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Cities look at ways to stimulate (affordable) housing construction

February 6th, 2009 · 6 Comments

I have a story in today’s Globe about what cities are trying to do to keep business, especially development, going in their neighbourhoods. Surrey’s efforts are just kicking off so not a lot of details yet, but there’s a LOT of talk in Vancouver these days about what the Vision council could do to thaw out some of the frozen activity around the city.

You can read my story here.

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  • LP

    Is there a city charge/fee for every parking stall required, or are they referring to reduced parking stall requirements would lower the construction costs?

  • tommi

    “Mr. Meggs said that the Vision councillors promised to encourage a boom in affordable housing and he thinks that’s still possible if the city works with the industry. ”

    Gee, what a turnaround from Vision. Before the election, “Developer” was a very, very bad word according to them, another thing they tried to pin on the NPA. Now they want to see how they can help the poor developers build more buildings??

    We learn more and more about Vision’s true intentions now that they’ve been elected to office. Because prior to that, they were sending out a very different and conflicting message.

    Get ready to grab your ankles, taxpayers!

  • Feesto

    Building underground parking is incredibly expensive. A reduced parking requirement means better project viability

  • fbula

    LP,

    There’s not a charge for the stall. There’s usually a requirement to have a certain number of parking stalls per unit. As my developer posters will be happy to tell you, it costs about $40,000 or thereabouts to build an underground parking stall.

  • LP

    Frances,

    The reason I asked the question is because in Calgary, they used to have a permit fee for every parking stall required.

    It wasn’t for residential as far as I know, at the time I wanted to open a business in a trendy area. The building was already built and the space was assigned a number of stalls. For the type of business I wanted to put in this space, the city required that I have more parking stalls than what the building had reserved for that space.

    One option I had was to pay $7500 per required stall, to the city’s ‘parking fund’ to get my business license. The city supposedly used this money to build parkades or some other form of city improvements that alleviated parking problems.

    I’m pretty sure that if you asked most Calgarians what was really built with all that money over the years, they wouldn’t have a clue.

    With all the Vision party members that read your blog, perhaps this will get their juices flowing for another revenue stream for Vancouver – if they don’t already have something like this in place.

  • paul

    Tommi:

    It should come as absolutely no surprise that Vision is working hand in hand with developers. Anyone who had their eyes open at all since Vision’s inception would know that the party is built on developer dollars.

    Though this has served to draw more of the left into their support base, the charade will likely erode this support in time.

    Love them or hate them, developers are essential to growth of cities. Developer is not a dirty word, as it is these people who have risked their financial hides to build this city.

    It would have been nice for Vision to have been less ashamed of their alliance and more forthright thoughout the campaign. (Even now, Raymond Louie’s developer-laden donor list for the leadership race is still locked away at Vision headquarters). Being open about it would limit the unpleasant surprise for those who drank the Vision Kool-Aid (er…juice).

    At least the NPA (shudder) made no great effort to hide their connections to the developer community.