The Split Record
Vik Khanna’s own reading of the public record on Vancouver’s school lands. It is a column, so it argues, and the argument is his rather than the company’s. Every claim in it still traces to a source, and where the record is unfinished the column says so instead of smoothing it over.
9 entries
The price that never had to be argued
Repairing a fire-damaged school was priced at $8 million to $10 million in June 2023. The cost of holding the same buildings empty first appears in the 2025 cycle, at $65,000 a year. One figure had to be argued for.
The rent was set in a courtroom
A Vancouver school board and its lessee could not agree what one ground lease was worth. A court settled it on 20 December 2024, at $1.65 million a year against a claim of $9,611,250 or more.
Four prices on one site
A Vancouver school board sold the parcel beneath one of its schools, kept the surface, rebuilt the school on it, and priced four separate things along the way.
The state between two policies
A district has a policy for closing a school and a policy for disposing of land. The first ends at the closure bylaw. The second starts at a surplus resolution.
A motion can stop a subdivision
The Vancouver School Board authorised a surplus consultation on the eastern portion of the Graham Bruce site on 29 May 2023 and voted to suspend the subdivision on 25 September 2023.
The only instrument that runs a century
Over ten years the district completed one long-term instrument on a school site: a 99-year pre-paid ground lease on the south portion of the Sir Sandford Fleming site, for about $8.5 million.
A recommendation has no execution date
The Board approved the closure of Queen Elizabeth Annex on 6 June 2022 and declared the site surplus on 11 April 2023, recommending a transfer to the francophone school authority.
The inventory that was spent
A district’s spare buildings are its ability to absorb change. Spent one at a time, for good reasons each time, they stop being an inventory and become a set of decisions nobody made together.
To Be Decided
In 2019 the board put seven projects in a table. Six of them got a decision. The seventh got the words to be decided, and then the province changed the law around it.