Vancouver’s Broadway businesses barely getting by with closures at Main Street to last another month

After three long months, businesses in Mount Pleasant are barely scraping by as a section of East Broadway remains shut down for construction.

While the section of Broadway between Main and Quebec streets is set to reopen at the end of next month, Neil Wyles, Executive Director of the Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Association (MPBIA), says the damage has been done.

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Shops are continuing to shut their doors, with no government support on the way.

“I dismissed the standard response from the province, that any sort of help or support would double the cost of the project. This is a $3-billion project,” said Wyles.

He says businesses can’t continue operating under such conditions, but the province says its policy isn’t to step in and provide support.

Following a closed-door meeting with Transportation Minister Mike Farnworth in January, the province said no money would be doled out.

“Consistent with all ministry projects that improve British Columbia’s transportation infrastructure, the province does not provide compensation for disruptions arising from construction,” the ministry stated.

The project has been delayed multiple times and has blown through its budget by at least $127 million. The subway is expected to open sometime in 2027.

“$10 million on a $3 billion project is a drop in the bucket,” said Wyles.

“And it’s probably that amount of money that would help get these businesses through these extra two years.”

Wyles said he’s been told, “Any support would be too much for the province to handle or be too much money.”

“I strongly disagree with that. I don’t think it would take much. Sadly, our province has done nothing.”

Dougie Stewart, owner of Colour Strings Music on East 8th Avenue, says with no parking and limited foot traffic, keeping the doors open continues to be a daily struggle.

“I’ve been in the neighbourhood for a long time,” he said.

“Cambie [Street] didn’t bounce back to the once original place it was with new restaurants and bars and little stores that were there. They didn’t come back. It was then the walking traffic. Nobody walks down Cambie as much anymore because they take the SkyTrain.”

Stewart says Mount Pleasant could share the same fate as the Cambie corridor after the Canada Line was built.

“We don’t get any special information about what’s happening,” he said.

“We just get closures. So, I’m not confident it’ll finish in time. They’re already two years over. So, I’ve already lost a massive revenue and customers on that — and so is everybody else in the area.”

Stewart says three businesses within five blocks of his have been forced to close just in the last month.

“They didn’t even factor in $1,000,000 or $500,000 or some finances towards that to actually help the businesses in the neighbourhood that they just left as high and dry and said, ‘Get on with it.'”

Once the section of road between Main and Quebec streets reopens, crews will move down the street and shut down Broadway and Cambie as the project continues.

—With files from John Ackermann