rise by raising the entire site by 1.5 metres and stabilizing the foreshore. That required its own studies and approval process through Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, which Concert now has.

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