Dan Fumano: B.C. taxpayers spending millions to fix 'hugely unusual' problems at Vancouver building
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2019 10:00:50 +0000
Only nine years after a local company was paid $8.5 million to construct a 51-unit social housing building in Vancouver, provincial taxpayers are on the hook for extensive repairs there expected to cost $4.5 million.
It’s not clear who is responsible for the deficiencies at the Dunbar Apartments on Vancouver’s west side. For now, the province is footing the bill for the repairs, which a building maintenance professional described as a “hugely unusual” amount of work for a building that new.
B.C. Housing, which owns the building, said by email that repairs and upgrades were expected to take 12 months using money drawn from the province’s capital renewal fund. It said it had identified “deficiencies with some of the materials and construction methods utilized on the exterior of the building.”
The four-storey Dunbar Apartments, on the southeast corner of West 16th Ave. and Dunbar Street, was completed in 2011. It has 51 studio apartments with support services for people who were homeless or at risk of homelessness. It was one of 14 supportive housing projects built in Vancouver at that time, in a partnership among the city, province and local non-profits.
Repairs have been underway for most of this year, and it’s under scaffolding and a bright blue covering, much like those that were commonplace in Vancouver during the leaky-condo crisis in the 1990s. The crisis led to a commission of inquiry in 1998 and updated building codes. It’s not clear if the issues at the Dunbar Apartments have anything to do with those building codes.
But industry professionals say it’s unusual to see such extensive repairs on a building as young as the Dunbar, constructed well after the codes had been changed.
“The scope of work includes a complete replacement of the brick veneer and replacement of the metal cladding panels in some locations due to inadequate strength of material and installation methods,” said the statement from B.C. Housing spokeswoman, Laura Mathews. “Crews will also be removing and reinstalling all windows to ensure proper waterproofing.”
Mechanical upgrades are also underway in the basement parking level, Mathews said, and the balcony drains are being replaced, because “water is accumulating up to the emergency balcony overflow drains.”
Building maintenance professionals at four different Metro Vancouver companies spoke on the condition they would not be identified in print because they did not want to hurt their prospects for future work.
They all agreed: Even without having access to a detailed building condition assessment, the basic details of the problems at the Dunbar Apartments raise unusual red flags.
“For a building nine years old, that’s an awful lot of money. Something went wrong,” one said. “Something of that age shouldn’t be going through these problems, that’s not common.”
“That sounds like something that was built in the 1980s, when you’re talking about pulling all the windows and pulling all the cladding,” he said. “We were supposed to have systems in place to avoid this. And, to a great extent, it has. But something happened here to this building.”
B.C. Housing said it had also identified “unrelated building deficiency issues” at some of the other supportive housing sites built around the same time as the Dunbar Apartments, and, at the Sun’s request, provided basic information about those. The other building upgrades, however, were “related to the use of new technologies with more complicated mechanical systems in order to meet the LEED standard.”
“The mechanical systems on some of the products are complicated and required further upgrades to improve their performance. Most of these upgrades are complete,” Mathews said. “B.C. Housing strives to create new buildings that meet high energy efficiency standards. Sometimes this involves utilizing new technologies and materials, and with that comes a learning curve on how those technologies perform.”
The budgets for the mechanical upgrades at the other buildings were substantially smaller, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of the buildings, than the work at the Dunbar Apartments. Budgets ranged from $120,000 to fix heating problems at a 129-unit building to $1.02 million for work including a boiler replacement at a 110-unit building. Industry professionals described those upgrades as not especially unusual, particularly for buildings using newer, energy-efficient technology, as B.C. Housing tries to use.
The Dunbar building was the outlier.
B.C. Housing said in its statement: “The repairs required at the Dunbar site are unique to that building.”
The problems at the Dunbar Apartments were not caused by damage by any residents, said Susan Hancock, a spokeswoman for Coast Mental Health, the charity that operates the building. No tenants have been moved during the work, she said.
In 2010, Aquila Construction Inc. was awarded a $8.54 million contract to build Coast Dunbar Apartments. Davidson Yuen Simpson Architecture was the architect.
Dane Jansen, a partner at the architecture firm now known as DYS Architecture, said B.C. Housing had not contacted his company about any deficiencies or repairs as far as he was aware.
And Derek Bosa, president of Aquila, said the first he heard about the Dunbar’s deficiencies was when The Sun phoned the company’s offices this week to inquire. After the Sun provided B.C. Housing’s description of the Dunbar Apartments’ deficiencies to Bosa, he replied by email to say: “All I can offer is that this issue is pending further information and discussions with B.C. Housing.”
There don’t appear to be any lawsuits involving this building. But B.C. Housing is not ruling that out.
Asked whether anyone might be held accountable for problems at Dunbar, or whether taxpayers will pick up the tab, B.C. Housing said no one was available for an interview. But Mathews sent an email saying: “B.C. Housing has reserved its rights to pursue legal recourse pending further discussions with the contractor.”