This is sure to set off another interesting debate about affordability (what is it, what does it mean, are the trade-offs worth it, affordable to who, affordable for how long) and gentrification in the Downtown Eastside (since CCAP and Wendy Pedersen are currently taking the position that anything except for social housing is gentrification, even these kinds of units).

I find this project interesting because of the way Gillespie and Henriquez are puzzling over how to prevent speculation. That’s an ongoing issue in this city — well, in certain parts of the city. There’s no doubt that speculative buying drives up the price of real estate in particular neighbourhoods, which then ripples out to other neighbourhoods. How do you prevent it or slow it down, assuming you want to?

I’ll be looking forward to see the results of this effort.

(Btw, for those not aware, Gillespie and Henriquez are also the team behind the much-debated tower on Comox in the West End.)

The renters there hated the NPA for not doing more to protect the neighbourhood’s rental buildings, which felt like they were under attack from owners wanting to “renovate” and charge much higher rents.

If the mini-revolt in the West End keeps going, Vision Vancouver could find itself meeting pockets of similar dislike. The ubiquitous West End Neighbors is organizing another protest/rally outside tonight’s VV fundraiser downtown, along with other activities. (Their news release attached below.)

A small note from me: Although this West End group’s efforts to have more input into development decisions is admirable, I have to sigh in despair at the way they stray into misinformation and hyperbole in an over-enthusiastic or perhaps incompletely researched effort to make their case.

Like actors in some Robert Redford drama about nasty developers, they have in the past made accusations that council is allowing certain developments in return for donations from particular developers. As I’ve pointed out before, this might make sense if councillors were getting direct cash in their pockets. But all contributions just going to pay off their giant election-expense bills. It doesn’t make any sense to imagine that even a $10,000 contribution would make a difference in a $2-million election budget and that the entire council would decide to allow a project just to get that.

They also make a reference, in this news release, to the “$16-million tulip tree” — reference to the six storeys that was proposed as compensation for a developer who would have to build around the 107-year-old tree in order to preserve it. As city planners noted, that estimate — the result of poor math on the part of one local writer — was wildly off. The net profit on six storeys was calculated at $4 million and that money would be used for the extra expense of building around the tree.

Finally, a point that opponents to tower projects in the West End keep making is that developers are getting “subsidies” from council to build rental projects. The implication is that they are making a killing on these rentals. As anyone who has studied rental housing for even 30 minutes in this country knows, developers more or less stopped building rental projects in this country in the 1980s when the federal government changed various pieces of tax law. Ever since, city planners and housing advocates have been struggling to figure out ways to encourage developers to get back into the business.

Vision’s Short Term Incentives for Rental — which the WEN group is so opposed to — is the local attempt to provide a solution. Developers do not get cash subsidies. They get given enough density to provide them with the equivalent level of profit they would make by building a condo project. Ironically, traditional housing advocates, who are not usually developers’ big friends, have supported this effort.

Okay, end of my exasperated rant.

(Vancouver, June 16, 2010) The West End will be busy today with a rally about rezoning and development pressures on the community and then “greeters” outside a “Vision Vancouver” fundraiser at the Coast Plaza Hotel. Media are welcome.    

WEST END RALLY AT MAXINE’S (1215 Bidwell Street) When: 4:45 to 5:15 pm, Wednesday, June 16, 2010 Where: Outside 1215 Bidwell Street, near corner of Davie What: Speakers will present the latest info on rezoning and development in the West End and other neighbourhoods in Vancouver. Information will be presented on the status of “Maxine’s” (historic building rezoned in December for a subsidized 20-storey tower, and threatened soon by the wrecking ball); the “No Rezoning without a Comprehensive Plan!” petition now with over 6300 signatures, findings of a citizen’s opinion survey on the future of Maxine’s, and more. Participants will also hear about concerns in other neighbourhoods of Vancouver about major rezonings and proposed developments, many of them under the City’s controversial Short Term Incentives for Rental Housing (STIR) program.  

VISION VANCOUVER FUNDRAISER AT COAST PLAZA HOTEL (1763 Comox St.) Then, after 5:15 pm the group will walk 2 blocks to the Coast Plaza Hotel to greet Mayor Robertson’s guests for Vision Vancouver’s fundraiser (starts at 6 pm), welcome them to the neighbourhood and let them know taxpayers and voters care about Vision Vancouver’s policies major City decisions affecting everyone.   Anyone visiting the West End today is invited to have a look at current rezoning hotspots at 1401 Comox St. (St. John’s Church), 1754 Pendrell St., 1600 Beach Ave. (Beach Towers), 1245 Harwood St. (with the “$16 million tulip tree”), and 1215 Bidwell St. (Maxine’s). Each involves an actual or potential rezoning application that could result in a new residential tower of 18 to 22 storeys. Many citizens are concerned City’s willingness to make site-by-site rezonings that radically override existing community policy plans and zoning guidelines (on height, density, setback and so on) will significantly change their communities, destroy heritage, reduce liveability, and in some cases (under STIR, which essentially subsidizes developers) involve huge costs for all Vancouver taxpayers who pick up the costs.   West End Neighbours (WEN) is a network of residents that has grown to thousands of citizens concerned about the impact of fast-tracked rezoning on liveability in the West End and the implications for all of Vancouver.

Even so, it will probably surprise some to hear that West Van is one of those communities.

The city has negotiated with British Properties’ developers to add townhouses and apartments to the upcoming Rodgers Creek development and reduce the number of single-family homes. It’s legalized secondary suites. And it’s considering its own version of laneway houses, with the first two pilot projects due to be considered later this month or in early June. But that’s not without some angst, as I describe in my Globe story today.

I admire them for taking on this topic. And I’ve seen shipping containers used ingeniously in a few places I’ve visited. It seems to me I saw stores operating out of them in Kabul and, at the other end of the universe in all ways, I also visited an organic farm in Maui where the owners had turned a shipping container into their office. (They’d also turned a garden hose into an outdoor shower for our benefit, but that’s another story.)

However, I have to say that in the way of the great Media Chicken Shunning that is going on in this city, I currently am having strong doubts about whether Vancouver can accept any idea that strays outside the parameters of the mediocre and middle of the road that seems to prevail here. I’ve always known the city was parochial and small-minded, but that’s been brought home forcefully in the last couple of weeks, as all the pundits of the land have thundered on about the way global disaster will come to Vancouver if it allows urban chickens.

I’m frankly completely baffled by this reaction. I could understand their scorn if the Vision council had decided to make decisions by consulting a ouija board or if it had mandated that all new housing development include a space for housing pigs and donkeys at the basement level, in order to promote food security.

But we’re talking about allowing urban chickens — a trend that has been growing in North America for at least the last decade. If anyone wanted to do even the most minimal research, they would see that hundreds of cities have made the move to allowing people to keep small numbers of chickens and that it’s hardly a radical concept. Susan Orlean in the New Yorker wrote about what a trend it is, definitive proof that, far from being some new age weirdo fad, it’s a yuppie as a Starbucks non-fat, no-whip moccachino.

So … shipping containers as housing? Nice try, but I can well imagine what the great minds around here would have to say.

But Vancouver is going to give it a try, as I outline in my Globe story here.

There’s a tussle over whether the Vancouver Art Gallery will indeed land there. The four very influential developers there — Aquilini, Concord, Canadian Metropolitan, and the provincial government — have been arm-wrestling the city for months over how much residential they’ll be allowed to put in, how much density they can add, and how much view cone space they’ll be able to slice into. (Check my Globe story tomorrow for more on one of these issues.)

If you read the report and/or listened to the council debate on Tuesday, you’ll be interested to learn that Raymond Louie and company are thinking about reviving their original idea for Southeast False Creek of a neighbourhood with one-third social housing, one-third affordable, and one-third regular market. That’s still evolving.

And the latest to weigh in is Mayor Gregor Robertson, who wants to see that area to take all the new green building ideas that were incorporated into the village and do even more of them in Northeast False Creek.

In a rare interjection into the public debate at council, Robertson made a point of adding at the end that he is worried the current fledgling plan doesn’t push green far enough.

“I am a little concerned that we are not advancing the sustainability objective or the platform of Southeast False Creek,” he said. “The intention was that that would be the new base for development. Our challenge is to take the next step beyond that. I see Northeast False Creek as the opportunity to take it to the next level and showcase it as a large-scale development site such as this.”

Of course, astute followers of council are probably already thinking what I was thinking as I listened to this. Which is: But, but. But Southeast False Creek is land that was owned by the city, where they could dictate the terms pretty freely.

Yes, Millennium Developments/the Maleks are building a green project that has all kinds of elements never before seen in Vancouver. But they knew that would be required when they bid on the project and presumably bid on the land accordingly. Or not, but at any rate, they knew they were going to have to follow a whole new set of rules in exchange. AND they’ve complained that the green requirements are what fuelled some of their cost overruns. AND I don’t know a developer in town who sees what’s happened at the Olympic village as any kind of model for doing anything green — not at this point, anyway.

But the mayor appears to be saying that developers will be willing to comply with these new, more demanding green requirements from the city because they’ll make money.

He acknowledges that higher standards “will be more for the landowners and developers to factor into their pro formas.” But he points out that projects elsewhere, in Portland and Victoria, at Dockside Green, are seeing people pay a premium to live in environmentally advanced projects. He’s hoping that the Olympic village will see buyers willing to see that same kind of premium.

I’d be interested to hear people weigh in on this one. I personally would pay more for a place that I thought had been designed to be more sustainable. But not sure if that’s what’s proving true in the marketplace.

And I await further developments on the affordable-housing front in this area.

The Vision Vancouver council’s latest task force/brainstorming/collective put in place to hone in on an issue — in this case, how to create affordable and rental housing — is going to be meeting at the Celebration Hall at Mountain View Cemetery from 2-5 tomorrow, April 25.

As far as I know, it’s not a public free-for-all but you can listen to the people at the roundtable and their suggestions. Raymond Louie said those invited to the roundtable include people from the development industry, architects, BC Housing staff, CHMC staff, and representatives from tenant groups like the Tenants Rights Action Coalition. A warning, though — there are already 40 people invited to be part of the roundtable, leaving only a few spots in the small room for the general public. 

It’s interesting that this meeting is open, when other task forces (homelessness, greenest city, developers’ group on what the heck to do with the Olympic village) haven’t been. Maybe it’s because this is more about general policy. Maybe because council is realizing that if it’s going to create a task force a month that is giving advice that the city is going to put into action, everyone should get a sense of what the different parties are pitching.

NPA Councillor Suzanne Anton is pretty critical of the way the recent rash of Vision Vancouver task forces have been run — announced without any council approval, some (like the Greenest City one) appropriating money from city departments, held in private. She says that if they’re going to be giving advice to councillors, they should be structured like advisory committees, with public meetings and minutes, so everyone knows what’s going on.

It’s an interesting point, although it seems to me there are more shades of gray than people think at first glance. There are all kinds of meetings that ciy councillors have with various parties on issues that result in motions and votes at council. Former mayor Sam Sullivan had all kinds of meetings with stakeholder groups in the mayor’s office when he was developing his ideas about Project Civil City, the drug-substitution program and EcoDensity. So did Larry Campbell. There have been film task forces and crime coalitions, meetings with the Fair Tax Coalition, input from the arts community, and you name it over the years.

So there’s a question about where you draw the line on what should be open and what shouldn’t be. Should the public be able to sit in on every meeting the mayor has? I think we all agree there’s a logistical problem with that. But should the public be able to understand who is having an influence on an immminent policy decision and what they’re saying? I think most of us would like to know that.

The question is coming up because this Vision council is doing things differently. Staff have always held meetings with stakeholder groups as they develop policies that are eventually brought to council. (See Charles Gauthier’s post in relation to how the city’s Metro Core policy/downtown vision was developed, for an example.) But here, we see the politicians getting more directly involved, by setting up those groups, deciding who the stakeholders are and sitting around the table with them to hear their advice. That’s all part of the Vision view that it should be politicians who drive change, not the staff.

But if they’re going to do that, does it need a new kind of process with new rules? Interested in your comments.

This is sure to rev up the engines of those critical of what’s happened at Little Mountain, the social-housing project that the province awarded to Holborn to redevelop. Most of the people got moved out and it’s now sitting partially boarded up, but little is happening. Actually, I should say, nothing is happening. The city has been trying to get Holborn, which was Simon Lim but now seems to be represented by his brother-in-law in the media and at Vision Vancouver fundraisers, to at least start holding consultations with the community.

More pressure on the provincial government — just in time for the election, yes sir — to explain what it is doing with this empty site. Switching developers won’t help, since I don’t know of a developer in town at this point who is willing to start anything.

UPDATE: Got a brief message from Housing Minister Rich Coleman, who says the Little Mountain project is still on track to his knowledge at this point. and that BC Housing officials will be meeting with Holborn’s new CEO Friday. The province holds a large non-refundable deposit from Holborn for the site.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It sounded like some of the the standard stuff to me — we’re going to listen to you, we’ve heard your concerns, we realize that when your business does well the city benefits, blah blah blah.

It also seemed like there were some definite hints about a few critical things. One, that this administration is going to re-visit the recent push to preserve the central business district for office only (recent sign of that was the last-minute decision to pull the Metro Core jobs report last week, a report that has been focused on the need for office and jobs space). That’ll be a big disappointment to the other business camp in down, the Vancouver Board of Trade, which has been fighting the good fight for two decades now to preserve the CBD and more as an office-only area, hoping always that Vancouver will someday turn into a head-office town with clusters of towers filled with guys in suits. Interesting Point Two in the speech, that the quiet arm-wrestling to get amenities from developers, something that the Larry Beasley planning administration perfected, is going to be radically modified. In spite of that, I wasn’t sure what developers would make of these hints.

But afterward, they were almost gushing about the speech and saw it as a definite signal to staff that things were going to be different. Some of them, and I believe I have the right word here, “chortled.” I had to hang around and wait for the mayor to grab a quote on credit ratings, so I stayed until the bitter end, which meant I got to see the long line of people who waited to talk to him afterwards, another sign of something or another.

So what did he say? I won’t quote the whole speech, but here are the relevant bits:

“Well, today, I’m here to say that I believe housing and development in Vancouver is where strategies for recovery should and must begin. We were the last to be impacted by the global downturn and with our wits and determination we can be the first to rise back up.

“I want to make my commitment to you very clear: City Hall wants to be an active, strategic partner with the business sector in the economic solutions ahead. Social and environmental sustainability must be the core values. And innovation and creativity must be the drivers.

“The relationship between City Hall and the development community has been strained over the last few years. There’s been a need for greater clarity of shared purpose, an understanding that we’re all in this together. As well our partnership has been strained because, for various reasons, the City has not been as responsive as any of us would have liked.

“But I’m here today to say it’s time to put our community-building partnership back on an equal footing. To say that leadership is back at City Hall, and that my Council and staff are motivated to get to work.

“It starts with a City Hall that listens. I’ve been listening to your suggestions. I had no idea so many of you LOVE the idea of a speculator tax! At least, I think that’s what you said. (For the uninitiated, that’s a joke. GR floated that idea during the election campaign and took more of a drubbing on that than any other topic except his TransLink fine.)

“Seriously, here’s what I’ve been hearing from you during these last 10 weeks.

(stuff about how they build they cities we live in and account for $25 billion of business in B.C.)

“But I’m also hearing that our partnership in community building is at risk, that the financing you need is increasingly hard to find, and that controlling the cost of doing business is increasingly critical to your success.

“I’m hearing that we need to cooperate and innovate to build sustainable, moe affordable communities in a global recession and that we need to have a meaningful dialogue about costs, charges, requirements and approval processes in order to make that viable.

“I’m hearing that the city’s development process needs to be more transparent, that negotiating with developers to provide community amenities has worked well in a rising market, but not so well in a falling market, when we’re all trying to re-establish positive momentum.

“I’m hearing that a renewed, clearer but also more flexible framework for development permit approvals will speed the process of building affordable and rental housing, that greater transparency and pro form certainty will bring clear expectations to our renewed community-building partnership.

“And I’m also hearing that commercial and working space is vital to our city, but that we shouldn’t lose the opportunity to develop residential housing close to where we work. And we also need to ensure significant and varied opportunities for residential housing across the city.

…

“This new council and will consider new mixes of uses, the inclusion of different types of housing in the same building, innovative office and residential mixes, and strategic zoning along our transit corridors. We want to look at incentives and the removal of barriers for rental and affordable housing and we want to protect the thousands of jobs your industry generates and supports throughout Vancouver.”

He challenges the myth that supply alone with create affordable housing. He also challenges the one that says the government should build it all.