As Metro Vancouver’s growth is physically constrained by the Strait of Georgia and the Coastal Mountains, over the past few decades the centre of the region’s population has been steadily moving southeast, progressively further from the downtown Vancouver peninsula where the highest concentration of jobs is located. This imbalance between where jobs are located and where people live have significant negative social, economic, environmental and sustainability implications ranging from impacts on housing affordability, productivity, inefficient utilization of transportation infrastructure, increased carbon footprint and excessive air pollution.

Several decades ago, a regional plan was created to offset and address the inefficient growth pattern caused by our region’s geography. It identified and recommended a series of regional job centres with the goal of mitigating the adverse impacts of Metro Vancouver’s reliance on downtown Vancouver. Surrey City Centre, located just south of the Fraser River in North Surrey, was planned as the largest of these nodes and targeted as a new major business centre for the region. This plan provided the basis for many regional infrastructure investment initiatives and as a result Surrey City Centre is well positioned to further grow in this important regional role.  

While the region’s population growth pattern has evolved as anticipated by the regional planners, with more people now living proximate to Surrey City Centre than downtown Vancouver, the region’s distribution of office space and attendant jobs has been much slower to evolve. Specifically, Surrey City Centre has less than 2 million square feet of office space compared to the downtown Vancouver peninsula’s office inventory of over 28 million square feet. The negative social, environmental and economic implications of this imbalance are profound, and the Centre Block project is specifically targeted to address this imbalance and to advance the Surrey City Centre as a major business, education and jobs centre.

SCDC was asked early on in its mandate to undertake projects that would accelerate the advancement of Surrey City Centre into the region’s next downtown. To this end, in 2018 SCDC completed in partnership with the Century Group, the 3 Civic Plaza project, a 52-story tower containing 500,000 sf of hotel, academic, office and residential uses. This building has gone a long way to building momentum in the city centre and has laid the groundwork for two other significant and impactful projects in the City Centre that you will see on the following pages.