City’s target cut to 50 per cent of 252 units
Damian Inwood
Province
“The financial realities are forcing us to scale back.”
He said he believes a staff recommendation to go with a 50-50 split of social housing and market rentals is “a good balance.”
The proposal calls for the market units to be rented to people who work in Vancouver, with a household income of up to 20 per cent of market rent. Preference would be given to people like city police, firefighters, health workers or other essential service workers.
A staff report going to council Thursday says that the cost of the 252 units jumped from $64 million in 2006 to $110 million in 2009.
The only money the city had to offset the cost was $30 million that Vancouver 2010 paid to use the site during the Olympics and $2 million in development cost levies, said the report. The $78 million gap would not be covered by rents from subsidized-housing tenants, it added.
Even with the proposed 50-50 split, there would still be a shortfall of $32 million, according to the report.
Other options included a “bridging” option to provide temporary, mixed-income housing for three to five years.
Another option was to have 100-per-cent market rental housing with profits from sales used to build 250 social housing units elsewhere.
Coun. Suzanne Anton said that’s the option she’ll be supporting. “I think the right option is to sell these buildings off as market rentals and recover the cost of construction,” she said. “There’ll be money in the bank at the end and we can put that into social housing elsewhere, at a cheaper rate”
Coun. Ellen Woodsworth said that the 50-50 split was the best of the three, to “optimize” the amount of affordable housing in the city.
“However, the bid book commitment was 250 units of non-market housing,” she added. “I have some concerns about that.”
Am Johal, chairman of the Impact on Communities Coalition, branded the cut in social housing as “another broken Olympic promise.“
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