Land Values: More Vancouver businesses ditching main streets for laneway properties

The new café on Guelph Street in Vancouver isn’t that different from many other little independents in the city—small, specialty menu (this one vegan), popular in its small corner of the world—except for one thing.

It’s not on a main traffic street, nor is it one of the few former old convenience stores in Vancouver that have been re-purposed into a hipster café/grocery.

Instead, AM Café’s main set of windows face the alley between Broadway and East 10th Avenue.

There, people sitting next to those windows can observe the parade of urban life going by: a person with a roller suitcase and a black plastic bag that looks like it’s full of life possessions, a garbage truck, a couple walking their dog, a shopper on the way home from the nearby grocery store, a father walking alongside a child with a tricycle.

This summer, owners Lindsay Loudon and Olly Nicklin plan to take even more advantage of the alley by putting tables out along the small brick plaza that runs in front of those windows—an unusual feature in this new building that was completed in 2023.

“I loved the laneway vibe,” says Loudon, on a break from serving a breakfast rush in the 18-seat, 850-square-foot space, explaining why she and Nicklin decided to start their new business in a place that wasn’t exactly the most visible to people going by on Broadway. “I’m thinking that having the patio might make people change their routes.”

The rent was a bit less than other places, as well, because of its unusual location, something that was likely an incentive to the framing shop next door—which is fully on the lane, without even an entry on Guelph.

The Habitat project, a combo of commercial and residential, was done as a collaboration among Fabric Living, Porte Communities and Hudson Projects Corp.

As it turns out, Fabric CEO Jordan MacDonald is a true believer when it comes to tapping into what he thinks is a hidden city treasure: alleys.

“You really open up the fourth dimension of a city when you use them,” he said. His team spent a considerable amount of time designing spaces that would work on the alley: small enough for startup independent businesses, large enough to function, big windows that open onto the lane, special venting.

It’s more than just a case of maximizing commercial spaces in the building. He also sees this kind of design add as something that improves the quality of life in the neighbourhood. It makes things feel safer, bringing “eyes on the lane” to spaces that are now mostly devoted to garbage, loading and garage entrances. “Everything becomes more walkable,” says MacDonald.

The idea couldn’t come at a better moment as Vancouver continues to lose quirky spaces and formerly ignored corners of the city get redeveloped. (Some prayers for the continued existence of the tiny Boxcar bar next to the Cobalt on Main Street near the viaducts, a site that is set to be transformed into a new hotel at some point, and the Narrow Lounge, also on Main.)

People who love urban life and spaces have always had great hopes for the city’s alleys. Vancouver has more of them, proportionally, than Toronto does and certainly more than many European cities. Here, they’re almost as wide as city streets in some areas, such as the West End. And they have a long history, particularly in Chinatown, where residents who were confined to their homes by a city curfew could still socialize in the alleys behind their buildings.

There was a moment of excitement a decade ago when people talked about building laneway apartment buildings in the West End because there was so much room. (To my knowledge, only one or two of those were ever completed.) Vancouver’s business associations have devoted a considerable amount of energy to spiffing up some laneways in Gastown and near Granville as a way of adding new life. And, of course, Vancouver is famous for the number of little homes that now exist along its laneways. But there haven’t been too many efforts at putting small commercial operations in the alleys.

When I asked City of Vancouver staff for examples of other projects like the Habitat building, they came up with a couple. First, the new building at Broadway and Arbutus that has some commercial units facing the Arbutus Greenway. The second, a condo plus social housing plus commercial building in Strathcona that—who could have guessed—is also a Fabric Living project. The stylish black structure, near Casa Gelato, has four commercial units on the alley, one of which will be home soon to Roodenburg, a hip brand-development company that works with many Indigenous groups.

Surely there will be more of these popping up in other alleys? Surely the city is very excited about this urban- design experiment? Hmm. The emailed statement from the city said this: “The Broadway Plan policies ensure commercial space is included in new developments in key areas to support anticipated population growth. Commercial retail units with access off the laneway are supportable as part of mixed used buildings, depending on site conditions.”

“Supportable” isn’t exactly the most gung-ho statement I’ve heard about trying new things, but not at all a surprise to the laneway aficionados in town who are trying to make better use of these interesting city spaces.

Joe Fry at Hapa Collaborative, a landscape-architecture practice in Vancouver, is one of those. “What people love about their city is when they discover it through serendipity—they find places off the beaten track,” says Fry. “It’s what makes cities delightful. When you combine that with grittiness, there’s a kind of authenticity that is retained by paying attention to these spaces.”

And he’s baffled by how resistant the city—specifically the city’s engineering department—is to many efforts.

He’s working with several companies in the Mount Pleasant industrial area, a place where Vancouver’s decade-old community plan (now roadkill, it appears, with the newer Broadway Plan superseding it) envisioned making much more use out of laneways. But efforts to change materials like paving, planting and lighting in the alleys to encourage visitors and commercial operations to hang out there have hit the wall of the engineering department’s terror of having to maintain any of those.

“I can’t tell you how difficult the engineering operations department continue to be with any treatment of the asphalt,” he says mournfully, sitting at a table in his company’s Mount Pleasant industrial-area office. “They come up with all sorts of reasons: slipperiness, visibility, tripping hazard. These materials are the same materials used for crosswalks. The culture of ‘no’ that is prevalent in certain places at the city is frankly perplexing.”

In Gastown, where he is also doing work, the local business association is enthusiastic about, for instance, using the alleys to provide spaces for small incubator businesses. The idea is to create small, hidden gems. “I’m much more optimistic that our work in Gastown—with the right people at the city and with the support of business and residents—will move beyond the entrenched attitudes and artificial barriers that derail good civic placemaking,” says Fry.

The Powell Street neighbourhood that was home to Vancouver’s significant Japanese community before the Second World War (and where Fry’s Japanese grandfather printed the historic New Canadian newspaper) and Chinatown would also be great candidates, but would need a lot of investment and stewardship for them to work.

(And, by the way, alley-life fandom is not just an “only in the old core of central Vancouver” thing. There are other cities in the region that have tried to leverage the laneway experience. The City of North Vancouver has Streetcar Brewing and Cream Pony, a fried chicken and doughnut outpost, in one of the alleys just above the Shipyards District. The City of Langley is prettifying some side streets and lanes around its little core downtown. And, in Burnaby, Anthem Properties, when it developed Station Square, created a small, alley-like street called Silver Drive as part of the overall project.)

MacDonald is also hoping that the city develops more visible enthusiasm for the idea of seeing alleys as a vital part of the new Vancouver, the way Melbourne and Tokyo have, to name a few. He too faced some resistance from the city’s engineering department to introducing different kinds of paving and landscaping to his alley storefronts.

In the cautious language of those who have to deal with city staff on a regular basis, MacDonald pleads for some collaboration in making Vancouver an interesting place—collaboration that would encourage others to add similar spaces to the ones he has done.

“There is an opportunity to work with the city and engineering so we can have more of a win. If they are onboard, if they were wanting to lean into it, there would be a lot of opportunities to work with the developer,” he says. “And we wouldn’t be wasting so much space in the city.”