No, they are vacant lots that will continue to be vacant lots because Vision Vancouver can't build units affordably.
I am in favour of social housing, and in favour of it being spread around the city just as I don't want to deal with homelessness by buying bus fare to another city. However, I care about people living hard getting the stability of a home and being surrounded by healthy people to get them moving forward. I don't give a damn if there's a TV news segment about opening housing that costs $1 million per unit in capital and $100,000 per unit per year to operate. That is offensive to me, worse than doing nothing at all it is deceitful and taking advantage of homeless people to project a positive identity on a politician.
The transportable homes they built and sited near Main and Terminal are interesting, but at the end of the day unless they have solved the cost issue there is no chance of them making up lost ground and will keep falling behind. They'll probably just become more and more symbolic in their actions, more noise to cover up for fewer results. Look at Little Mountain... still vacant, there are no excuses except incompetence in collaboration/managing/numeracy. That's reflected in the turnover of city staff, where the Grandview-Woodlands plan blew up, screwed up, and another chief planner had to be hired. They live in a vague big picture world where actions don't matter. They've had a decade and a mandate to try anything, but they still have no numbers to show they found any solutions... They have no plan, they just want you to feel good that they feel good.
The purpose of hoarding vacant lots is two-fold:
- ask for money from other levels of government
- as the largest owner of idle unused land in Vancouver, create the pretext to give away buildable land below market price to select developers in an opaque and corrupt process that is run by people who have a phobia of all numbers.
Council chooses to blindly believe whatever they want; they care about pet projects like the York Theatre or $50,000 vacations to Socchi, and that's why they prefer CD1 instead of broad based rezoning.
(
There's now $715 million per year spent on housing for the needy in Vancouver you can't have a high market price/buildable s.f. and keep up with spending on subsidies or welfare. Broad-based rezoning would lower the cost per buildable s.f., and Robertson's VV has always opposed that as with how they chose to take over the Olympic Village's financing to prevent a fire-sale upon completion)
It might not matter much now because the private sector finally got up to speed and is finishing new housing units at a record pace after accessing enough developable properties, only a decade into the biggest RE boom ever. -- I don't fault VV for the flows of money beyond their control, I blame them from profiting personally by delaying a response to market prices. --
Vision Vancouver does more harm than good, the city gave them free reign to be bold and try new things but it gets worse everywhere they do take action. Allowing them to spend $100 to return $10 to the public takes away from initiatives that get actual results. When the time after the bubble comes, there will be nothing left and it won't be the folks who walked away with the $90 who will end up paying.
Politics out here lurches around, and Vision Vancouver has put image above results its entire tenure. The reaction will be tough love and hard numbers. Hopefully the next crew is more of a working-together themed council, but voters will accept a burn-it-to-the-ground approach just as well.
edit:
this is a transit discussion, and I was being glib that there's resources available. If they're smart and have the leadership to collaborate, they could use these 6 year old mega-budget items like Affordable Housing 2012 and actually make a difference. Better connections to the North Shore isn't exclusively about housing, but it's an improvement worth more than the city would spend on it. We need to find gains, it doesn't matter how much or how little we spend if we're not putting wood behind the right arrows.
Transit and transportation infrastructure are difficult because they are big items, but they're one of the few everyone appreciates and recognizes as a gain. Even the Port Mann bridge isn't hated despite there being both a toll, and a huge operating subsidy thanks to the BC Liberal P3 project organization.(CACs are the local form of P3s, and when a council has reached its spending limit so the CAC grants skyrocket look out for corruption and boondoggles)
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