More Housing: To opponents, rental housing on an empty lot in West Point Grey will be "a big, brutal, impenetrable fortress"
[Update: thanks to everyone who wrote in! As of 5 pm, there were about 400 comments in support, 100 opposed.
At the public hearing, the plan is to get through the list of public speakers tonight, and then council will debate and decide on March 11.
Video from the public hearing: https://www.youtube.com/live/p9L7bygqT2M ]
TLDR: The Safeway at West 10th and Sasamat, just east of UBC, has been closed since 2018. There's a proposal which has been underway for years to build badly needed purpose-built rental housing on the empty site, 450 market apartments and 115 non-market. It's going to a public hearing tomorrow evening. Opponents are trying to block it.
If you'd like to counterbalance the opponents (or write to express your own opposition), it takes literally 60 seconds to submit a comment. It can be as simple as "I support this project - we need more housing." Just set the Subject to "CD-1 Rezoning: 4545-4575 West 10th Avenue."
Agenda for tomorrow's public hearing, including the staff report. As of Friday morning there were only 10 comments opposed, but there may be a lot more by now.
From last year, after an open house where there were 300 people, mostly opposed:
Housing being so scarce and expensive in Vancouver isn't a law of nature. Land here is limited, but elevators exist. We have people who want to live and work here, and other people who want to build housing for them.
Problem is, it's extremely difficult to get permission to build practically anything that's not a detached house. You need to get site-by-site discretionary permission from city staff and from council to build multifamily housing, which takes years. "It's easier to elect a pope."
One big reason is local opposition: almost everyone agrees that we need more housing, but they have all sorts of reasons why it should be built somewhere else, or it should be a different project.
I sympathize with their fear of the unknown, but because we're not building enough housing to keep up with jobs, prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to force people to give up and leave. Vacancy rates are near zero. Younger people are being crushed and driven out by high housing costs. It's a terrible situation. It's also bad for older homeowners themselves: how are we going to sustain the healthcare system when the only people who can afford to live in Vancouver are people who moved here and bought a place 20 years ago? How can younger nurses afford to live here?
The opposition is particularly maddening because this is an empty lot, so nobody's getting displaced. When projects like this are blocked or downsized, people who would have lived there don't vanish into thin air - they find somewhere else to live, resulting in displacement elsewhere. It’s like pushing down on a balloon.
In this case, the opposition, Friends of Point Grey Village, is very well-organized. In fact one of the leaders used to work as a planner for the city.
What the opposition is saying:
- Lots of concern about shadows, building height (there's two buildings on 10th that'll be 17 and 19 storeys), and the buildings being too close to 10th. (The current design is based on the city's requirements, which were to make the buildings narrower and taller, and to put them right on 10th to minimize shadows on 9th.)
- As with the Jericho Lands, the opposition has hired their own architect to prepare an entirely different site concept with four-storey buildings.
- Providing market and non-market rental housing isn't enough. The development should include a library branch. (A new library branch opened across the street last year!) The development should include a daycare. If there's not enough money to support that, then the project should be changed to condos instead of rentals.
Also, I hate to say it, but exactly the same group is complaining about how all the businesses in the neighbourhood are shutting down. When younger people can't afford to live in the neighbourhood (houses there are $3M), that's exactly what happens. Douglas Todd: The crumbling of Vancouver's affluent Point Grey Village, May 2023. Reddit: What's it like living in West Point Grey?
Part of a series.