VANCOUVER — In Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood—sandwiched between the creek’s coast and residential towers on the north, and old, mostly single-family character houses on the south—sits an industrial area the city wants to revitalize. The roughly 40-block area hosts a mix of low-rise offices, shops and services, as well as homes and a public park. The city’s vision, though, is to evolve it into an innovation hub with a thriving food and arts scene. AbCellera, once a small biotech with six staff at the University of British Columbia, appears poised to become the area’s anchor tenant, snapping up lots that would eventually total nearly 450,000 square feet of office and laboratory space there.

In a province and city that wants their tech startups to flourish into the titans seen in Silicon Valley, AbCellera’s expansion feels like a slam dunk for the industry’s advocates working to help local companies grow in the province. Together, its new campus and manufacturing facility will add hundreds of high-paying tech jobs, which the company and city say will boost the economy.

Rapid growth, though, comes at a cost. Any time a tech firm adds square footage and jobs in Vancouver, concerns around talent shortages, affordability and density surface. AbCellera’s major expansion, which asks for some allowances on height and density restrictions, is no exception.

“We’re building a company that will be an anchor company. So we’re looking at how to build this company for decades to come, and we are in a growth phase,” said Véronique Lecault, AbCellera’s co-founder and chief operating officer.

In October 2018, the biotech firm, which finds antibodies that can block specific viruses and then partners with pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs that prevent or treat diseases, moved out of its space on the UBC campus and into a 21,000-sq.-ft. headquarters in what’s known as the Mount Pleasant Industrial Area (MPIA).

The new office couldn’t contain AbCellera’s ambition, though: in December 2020, it went public in a record-breaking IPO, and its revenue growth was supercharged by sales of a COVID-19 treatment it co-developed. AbCellera wanted more office, research and development, and manufacturing capacity—ideally in the city where it was founded. In April 2020, it started construction on a 44,000-sq.-ft. office about a seven-minute walk from its current headquarters. About a year later, the company announced it was adding two more buildings, spanning a city block in the MPIA. The 380,000-sq.-ft. development, nestled between the two other offices, will become its global headquarters and accommodate the hundreds of staff the company anticipates adding to its roughly 300-person headcount.

In June, it announced it secured a space about 2.5 kilometres away from what is becoming its main campus, for a 130,000-sq.-ft. manufacturing facility, where it will be able to produce therapeutic antibodies. The project is partly supported by a US$125.6-million grant from the federal government’s Strategic Innovation Fund. The government saw the facility, which will be the first of its kind in the country, as a way to bolster Canada’s defences against future pandemics. 

AbCellera isn’t the first technology company to find a home in Mount Pleasant. Hootsuite set up shop one block north of AbCellera’s planned two new buildings, and other companies in the area include Equicare Health, Medeo and Image Engine.

The long-term vision for the MPIA includes increasing opportunities for supporting the innovation economy, wrote City of Vancouver spokesperson Nancy Eng in an email, after the city declined The Logic’s request for a phone interview. 

Construction has already started on one of the two AbCellera buildings, which are anticipated to open in 2023 and 2024, but exactly what they’ll look like remains undecided. AbCellera is seeking permission to build taller buildings with more density than currently allowed. It’s a big ask for a city known for its not-in-my-backyard attitude toward development. 

“The contentious issues around density and zoning in Vancouver are almost exclusively around residential and, in particular, residential towers,” said Murray McCutcheon, AbCellera’s vice-president of corporate development. The MPIA area doesn’t allow for new residential development, wrote Eng, and the surrounding residential areas “have successfully coexisted … for decades.” 

A report presented to Vancouver City Council earlier this year noted the height requested could impact the view from some public spaces. Nevertheless, council voted unanimously in early March to let the company pursue rezoning, which is otherwise generally prohibited in the area where AbCellera is expanding its headquarters, while the city hashes out a long-term vision for it and the surrounding neighbourhood through the Broadway Plan.

AbCellera’s proposal “met the criteria for an ‘exceptional circumstance,’” wrote Eng. If its applications are approved, city staff promised to work with AbCellera “to refine the overall height and density to ensure compatibility and fit with the Mount Pleasant area.” First, though, the proposals have to run the rezoning gauntlet of open houses and public consultations.

So far, the Mount Pleasant community’s online response to the proposals, which the city considers in its decision making, has been mixed. Some have expressed concerns about allowing rezoning applications before the city firms up its plan for the area, which isn’t projected to be presented to council until the first quarter of 2022; others have fretted about the height of the buildings, the prospect of increased traffic and the possible displacement of smaller businesses.

There are “contradictions within the growth of high-technology companies,” said Andy Yan, director of The City Program at Simon Fraser University. While AbCellera’s proposed campus is “incredibly exciting,” he said, when technology companies embark on big expansions, they raise questions around issues like attracting talent—or displacing it. For example, when Amazon announced in 2018 that it planned to add 3,000 jobs to its Vancouver operations—backdropped against a heated competition for its second headquarters, for which the city was bidding—it aroused concerns about Vancouver’s ongoing housing affordability woes, and the competition for local talent.

The positive, everyone who spoke to The Logic agreed, is more jobs. AbCellera predicts the new buildings will support its growth plans for the next five to 10 years as it looks toward a future of employing 1,000 people. “I think we mostly believe that technology jobs beget technology jobs,” said Thomas Davidoff, an associate professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business. It’s a virtuous cycle at play: talented workers come to fill vacancies, he said, and that growing pool of skilled workers attracts more companies to the city, which then post more vacancies, and the cycle repeats.

It’s not all good news, Davidoff said. Some of those workers, likely, will come from outside the city, meaning locals won’t necessarily benefit from the creation of high-paying gigs. AbCellera plans to recruit locally and internationally, said Lecault, adding it hopes to repatriate some Canadians who may have left the country after pursuing degrees here to work at biotechs based elsewhere. AbCellera’s McCutcheon himself is an example of the company doing just that: he completed his PhD at UBC and then moved to Boston before AbCellera wooed him back in 2016.

Creating more well-paying jobs increases pressure on housing, as well, said Davidoff, in what is already one of the most expensive markets in the world. In July, MLS’s composite benchmark price for a residential property in Metro Vancouver—including condos, townhouses and detached homes—was nearly $1.2 million, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. Renters can suffer, too, as an influx of jobs can “put pressure on the city’s rental housing stock, which has a very low vacancy rate in recent years,” Eng noted, pointing to the city’s housing strategy as proof of its efforts to help residents secure affordable housing.

Davidoff, who believes city council could do more for housing affordability, said there’s a trade-off between housing and jobs. “We need homes, but we need jobs for people, because it’s so expensive.” It can be short-sighted to promote housing from a tax perspective, as it adds to a city’s expenses for services like policing and education, he said. This development, meanwhile, will bring in tax revenue, such as property tax.

When it comes to housing affordability, “we don’t really look at it as a zero-sum game,” said McCutcheon, who has been working with the city’s planners for about a year on the planned expansion. For Vancouver to thrive and provide meaningful employment to its residents and graduates of local institutions, it needs anchor companies to plant their flags and grow. “We look at this as a chance to create more for the city,” he said, citing economic opportunities.

One such effect could be an overall bump to salaries in the industry. “It does put upward pressure on wages,” said Davidoff, referring to when employers have to compete for a limited talent pool. “Maybe service workers come out badly, but high-skilled workers do well,” he said, adding that wages for tech workers in the city are still well below those in the U.S. Salaries in Vancouver’s gaming industry are already starting to tick upwards. New entrants like Roblox are competing for talent with established studios, which saw a spate of mergers and acquisitions during the pandemic that gave them money for expansion.

One of the big winners could be the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood itself. In the years to come, hundreds of employees will work out of AbCellera’s offices on weekdays, and may also choose to live in the area. They’ll venture out for lunch, or grab drinks after work. Maybe they’ll run errands nearby, scheduling haircuts or grabbing gifts. Restaurants, shops and service providers will want to locate at this economic hub, said the company’s McCutcheon.

For now, the future AbCellera envisions is under review. More public consultations, an eventual staff report and then a council vote will determine the scale of the project’s ambition. A timeline has yet to be set for the report to council, Eng wrote.

Even if the city denies AbCellera’s application, the manufacturing facility and a scaled-down version of the campus will go forward. A 2020 permit approval allowed for a five-storey building on one of the lots. No permit has been issued for the other. If the rezoning is not approved, AbCellera said it would readjust its facilities roadmap.

The company doesn’t appear concerned that will happen. The MPIA will be rezoned under the upcoming Broadway plan, it said, and its proposal is consistent with that industrial rezoning. 

“We’ve been told that this is exactly the kind of project that the city wants to see,” said McCutcheon. “They’re trying to catalyze the development that supports sticky, knowledge-economy jobs for sustainable anchor companies—and so the response has been very, very supportive.”