In northeast Burnaby, a stretch of Hastings Street between Kensington and Sperling avenues, near the gateway to Simon Fraser University’s main campus, is a study in contrasts.

On the south side of the corridor sits a busy strip mall, the Kensington Square Shopping Centre, anchored by a Safeway and a Shoppers Drug Mart, and filled in with an assortment of small businesses — restaurants, a barber, a physiotherapy clinic.

On the north side sits a sprawling and unsightly 10-acre parcel of concrete, yellow grass and overgrown shrubs — the site of a once-thriving three-deck golf driving range that opened with great fanfare in the mid-1990s but shuttered in 2011. Save for a suspicious fire in 2016 that destroyed the abandoned main structure, the site — which has an assessed value of over $100 m

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