501 West Georgia — Hudson's Bay Parkade Redevelopment

Vancouver council voted 7-3 on July 27, 2026 to approve Holborn Group’s redevelopment of the Hudson’s Bay parkade block downtown, a roughly C$2.8 billion project whose tallest tower would reach 315 metres and become the tallest building in Canada west of Toronto. Henriquez Partners Architects designed it. The primary site is 501-595 West Georgia Street, with a secondary parcel at 388 Abbott Street.

Project Scope

The approval covers four buildings: towers of 63, 68 and 79 storeys on the Georgia block plus a 38-storey building at Abbott. Combined, the development delivers 1,783 homes, 920 hotel rooms and about 70,000 square feet of conference and meeting space. Of the 1,783 units, 237 are designated social housing, gifted to the City. The 315-metre hotel tower carries a diagonal-grid exoskeleton that Henriquez based on the glass sponge reefs native to the British Columbia coast, a structural expression rather than a cladding pattern. One open item could change the numbers: NAV CANADA has raised aviation concerns that may force a reduction of about 27 metres, which would still leave the tower as the tallest in Western Canada. No construction start or completion date has been set, and no general contractor named.

Why It Matters

Vancouver has spent fifteen years capping downtown heights to protect view cones, and this approval is the clearest signal yet that the policy is bending. A 79-storey residential tower in a market with a 550-foot informal ceiling changes what land on the Georgia corridor is worth. The 237 social housing units are the trade that got it through council, and they’re worth watching, because Vancouver’s density-for-affordability deals have a mixed record on actually delivering the affordable component. The reef-inspired exoskeleton is also a genuine structural system in a seismic zone, not decoration, which makes the engineering documentation worth reading when it’s published.

Project Team & Details