Questions are being raised as to why the areas in Vancouver targeted in the development plans are the ones already vibrant with affordable housing
In recent weeks the City of Vancouver has unveiled plans to add significant density to areas that are already rich with rental housing, much of it affordable. But questions are rising as to why the areas targeted are the ones already vibrant with affordable housing, while low density areas of the west side are left untouched.
In existing apartment neighbourhoods, the plan says buildings will undergo “careful renewal of the aging rental stock over the long term,” with requirements for below-market rents and policies for tenants who are displaced. “They will go bigger and develop more and they’ll say it’s newer and nicer, and so I’d probably pay double what I’m currently paying,” adds Ms. Guerette, 38. “Just based on what happened with Cambie Street. That didn’t bring prices down, it drove it up,” she says, referring to the Canada Line extension.
Thom Armstrong, chief executive officer of the Co-operative Housing Federation of B.C., said that supplying affordable housing is becoming an impossible effort. For every provincially subsidized affordable housing unit that was developed between 2015 and 2019, he says, another three affordable units were lost due to redevelopment. Those are units in the $750 to $1,000 a month range, and those figures were obtained from census data.
Cameron Gray was the city’s housing director for 20 years, and he argues that the city could have targeted several areas capable of taking on significant density without causing displacement.and West 10th in Point Grey make sense due to the high cost of land on the west side. “Right now, it seems to me, the tradition – which is decades old – of preserving the west side at all costs, seems to be a consequence if not a motivation for what they are trying to do. That seems to be quite counter productive and at some point I think they are going to have to face the music, that some density is going to land west of Granville and south of 16th Avenue.
At the press conference, Theresa O’Donnell, director of planning and general manager of planning, urban design and sustainability, did not explain why the west side was not given more consideration for greater density. Instead, she spoke about policies that would balance out redevelopment. In an interview later, he commented on the release of draft Vancouver Plan: “It reduces communities to a transactional unit. … It’s about land use, not people.”
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