Frances Bula header image 2
← →

Broadway transit, social housing meetings tonight

June 22nd, 2010 · 16 Comments

The residents are revolting in more places than just the West End. Tonight, two meetings bring them out.

One, the Broadway transit group that is coming together of “Not another Cambie” is holding a meeting to rally the troops and hear from speakers they’re likely to agree with.

Two,, there is a public hearing at city hall for two of the eight social-housing projects that recently got funding. One of them is the tower at Broadway and Fraser, which has managed to unite two groups with different interests: the usual “we’re not against the homeless, we just don’t want so many of them in this neighbourhood” faction and others who have no problem with social housing, but really don’t like the very visible tower planned for this low-rise area of Broadway.

More info on the two meetings below

City hall

Categories: Uncategorized

  • mezzanine

    Re: Not another Cambie

    “holding a meeting to rally the troops and hear from speakers they’re likely to agree with.”

    😉

  • Paul C

    Re the Group “we’re not against the homeless, we just don’t want so many of them in this neighbourhood”

    Doesn’t the fact of building social housing help to fix the problem of homelessness. I’m wondering if this groups real motive is “We support social housing, but we just don’t want to see those wierdo looking people in my neighbourhood”

  • Bill McCreery

    Part of the problem is the manner in which this Council goes about everything it does. It has 2 methods: Penny Ballem & brute force [which in fact are not dissimilar].

    The fears of the neighbours would be much diminished if the City built integrated projects which included condo owners, market rental & the homeless. They could then take that income & do other diverse projects sprinkled through the City.

    Their other great mistake reads like an act of desperation in that they insist on inserting terribly overly dense & over-height projects into otherwise cohesive neighbourhoods.

  • Frances Bula

    @Bill. I have to step in with some facts here. This project was planned and designed long before Vision or Penny Ballem arrived on the scene. It all steamed ahead under the previous NPA council. You could argue that Vision/Ballem could have gone to bat against BC Housing and Rich Coleman to try to get these projects altered, but you can’t say they are responsible for them. The city under Sam Sullivan was anxious to get some permanent social housing projects. They zipped the 14 sites through, with no one at the time that I can recall from any party saying there was going to be a problem with packing 100 units into each site.

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    This post will be too late for the meetings that I am not able to attend.

    — On Broadway, besides consulting the extensive postings here on the Bualblog, the key is really two-fold:

    (1) Integrate a revitalization of Broadway street (i.e. the design of the R.O.W.) with plans for the implementation of transit.

    (2) Push to make the TRT/LRT (Trolley Rapid Transit/Olympic Line LRT) one of the options tested.

    — On social housing, the issue is roughly this:

    (1) We don’t want to put social housing in towers. There are many reasons:

    1.1 Treatment models work better in smaller groups. Addiction/mental health ideally in houses of seven plus support professional.

    1.2 We want social housing to look like every other unit in the neighbourhood or quartier.

    1.3 Tower units outside the downtown peninsula, in my opinion, don’t deliver neighbourhood density. Rather, they create a density hot-spot with problems of access, parking, fit, eyes-on-the-street, the list goes on and on.

    —On Sports Talk Radio today was hollering for an overthrow of the municipal regime based on the policy of taxing parking spaces in the city. Apparently, added to the HST parking at Empire Field is going to be a kings ransom.

    The criticisms were very similar. Decisions coming on down from above. No consultation. Systems that are not thought through. A feeling of hopelessness. And a growing disenchantment with the direction policy is taking.

  • Bill McCreery

    @ Francis, I stand corrected. I spent most of 2006 to 09 away from the City so my experiential knowledge of that period is not as good as it should & will be. Thank you.

    My comments perhaps are more applicable to the many Vision initiated STIR & other spot re-zonings around the City. I would also suggest the suggestion of mixed occupant buildings or complexes would be a model worth examining for the reasons I suggested & because, if properly thought through, such projects integrate well into existing communities. False Creek South & Champlain Heights are examples of a wide range of housing occupancies being successfully integrated together. they do not include homeless housing but, do include group homes, special needs, etc.

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    “mixed occupant buildings or complexes would be a model worth examining for the reasons I suggested & because, if properly thought through, such projects integrate well into existing communities. False Creek South & Champlain Heights are examples”

    Combine this with Bill’s previous post:

    “The fears of the neighbours would be much diminished if the City built integrated projects which included condo owners, market rental & the homeless. They could then take that income & do other diverse projects sprinkled through the City.”

    That is a sensible, city-wide, neighbourhood or quartier-based vision, that also has the potential of creating a “profit center” or a revenue source.

    It’s not that we are short of good ideas. It’s more like the process that we have been following for years and years just keeps missing the opportunity to harvest neighbourhood ideas and community good will.

  • Frances Bula

    @Bill. Yes, those kinds of mixed-housing complexes are what the neighbourhood would like to see, but there was a lot of pressure on Vancouver city council to push through these projects quickly and they wanted to do it, as part of a joint provincial-city housing gung-ho assault on homelessness. Working out a complex project that would require agreement of multiple partners and multi-level financing for each of the parts of the project would have taken years and the idea was to fast-track these.

  • Ron

    Went to the meeting last night re the Broadway housing. 50 odd speakers! So the issue is getting bumped over to Thursday.

  • Bill McCreery

    @ Lewis, agreed. Vancouver is @ a stage in its evolution where we need to be doing thoughtful additions to existing neighbourhoods to make them more ‘self sufficient’ & offer a higher quality of life. This may require increases in density or, fill the many urban voids in the City’s fabric or, simply fill out the considerable reserve of undeveloped existing zoning. As well, the residents have important, essential contributions to make in such a process. Unfortunately, especially in recent years, this ‘consultation’ process has been poorly handled. Given the unpresidented since 1972, citizen backlash throughout the City, this time the politicians will listen.

    @Francis, agreed. I understand that context & its limitations. Unfortunately it seems to have developed a simplistic way of ‘getting things done’ which has been carried forward into other areas of planning & civic governance such as the STIR programme, the Cambie Corridor densification & last year’s overly simplistic budget cutting exercise.

  • Michael Geller

    I have not been at the meetings, but from earlier discussions with Terra Housing, the project manager, and the architects NSDA, it was my understanding that this is a mixed building with both community housing for those with special needs and market rental housing.

    The issue with the community seems to be the building form. I agree with others who have written above that it is difficult to assess this project in isolation from what might be planned for other sites along the street.

    Without casting judgement on the form, I would note that this project has been in the planning stages for years, and many plans and models have been prepared, with considerable input by the city’s housing department, planning department, and real estate department, not to mention BC Housing.

    What does bother me is that if this project is rejected, or significantly altered now, a very large sum of money will have been wasted on the plans and consultants. How much? I don’t know, but I think this information should be provided to everyone involved. It’s likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly approaching 7 figures.

    To my mind, something is terribly wrong when people experienced in social housing can spend so much time working with a community, and so much money and face the prospect of seeing the whole thing rejected, or significantly modified.

    I gather one option is to reduce the height, but this will eliminate the market rental units that are intended to fund, in part, the social housing units. I do hope someone is paying attention to the overall project economics…and that the numbers are being openly shared with the community.

  • Lewis N. Villegas

    “To my mind, something is terribly wrong when people experienced in social housing can spend so much time working with a community, and so much money and face the prospect of seeing the whole thing rejected, or significantly modified.”

    I hope the project is rejected, Michael.

    Something is terribly wrong, and I think the issue is our lack of understanding of “urbanism”. It seems to me that we are still making decisions at the Hall based on the logic of suburban, automobile-driven neighbourhood form.

    Our civic leaders and our neighbourhood leaders need to find one voice. You and I are on the same page that a “one site at a time” process is not a good thing. We are in agreement that projects, and quartiers, need to be economically sustainable. And, we are probably equally worried about some of the unintended consequences (i.e. land speculation) that some of these “missed steps” in urbanism are bringing home to roost.

    We need to find common ground. A way to let the marketplace know that there is a level playing field out there, and a way to reassure neighbourhoods that their future is being planned in a careful and responsible way.

    Well, i don’t think that is adding one tower after the next. I don’t sense you do either.

    So, what are the concrete and verifiable facts that we can all agree on? Surely, they are not that Vancouver is going to match unit for unit the densities of Hong Kong, New York City, or even Toronto.

    So, how much is too much? Am I the only one sensing that the folks at 12th & Cambie are really not thinking about density the right way?

  • Tessa

    Lewis, the city of Vancouver is actually more densely populated than the city of Toronto, acknowledging of course that Toronto is a much larger geographical area and includes a large proportion of its former suburbs. So if you don’t think we should match the densities of Toronto, then we should probably start depopulating the city.

    Of course, on this specific proposal, I think Michael has a point in that any serious objections to the building should have been able to come forward earlier. And maybe the problem is that people didn’t know about the plans as they were developing, and so couldn’t really oppose them, but I still think the point is valid and the process needs to be prepared so that is done. Otherwise entire projects will never get off the ground for fear it will all be wasted at the last minute.

    I don’t necessarily see what’s horribly wrong about a relatively mid-sized tower on Broadway, one of the city’s busiest and most densely populated arterials, even if that section is less dense than others.

  • owl

    “To my mind, something is terribly wrong when people experienced in social housing can spend so much time working with a community, and so much money and face the prospect of seeing the whole thing rejected, or significantly modified.”–Michael

    “I hope the project is rejected, Michael.”–Lewis

    I am with Lewis on this, it should be rejected and something IS terribly wrong when politicians at two levels make these promises of 12oo units over and over again with their package homeless tower deals of 100+ units all clustered in Mt Pleasant and downtown, a mere 110 units on the entire west side in two projects. It’s a numbers game, the community is told what they are getting, the “working with the community” consists of two presentation of a done deal tower that has to be 11 stories if you want 24 low-income rental market units just the same tower as the other ones which are all situated where higher buildings already exist, where the neighbourhoods are not in peril. There is no other tower of the 12 or is it 14 projects situated in a neighbourhood that is struggling so hard to change, that is under siege by drug dealing, prostitution, empty storefronts, massage parlours, buck a slice pizza, 24 hr. convenience stores, methadone dispensaries like Broadway/Fraser has been for years. The ignorance astounds me that would have had this tower on the list at all, when from the beginning, if any supportive housing advocate had spend a few hours around this part of town or talked to a couple of families who own houses near this location in the beginning it should have been planned entirely differently–perhaps supportive housing for youth only with a new and bigger youth centre. If money and time are wasted with this type of political homeless agenda, you can’t take that as an excuse for the folly of this particular project in this particular neighbourhood. The proponents should have known better, city staff should have also, so the money sources should have been advised of a different plan for this location, one with some urban planning edge to give the corner a proud, innovative boost to revitalization. Ideas were there in the community, architecturall and socially, but the arrogant top-down nature of this decision is backfiring big time, already sixty speaker to the rezoning public hearing, a third session planned for July 6, the overwhelming majority against it as it is presented.

  • Ron

    @Michael:

    “I have not been at the meetings, but from earlier discussions with Terra Housing, the project manager, and the architects NSDA, it was my understanding that this is a mixed building with both community housing for those with special needs and market rental housing.”

    I have been to the meetings!

    The objection is not simply to height. (I don’t agree with that objection myself, the area needs development badly, is on a pretty good transit corridor, and will ultimately see many mid-rise projects.)

    The question for me is content. Kids and adults together. No investor for the market units. Unknown staff level.

  • owl

    To Michael: I forgot to ask the source of “. . . and many plans and models have been prepared, with considerable input by the city’s housing department, planning department, and real estate department, not to mention BC Housing.” If that is true, I wonder why the many neighbourhood people at community plan meetings over the years right up to the open house never saw a single alternative plan to the tower plan as it exists today. I was at nearly every meeting. We saw one plan only. The mantra was if you don’t want the 11 stories, you won’t get any market low income rental units but 100+core needs single units only. Now city staff are molifying people with same building only 8 stories with no, I repeat, NO market low income rental housing which 90 percent of people in workshops wanted.