Dan Fumano: West side story — Moderate-income apartment coming to Kitsilano
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2019 03:14:59 +0000
For the final action of its first full year in office, Vancouver’s council took a small step, but perhaps sent a bigger signal.
Wednesday’s decision wasn’t a big move in solving the housing crisis. Council approved a five-storey apartment building for Larch Street with 63 homes, 13 of which will be at below-market rents. With that building and two others approved last week, Vancouver has approved construction of only 890 rental homes in 2019, less than half its target of 2,000 a year.
While these recent approvals barely chip away at the city’s demand for rentals, Mayor Kennedy Stewart insisted they send “an important signal.”
Had these projects been rejected, it would have sent an even stronger signal, telling those who build housing that regardless of what Vancouver politicians say about easing the city’s chronically low vacancy rate and rising rents, it’s an uphill battle to get rental housing built in the city, even when trying to do what city hall supposedly wants.
These three projects are the first to come before council under a new program intended to boost rental construction. Over the past decade, Vancouver has been a pioneer among Canadian cities in using incentives to encourage developers to build rentals. The city’s moderate income rental housing pilot program aims to do something new, pushing the private sector to produce a percentage of below-market units in exchange for being granted extra density.
“It’s really a groundbreaking policy,” Stewart said after Wednesday’s council vote, adding that other mayors and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland have been asking him about the program, “wondering if it could be used in other parts of Canada.”
Kits building’s wooden scale model in the middle of Council chambers at Vancouver City Hall in Vancouver, BC, December 17, 2019.
Vancouver’s first two projects under the program, approved last week, will bring welcome rental housing to stretch of Renfrew Street near transit, offices, and schools. Those two projects sailed through without any opposition.
The fate of the third project would say more about this council’s approach to rental housing. It’s one thing to OK buildings on a busy east Vancouver arterial where no neighbours kicked up a fuss, but what would council do with apartments proposed for a Kitsilano side street when dozens of angry longtime homeowners came to city hall to protest?
A fierce campaign opposed the Larch project, including more than 130 letters and many of the 95 people who addressed council over two late-night hearings. Neighbouring homeowners made impassioned pleas to council, complaining about the building’s size, impacts on parking and how it would, they said, destroy their neighbourhood’s “character.”
Many of those residents’ concerns were echoed by the three councillors who voted against the project on Wednesday: COPE Coun. Jean Swanson, Green Coun. Adriane Carr, and NPA Coun. Colleen Hardwick.
Hardwick explained Wednesday why she opposed the Larch project, even though she supported last week’s projects in East Van.
“Why? Well, first: location, location, location,” Hardwick said. “There are better locations throughout the city, including in Kitsilano, for a development of this scope. And just so you know, my mother’s side of the family has lived in Kitsilano since the turn of the last century.”
Kits building’s wooden scale model in the middle of Council chambers at Vancouver City Hall in Vancouver, BC, December 17, 2019. Vancouver council is voted on a 5-storey rental building for Kits. (Arlen Redekop / PNG staff photo) (story by Dan Fumano) [PNG Merlin Archive]
The project’s location is, indeed, noteworthy. For one thing, not only is it west of Main Street, but the address happens to be on the west side of Larch Street, a boundary across which no five-storey buildings should be considered, some angry neighbours said.
Kits building’s wooden scale model in the middle of Council chambers at Vancouver City Hall in Vancouver, BC, December 17, 2019. Vancouver council is voted on a 5-storey rental building for Kits. (Arlen Redekop / PNG staff photo) (story by Dan Fumano) [PNG Merlin Archive]
More than 200 people wrote letters supporting the Larch project and several supporters spoke before council. Many of their reasons were echoed by the other seven councillors who, along with the mayor, voted to approve it.
OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle noted that one distraught longtime homeowner, in his remarks last week urging council to reject this five-storey apartment building proposed for a site across the street from his four-storey condo building, quoted Martin Luther King on the nature of injustice.
Boyle, a United Church minister, read out a longer excerpt from that piece of King’s writing, and said that when she considered the Larch project, she felt “the injustice isn’t that a neighbourhood may get more neighbours, but that new neighbours have been excluded from so much of our city for so long. Our history of zoning as a city, like many other cities, has been about exclusion and about protecting a certain type of character, over welcoming those who need a home.”
Rezoning applications have been submitted for at least seven other proposed buildings under the city’s new program, totalling 941 units. Others still in the pre-application stage could produce up to 1,000 more rental homes.
It remains to be seen how many of those homes will get built or if it will be anywhere close to enough to materially ease the city’s housing challenges.
But if the final hours of council’s 2019 schedule had seen a different outcome, those who want to more rental homes built in Vancouver would have far less cause for optimism in 2020.