Rick Ilich, CEO of Vancouver-based real-estate development firm Townline, discusses a broad range of topics regarding downtown Victoria's social and economic climate, and what it will take to re-balance the cost of housing supply in the Capital Region in light of government-induced challenges.  Citified.ca
Townline CEO Rick Ilich pulls no punches in Q&A on issues facing Victoria's housing sector and investor market
Ten on the 10th
Published March 10, 2026
Citified's Ten on the 10th is a monthly question-and-answer segment connecting our readers with the insight and knowledge of Victoria's top real-estate and business professionals.
Ten on the Tenth's March, 2026 segment features Rick Ilich, CEO of Vancouver-based Townline, one of British Columbia's most active real-estate development firms with numerous high-profile projects completed in Victoria, approved for development, and in planning. Mr. Ilich's full bio is reproduced at the end of the Q&A segment.
Asking the questions is Ross Marshall, Senior Vice President of the Victoria offices of commercial real-estate brokerage CBRE. As a leader in facilitating large-scale commercial real-estate transactions throughout the Capital Region – which include apartment complexes, industrial retail and office properties, and land/development opportunities – Ross and his team are at the forefront of market-leading real-estate transactions on Vancouver Island.
Would you like to be featured as part of a future Ten on the 10th Q&A? We'd like to hear from you.
How has the real estate market in Greater Victoria changed over the past five years, especially in the downtown core? What feels fundamentally different today compared to before the pandemic?
The downtown core has not bounced back since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Some national employers have identified work-from-home as a cost saving opportunity, and are willing to reduce the quality of service to their clients as a trade-off for profitability.
Government also caved to the unions and allowed work-from-home to become baked into collective bargaining. Victoria is a government town, and so many small businesses were formed to service government office workers. It is simple; without this major employer, the downtown core will not be what it once was. And without these office workers walking our streets, the drug trade has had a free ride prying on the un-housed, and the unwell.
Townline delivered the high-quality rental building Neighbour on Pandora, yet leasing has been challenging due to conditions on surrounding blocks. How have homelessness and public safety concerns directly affected tenant demand, and has the presence of the joint Victoria bylaw and Victoria Police hub at the base of the building made a difference to leasing interest?
With the Neighbour project, Townline addressed a significant gap in housing affordability by delivering lower priced rental housing to Victoria. This was done with zero financial support from government.
We should have been applauded.
Yet, without any public consultation, Island Health opened what they call a Safe Inhalation Facility right next door to Neighbour, and on that facility's west side is Our Place.
This foolish abuse of power, and the naive siloed decision making of this government disrupted the organic efforts of Our Place to serve people in need of community and safety, and Townline’s Neighbour to service an affordability housing need. This inhalation site is a failure, and needs to be shut down. It has incentivized drug dealers and gang activity to consolidate and prosper, and is the direct cause of business failures on Pandora Avenue.
The opening of the City of Victoria's Bylaw and Victoria Police operations in our building, facing Pandora Avenue, is a great start, but until they are fully operational, Townline is still incurring substantial security costs, as is the Save-On-Foods kitty-corner from us.
Until the inhalation site is closed down, and if the police are limited to the current soft touch designed into our judicial system, the police and bylaw will be challenged to do what is needed to make big changes.
Greater Victoria has long been viewed as a safe and stable market. Has downtown lost some of that “safe haven” perception among investors? If so, what would it take to restore confidence?
Greater Victoria has been a bastion of stability because of government employment, and in recent years tech has been attracted to its affordable commercial rents (compared to Vancouver). The city has comfortable scale and historic fabric weaved into a beautiful setting.
Victoria has been a comfortable place to invest and develop new buildings for the past 20 years. But like other parts of British Columbia, local government grew and chose to target new development as a source of new-found capital, through increased fees, levies, and taxes. Other political ideologies have also been baked into new construction, such as inclusionary housing, multiple social policies, and ideals like desires to 'save the planet,' all through very expensive energy modeling and carbon reduction efforts.
To restore confidence, all layers of government need to collaborate to reduce the regulatory burden of inventing then overseeing politically popular policies, which end up driving up the cost of housing, thus making it very challenging for the very people that they need to attract as investors in their communities.
If conditions don’t improve in the downtown core, what does that mean for future housing supply and investment in the core? Are we at risk of seeing capital move elsewhere?
If conditions do not improve in the downtown core, that would mean that government has failed to address the problems created by their continued hide-their-head-in-the-sand, siloed reactionary decision making versus a proactive cross-ministry approach of updating the judicial structure that handcuffs law enforcement, versus the predators that pray on the vulnerable and addicted. Governments have chosen to prioritize union votes that ingrain working from home, versus back in the downtown core.
If that is what they prioritize, the police will be overburdened, and the decay will continue.
My opinions on why these problems are happening – and if we do not prioritize public safety and the local economy – is investment in the downtown will drop off.
Beyond street level conditions, developers are also navigating rising construction costs, property taxes and lengthy permitting timelines. What policy changes would make the biggest difference?
Actually, compared to many other communities on Vancouver Island, I give Victoria credit for trying. We have seen some permit times decrease, and the City is reviewing some of their restrictive policies.
What the downtown needs, though, is more people working downtown, and a visible change to the aggressive nature of the drug culture on the streets.
Then there is the Provincial program of Housing First, which is ridiculous. Housing someone with active criminal intentions, or addiction issues, or untreated neurodiverse issues, without a guarantee to the wrap-around care that they may need, is the big problem. Additionally, housing plus job training should be an incentive to clean up people’s lives.
And on another note, the natural environment is important, but the concept that Canada has any significance on climate change is a discussion that should be weighed in economics. The last time I read anything on Canada's carbon footprint, it was something in the realm of 1.4% of the total global output. Perhaps the coal that Canada sells to India and China should be absorbing some of the hundreds of millions of dollars of environmental policies that new housing is having to pay for through various government policies. This is one area that is driving up the cost of housing delivery.
Victoria needs housing, and developers are being asked to deliver it. Is the current environment fair to the very groups being asked to solve the housing crisis? Has the social contract between the government and the development community broken down?
Governments are too busy chasing ideologies which they build into policy, which drives up the cost of housing. Government needs to pick a priority and cut away all the other side policies that are driving up the cost of delivering homes. If Government wants modest cost of housing, then strip away the policies that are preventing it.
Even the not-for-profit housing operators are struggling. The political ideologies built in to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and BC Housing funding is over-the-top, and in many cases makes the cost of building for the not-for-profit sector more expensive than market housing.
When investors compare downtown Victoria to other Western Canadian cities, where are we falling behind? What are those cities doing differently that we should be paying attention to?
The federal government lost their way, by way of a poorly tracked immigration system. Under the current leadership, they seem to be trying to right-size immigration. 2026 is going to be another challenging year, but immigration should be in a positive trajectory in 2027, thus stimulating a need for housing which will bring back jobs.
Those cities that have the right formula of weather, geographic wonder, jobs and housing stock that can address safety and affordability will attract the population growth.
Victoria needs to be ready. Safe streets, housing, jobs and community through arts, culture and tourism will win the day.
If we fast forward 10 years, what does downtown Victoria look like? Do you see a revitalized, vibrant core that learned from this period and adapted, or a downtown that struggled to regain its footing? What decisions made in the next 12-24 moths will ultimately determine which path we take?
Provided that all levels of government learn how to work together, Victoria has a wonderful future.
Saying that, until all levels of government learn how to pick leadership that will prioritize economics, which in turn feeds all the wonderful things that make a great city, we will continue to be too busy chasing the next shiny thing and will lose sight of the growing decay under our feet.
What needs to happen over the next 12-24 months?
Government needs to embrace change in their current operations structure, and prioritise safety, mental health, and stripping away policy and punitive fees and policies that are driving up the cost of housing.
In a nutshell, focus on our backyard, not everyone else's.
What would a successful turnaround look like over the next five years? What needs to happen (realistically) for Pandora and the downtown core to thrive again?
The Pandora condition is all about inadequate siloed Government policies.
If current government really wants to see change, they will prioritize it. I feel like Victoria's recent efforts increasing policing and cleaning up unlawful encampments is a good start. We should shut down safe inhalation sites, we should allow police to arrest and retain repeat offenders by not hiding behind siloed mental health policy, but by working with all affected levels of government and community to come to a common methodology.
The priority should be greater good of community, not individuals hiding behind old civil rights standards. If someone does not have the ability to help themselves then, we should have the right to remove them from a toxic environment, and involve them in a new safe environment outside of the existing negative community.
This mindset will not only clean up Pandora, it will bring back safety to our streets, and show the people that are trapped in this disorder that their dignity maters.
Despite everything we’ve discussed, over the years you’ve continued to invest in Victoria despite the headwinds, and in adjacent communities like Saanich where you have a significant project at Mayfair Lanes that may break ground next year, What keeps you investing and developing in Greater Victoria? Developers don’t typically invest hundreds of millions of dollars without long-term conviction. What gives you confidence that downtown Victoria and the Capital Region’s best days are still ahead?
This is a bit challenging to answer today.
I have a home in Victoria, and I live here more than my family’s home in Vancouver. I first invested in Victoria, in 2004.
At that time I saw economic promise and a willingness for investment. People were leaving larger cities and moving here for lifestyle. But along with that came rising housing costs. Keep in mind, the only rental housing that was coming to market back then were the new condos that developers were building and selling to people not just in Victoria, but from across the region.
But once the federal government lost track of millions of part time worker and student visas the demand on rentals in particular, out-paced delivery, so rents went up. Then civic government jumped on the bandwagon and added numerous costly policies, fees and taxes to the development process, driving up costs.
Government needed a culprit, so they pointed to developers, short-term rentals, and secondary homes all the while they kept piling on more costs, and more regulatory burden.
Once immigration right-sizes, once government reduces regulatory burden and political ideology, and shows investors that Government will not extract every possible nickel that stalls sound investment in most parts of the world, investment will once again pay attention to Victoria.
The gamble is not, 'is Victoria a great place to live work, and play,' the gamble is 'when' will government stop demonizing investment and hard work.
Rick Ilich founded Townline in 1980, initially focusing on single-family homes. Over the first decade, he established a strong foundation in building single family homes before expanding the company’s scope in the early 1990s to include large-scale residential, commercial, and mixed-use projects. Under his visionary leadership, Townline has grown into a prominent force in the industry, with developments spanning Metro Vancouver, Vancouver Island, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
Rick’s attention to detail, commitment to creativity, and drive for innovation are embedded in every aspect of Townline’s work. Central to his core values is a steadfast insistence that customer service and livability remain top priorities, ensuring that Townline’s projects enhance both quality of life and community well-being.
Recognizing socioeconomic inequities early in his career, Rick, alongside his wife Lauren, co-founded TL Housing Solutions (TLHS). Operating as a "fee-for-service" developer and builder, TLHS provides turnkey solutions to non-market housing operators. With over 4,000 homes built or in process, TLHS has helped secure safe and stable housing for marginalized communities, including women escaping domestic violence, seniors, individuals with special needs, Indigenous housing providers, and workforce members previously priced out of the market.
Beyond his leadership at Townline and TLHS, Rick actively contributes his expertise to industry development and policy, currently serving as Chair of the UDI Pacific Region.
© Copyright 2026 by Citified.ca. All rights reserved.
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