News and Features
Foreign Real Estate Heirs And How They Are Changing Vancouver's Skyline
By Frances Bula published Sep 1, 2012
Additional Images click to enlarge
From Concord Pacific Place to Little Mountain, Vancouver is the proving ground for a generation of offshore development dynasties
When Joo Kim Tiah was still a scrubby high-school student in Kuala Lumpur, his parents came to Whistler for a ski trip. As Tony and Alicia Tiah passed through, they thought Vancouver looked clean and pleasant so when they spotted a nice-looking building on West Georgia, they went ahead and bought it. It was the Fortis tower, and they paid $91.4 million.
Seventeen years later, Tiah uses Fortis’s 21st floor as his office. From the grand but sparsely furnished room painted a sober olive, the 32-year-old oversees his family’s now-extensive Holborn Group holdings in Vancouver, properties he hopes will make an indelible mark on his adopted city. Next door is the site where one of Arthur Erickson’s final designs will be built, a distinctive twisting structure Tiah hopes will achieve the iconic status of the CN Tower in Toronto or the Petronas Towers in his hometown of Kuala Lumpur. Down the street, the family’s TA Properties owns the Bay parkade, a prime spot for redevelopment. And across the Cambie Bridge, the contentious Little Mountain lands. The six hectares of former social housing will bring density to the heart of single-family Vancouver—but not without some heavy ploughing. It’s taken five years just to get agreement on the overall concept for the project, currently a giant weedy lot punctuated by orange fencing. That’s happened amid passionate protests over the way the site was cleared of residents and over the lack of anything more than the replacement of the original 224 units, tussles between the city and the province over how much density will be acceptable, and a bullish insistence from Tiah about what he needs for Holborn to make a reasonable profit. That fight is far from over.
The community process has been both puzzling and frustrating for him. Meeting with residents is not a significant part of the development process in Malaysia. “There’s a world of difference here. The public consultation is so exhaustive. It’s dragged out so long,” says Tiah, who’s had two of the city’s ultimate power insiders—architect James Cheng and marketer Bob Rennie—at his side throughout the negotiations. He’s attended many of the meetings to show people the face behind the project, and he says he’s in awe of the volunteer hours people have put in to get as familiar with the project as he is himself. But the consultations, he notes, sometimes turn into meetings where “only the diehards show up, and it’s like their own club.” Several people say he was very impatient with the lengthy public talks, that he split with former Vision councillor Jim Green last year, hired to work with the Holborn team, because he thought Green should spend less time with residents and more time influencing former political colleagues. And, although publicly he says he can live within the density limit set by staff (a little more than the Olympic Village, noticeably more than the Arbutus Lands), privately he is badgering City Hall to get more.
