Downtown tower approvals hit a ten-year high
Eleven towers cleared council this year, all within eight hundred metres of a SkyTrain station.
COQUITLAM — Eleven residential towers have cleared council this year, the most since 2016, and every one of them sits within eight hundred metres of a SkyTrain station.
The concentration is not an accident. The city's transit-oriented development areas, redrawn after the provincial housing legislation of 2024, allow heights along the Evergreen Line that would need a site-specific rezoning anywhere else in the city — and developers have gone where the process is shortest.
What the approvals do not yet show is completions. Of the eleven, two have building permits; the rest are somewhere between a development permit and a financing package, and at least three are widely understood in the industry to be waiting on interest rates before breaking ground.
The city's own projections assume roughly 60 per cent of approved units are built within five years. On that arithmetic the eleven towers become about 2,400 homes by 2031, against a housing target of 4,100.
