A groundbreaking was held on Monday for an ambitious community project in the heart of Vancouver which will see two rental housing towers built as well as a new Jewish Community Centre (JCC) and dedicated high school on a 3.3-acre site.

At completion, the project is estimated to cost over $400 million. The first phase of development will be the building of the community centre.

The project is being developed by the Vancouver Jewish community, overseen by two foundations under the JWest umbrella:

• JWest Corp. - The development and construction board, led by co-chairs David Porte and Joe Khalifa. 
• JWest Foundation - Led by chair Alex Cristall, the foundation is the applicant on the rezoning and the titleholder of the 3.3-acre site, which the JCC transferred into community hands in June. 

The project was given the green light by Vancouver City Council in July to develop the site at Oak Street and 41st Avenue in the Oakridge neighbourhood.

The new community will be called the Roadburg Campus while the community centre will be named the Diamond JCC. The names honour two families whose generous donations anchored the project.

The plan for Roadburg Campus and Diamond JCC

The campus will deliver 630 secured rental homes in two residential towers of 37 and 39 storeys.

According to the project website, 20 per cent of the residential units will be operated by a not-for-profit, for the Oakridge neighbourhood. Forty per cent of the homes will be family-sized two- and three-bedroom units.

Acton Ostry Architects is the architect for the campus, leading design across all phases. "The firm has a long history with Vancouver's Jewish community, having designed King David High School, Har-El Synagogue, Hillel House, Congregation Beth Israel and Vancouver Talmud Torah," JWest Corp. chair David Porte told RENX.

The residential towers will be built in the project's third phase.

The first phase – a six-storey, 200,000-square-foot community centre roughly twice the size of the current JCC – will include expanded childcare with a rooftop play area, expanded seniors' services, an eight-lane 25-metre pool, two gymnasiums, a theatre, an art gallery, a music centre and a library, along with a renewed and expanded Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and office space for more than 20 community organizations.

The second phase of the project will be the development of the new King David High School.

Major donors' ties to Vancouver real estate

Both the Al Roadburg and Ronald Roadburg Foundations contributed a $36-million gift that named the Roadburg Campus, Porte said.

Al Roadburg, who was born in Vancouver in 1913, turned to real estate after a successful career as an industrial entrepreneur. He founded Broadway Properties. "In the 1950s, he began assembling a real estate portfolio – all-rental apartment buildings, multi-purpose warehouses, commercial spaces and office buildings," Porte said.

After Roadburg's death in 2002, his son Ronald took over as president of the real estate company and continued to expand the business. Ronald Roadburg passed away in 2021.

The Diamond family, for whom the community centre will be named, has connections to Vancouver real estate dating back to 1968 when Austeville Properties was founded by Gordon Diamond.

"We have been providing people with the very best in rental accommodations in Greater Vancouver since 1968," the company says on its website. "We also own and manage a superb selection of office, retail and warehouse spaces in varying sizes and locations throughout the region."

"The Diamond family's Vancouver roots go back close to a century, beginning with Jack Diamond, who built Pacific Meat Company and later co-founded West Coast Reduction Ltd. with his sons Gordon and Charles," Porte told RENX. 

"Gordon Diamond remains chairman of West Coast Reduction, and he and his father established the Diamond Foundation in 1984.

"The foundation's $25-million gift in September 2022 was the first philanthropic donation to JWest and opened the capital campaign; the community matched it almost immediately. The Diamond Foundation then doubled their gift for a total of $50 million."

The B.C. provincial government and the federal government provided an additional $25 million each to the project to complement the $154 million raised to date by the community.

JWest Corp. co-chair David Porte is also well known in the Vancouver real estate sector as the president of Porte Communities, a real estate development and property management company founded by his father, Hershey in 1968.

"I've spent 30 years in the real estate industry and arriving this morning, and I can tell you there is no project like this in this city; a public community centre of this scale and scope, built by private philanthropy powered by community leadership," Porte said at the groundbreaking ceremony.

"That has never happened in Vancouver before. The new JCC is the first step, with the high school and housing to follow. When it opens it will be a jewel for Oakridge, and the centre of Jewish life for all of Metro Vancouver, a place that unifies our entire community. Today, we stopped planning and started building.”