City plea for affordable housing cash a gamble
A long-standing sore point in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside was aggravated this week when city staff prepared to market the latest plans for a development at 58 West Hastings Street.
The plans are controversial and as they stand suggest a recent mayoral promise may be broken. But there’s a larger dynamic at play with this development that offers some good insight into modern intergovernmental politicking.
At face value, the project sounds like a great idea. It would be funded in part by a $30-million donation from the Chinatown Foundation and will include retail and health-care space. The upper seven floors would be residential.
As of now, half of those units would be priced at a welfare or pension rate and the other half would be low-end rental. The problem is, Mayor Gregor Robertson promised last August every unit in the building would be priced at a welfare rate of $375 a month.
So when the Chinatown Foundation brought forward its rezoning application for the building (with only half the units at that rate), community members were understandably angered.
The Carnegie Community Action Project issued a news release announcing a rally to crash the city’s open house on the project. “We want Gregor to keep his promise,” went one call to arms.
But neither Robertson nor the city appear to have forgotten that promise. In fact, staffers have played it up in their communications slides prepared in advance of the now-postponed open house.
Included on one of the slides is a photograph of a statement scrawled in large letters on a flip board. “We commit to 100% welfare/pension rate community controlled housing at 58 W Hastings …” it reads. The statement is signed by the mayor and dated Aug. 2, 2016 — one of the early days of the months-long tent encampment.
Luke Harrison is the new director and chief executive officer of the Vancouver Affordable Housing Agency. As head of the agency, Harrison is responsible for sniffing out funding partners to get housing projects like 58 West Hastings off the ground.
Harrison said he needs to find another $30 million to make the development 100 per cent welfare rate. That could come from Ottawa, it could come from Victoria, or it could come from outside of government, Harrison said.
VAHA, which started in 2013, has not been an absolute success. Its first development — a 40-unit modular housing project — finally opened in February of this year.
But VAHA and the city have learned lessons along the way. Among them is that funding partners like to throw cash at shovel-ready or even move-in ready projects. That’s what happened on the modular housing project, where Ottawa stepped in at the last minute after the city announced it was going ahead alone if need be.
It’s what Harrison is banking on happening this time around as well.
Robertson is too. And now he’s asking for angered community groups to join him in pressing senior governments to co-fund the project.
It’s a gamble, but it’s one that’s paid off before. And for that reason it’s a gamble we’ll likely see again soon.