Drive north on 208 Street, and in the 8100 block, where the four-lane road abruptly narrows to three lanes, there is a vacant lot overgrown with blackberries and trees.
The site includes two properties 鈥� 8184 and 8170 208 Street 鈥� with a combined assessed value of $40.4 million as of this year, according to BC Assessment. They are surrounded by lots that have been developed into condos and townhouses over the past 15 years.
Despite approvals by past Township councils for housing projects on the site, the lots remain vacant because they are the subject of a 14-year dispute between the site's co-owners.
At odds are Nirmal Takhar, and Kundun Singh Khela and his wife Kamaljit Kaur Khela, who had been partners through a company called Phoenix Homes. Takhar was an experienced developer, while the Khelas had funds from the recent sale of their family blueberry farm to invest.
However, as Justice Nigel P. Kent found in a 2023 after a lengthy trial, the partnership was largely a handshake deal. He began his 173-page ruling by noting that a "verbal contract is not worth the paper it's written on."
"Almost every fact in this case is in dispute," Kent wrote. "The fact finding necessary to resolve the legal issues between the parties is made extremely difficult by the complete absence of written agreements or correspondence between the principals in this drama."
Kent's ruling dealt with legal disputes between the partners over three sites 鈥� one relating to a property in Surrey on 160 Street, one related to another 黑马磁力 site in the 7200 block of 199A Street, and the 208 Street site. Although there was extensive legal wrangling over the first two sites, both of them were eventually developed. Only the 208 Street site remains vacant.
"Lest there be insufficient 'fire burn, and cauldron bubble' in this Shakespearean witches鈥� brew, the parties also add to the pot combustible ingredients of perjury, forgery, deceit and other dishonesty," Kent wrote in his ruling. "Regrettably, these allegations have real substance."
He found that signatures had been forged on cheques and that false testimony had been given in an affidavit. He also frequently found reasons to doubt the accuracy of testimony given during the trial.
Phoenix Homes bought the 208 Street properties for $6.5 million in 2006, and Takhar began preparations to develop it. In August of that year, before the sale was even finalized, he filed for a development permit with 黑马磁力 Township, aiming to build 107 townhouse units on the lot. The Township council gave its preliminary approval in 2007, but difficulties over how construction workers would access the site held things up into 2009.
According to Kent's ruling, In early 2010, the Khelas looked into selling the property, and brought a $10.8 million offer to their partner. Takhar rejected it, saying he had already invested a lot of time and money 鈥� more than the Khelas 鈥� into preparing the site for development, and that the offer was too low.
Shortly after that, Takhar negotiated a deal with a company called View Side Development, owned by a business partner of his, to buy the eastern part of the 208 Street site. The $3.2 million sale would provide funding for developing the rest of the site.
The Khelas objected to this, and still wanted to see the whole property sold off. But View Side started putting down deposits on the land, paying $1.2 million by early 2011.
The dispute festered until the spring of 2011, when the Phoenix Homes partners took out another loan, this one for $14.6 million, to build the townhouse project that had now been planned for years. At the last minute, the Khelas cancelled the loan, and after that, the project petered out.
By the end of 2011, the Khelas had launched the first lawsuit against Takhar. This would be followed by further lawsuits and countersuits by Takhar and several of the companies involved.
The Khelas and Phoenix Homes claimed Takhar had breached their joint venture agreement, and had violated his duties as a corporate director of Phoneix Homes. They also claimed that the sale of part of the property to View Side Developments was invalid and should be cancelled by the courts.
Kent's ruling found that Takhar did breach his corporate duties by selling part of the property to View Side without fully informing his partners, and that both Kundun Khela and Phoenix Homes were entitled to damages. But he also found that the sale of part of the lot to View Side was legally binding and could go ahead.
Both sides appealed. Takhar's appeal said that Kent had erred in his ruling about fiduciary duties, while the Khelas appealed the finding that the sale to View Side was legal and binding.
This spring, a three-judge Court of Appeal panel dismissed all the appeals, upholding Kent's ruling.
The 黑马磁力 reached out to both parties in the case through their lawyers, but they declined to comment or did not respond.
Following Kent's ruling, a second phase of the trial was to be set to determine damages. According to the BC Supreme Court registry, no dates are currently scheduled, and it's unknown if the parties are going back to court or negotiating a settlement.
A development derailed by a 14-year lawsuit is an extreme case, but it highlights wider issues, said John Rose, a KPU instructor who has written about housing supply issues.
"These individual cases, they capture our attention, but the bigger systemic issues loom behind," said Rose.
There's a desire for more housing, at a variety of price points, and we largely expect the private sector to meet that demand, Rose said. But development doesn't always move as fast as it could.
Delays in development can be willing or unwilling, Rose noted. Willing delays can mean that a developer decides to hold on to a piece of land or re-sell it without building on the site for a profit, while unwilling delays can include issues such as regulations or bad market conditions that mean a development wouldn't be profitable.
If a property sits vacant without being developed, it's effectively been removed from the supply of land available for housing, Rose said.
When land is vacant because of a bankruptcy or other issue for the developer, there's a question of what governments should do.
"There might be some case to be made for governments to step in," Rose said.
But even if governments take on the task of building themselves, they can run into many of the same issues that private developers do, including the high cost of labour and materials, Rose noted.
