Vancouver City Councillor
Seattle’s is a model similar to Portland’s Dignity Village, which I visited in 2014 and advocated for as a possible solution here. Volunteer labour and faith based groups played a huge role in helping to build these temporary intentional communities, and the results were profound: once they had temporary housing, the average resident was able to find stable permanent housing within 6 months.
in Greater Vancouver, transit oriented development is not seen as a driver of building of affordable housing, in fact it’s been quite the opposite: In Burnaby we are seeing wholesale demovictions of communities with affordable housing bulldozed to make room for new less affordable towers, In Vancouver, where T.O.D has been employed (Marine Drive and Oakridge) proposed developments offer an abysmal portion of affordable housing, but tremendous condo sales and presales.
As expected, the City of Vancouver’s 1.8 billion dollar capital and operating budget for 2017 passed yesterday. Also, as (cynically) expected, the people of Vancouver were distracted by a last-minute emergency property tax increase of 0.5% to deal with the ongoing fentanyl crisis.
To be clear, the necessary additional funding for first responders isn’t optional. Emergency services are precisely what we pay taxes for and as we’ve been hearing for months now, our first responders —in particular our firefighters— need more resources to do the life saving work we expect of them.
Has Vancouver lost its way? Certainly, life isn’t necessarily getting better for many of us here: more homelssness, less affordability, more stress — if anything, the race toward “world class city” and other superlatives often feels like a race to the bottom.
Condon & Beers offer a thoughtful suggestion for a reset:
It’s a broken process. In the absence of facts and information, rumours and innuendo abound. Last month I attended the local residents’ association meeting to assuage some of those fears and having gone to a VCH open house, I was able to explain the clinical models that the two proposed sites are providing and hopefully gain community support. Of course, I shouldn’t have to be the one to dispel rumours, but because VCH did a poor job of community engagement there was a lot of misinformation out there. That is the nut of the issue: community engagement.