More than seven months after the Lapu Lapu Day tragedy in East Vancouver, a makeshift memorial still stands at the site.

Now, the Filipino community says it is closer than ever in the decades-long push for a Filipino cultural centre.

“Perhaps if we had a home, things might have been a little bit different in this healing process,” Warren Dean Flandez with the Filipino Legacy Society told Global News.

All three levels of government recognize the need for a cultural centre and the private sector is offering a space in a new development.

A development application is before the City of Vancouver to transform the corner at Main Street and East 4th Avenue into a 30-storey hotel. The first six floors would be a 60,000-square-foot Filipino cultural centre, with event space, an art gallery an

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