VANCOUVER -- When the province sold Vancouver’s Little Mountain lands to a company pledging to re-house displaced low-income residents, the deal was controversial for its low price tag for prime land. Now, CTV News has learned only a fraction of that price has been paid, despite the sale and possession taking place more than a decade ago.
Holborn Group bought the 15-acre parcel for $334 million in 2008 and hundreds of low-income families were evicted from the social housing units on the site the following year. Only one temporary and one permanent structure have since been built on the land.
British Columbia’s housing minister has now revealed that the company has only paid a fraction of the purchase price the BC Liberal provincial government under premier Gordon Campbell negotiated, but emphasizes the details of the deal are secret and she doesn’t know when the full amount is actually due.
“There’s a whole bunch of secrecy around the site,” said current Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Selina Robinson on Thursday. “The provincial treasury has only received $40 million of the $334 million, so they’ve only received a small portion of payment … It stinks to me as a taxpayer, it stinks to me as a British Columbian, it stinks to me as a human being seeing that there’s an affordability issue, a housing affordability issue that didn’t just crop up two years ago, it’s been ongoing for a decade and a half.”
CTV News tried reaching Holborn by email and phone, but the company did not respond to requests to discuss the Little Mountain project.
“We haven’t seen the deal; it’s a secret deal the BC Liberals made,” said Robinson, insisting that despite being the government, the BC NDP has no idea when the full amount is due or what the terms of the agreement are with Holborn.
“My understanding is it’s a secret, a deal that was made by a previous cabinet and we don’t get to see previous cabinet documents,” she said.
David Chudnovsky, the former NDP MLA for the area, has spent two years battling BC Housing for access to the documents and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner has now ordered the agency to hand them over.
“The site is still a vacant lot, the only thing that’s been built is the 53 units of social housing as a result of four tenants refusing to move in 2011,” said Chudnovsky. “The notion that Holborn is at work and doing more stuff and making applications, all of that is talk — nothing has been done there since 2013 when they opened those units of social housing.”
CTV News reviewed the Little Mountain site and found no signs of construction, though there were development application signs.
“I’m very interested in these documents being made public in the coming weeks,” said Vancouver city councillor Christine Boyle. “That’s something I’ve been asking publicly for and council supported unanimously. I hear clearly the public wants some transparency and accountability on this project and not necessarily to slow it down but certainly to have a clear sense of what the public benefit is and where we go from there.”
In 1951, 224 affordable units were built at the Little Mountain site when Vancouver’s first large-scale social housing project was built there. When residents were evicted after a bitter battle in 2009, Holborn Group had offered them homes in the 234 social housing units it would build alongside roughly 1,600 condos. Only a few dozen low-income units have been built since.
“My understanding is those lands are still tied up in the City of Vancouver planning processes,” said Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson, who didn’t hold public office until years after the sale was complete. “They’re owned by a private investor and the investor is making his way through the City of Vancouver planning process.”
Boyle says she’s asked city staff if the rezoning, planning or consultation processes from the municipal government have played a role in the decade-long wait for construction to begin.
“My understanding is there are permits being processed and plans being made and I absolutely share the public’s huge frustration at the amount of time this has taken,” she said. “I’ve been asking questions for Little Mountain for many years and certainly many times over the two years since I was elected and what I keep hearing is that the delay is not on the city’s side, that we are moving quickly.”
Holborn Group has rarely responded when contacted about stories related to Little Mountain or to another controversial project it developed: the Trump International Hotel and Tower.
The company’s CEO is Joo Kim Tiah, the son of a Malaysian billionaire, who proudly stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. when the glitzy tower opened to much fanfare in April 2017.
"I would like to thank the media for constantly putting us in the spotlight. Your coverage has certainly brought awareness to everything we do here," Tiah said at the time.
Three years later, the Trump hotel was declaring bankruptcy and once again Holborn did not respond to requests for comment.
While there are several applications before Vancouver city council for social housing and market-rate condos, Chudnovsky wonders whether anything will ever be built by the developer now that the property has been vacant for so long.
“This story is a horrific tragedy,” said Chudnovsky. “We’ve started a campaign called ‘Take Back the Mountain.’ We say this deal is a failure, there must be a way for government to take back the land and build what the people of Vancouver need, which is homes for people who can’t afford the marketplace.”
