Condo project targeted by activists
Frances Bula
Sun
Wendy Pedersen of Carnegie Community Action Project. Photograph by : Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun, Files
Three condos are being built for every one social housing unit. Photograph by : Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
VANCOUVER – A Concord Pacific project in the booming Downtown Eastside has become the first to be targeted by local activists who are gearing for an anti-condo war.
The 154-unit Greenwich condo project — which is being built near Hastings and Carrall in the middle of what has been the city’s drug market, scavenging centre and residential-hotel enclave — has found itself temporarily stalled as area advocates protest a technical glitch in the approval process.
But those advocates say they’re willing to try to make a test case out of the project to highlight concerns about the onslaught of condos in a neighbourhood that has been traditionally the home for the region’s poorest.
“It’s kind of like a good target for us. And Concord, they’ve made their money in Vancouver,” says Wendy Pedersen of the Carnegie Community Action Project.
She said the group, which has meetings scheduled with city planners today, is going to demand the city start taking action to enforce its own Downtown Eastside housing plan.
That plan, produced in 2005, said the low-income community that lives in 10,000 residential-hotel and social-housing units be preserved and that the neighbourhood remain predominantly low-income.
There is also a general provision in the plan that the city should “monitor the housing mix” and “develop tools to manage the rate of change, if necessary.”
The report’s statistics said there were 2,000 market condos in the area but a recent tally by the housing department showed that 1,600 new condo units had been approved since 2005, with construction of those projects stretching to 2010.
Pedersen said there are now three condos being built for every one social-housing unit and the neighbourhood is being overwhelmed.
Concord Pacific’s senior vice-president of development, Peter Webb, said that he understands the strategy the activists are using and he even sympathizes with their desire to make their case.
“I believe they need to make their voices heard.”
But he said there’s nothing in city policies that could prevent the company from building, since it has not asked for any extra density or a rezoning.
It is building according to what the current zoning allows for height and density, which means there are no grounds to deny a development permit.
But, he acknowledged, “from the development perspective, it’s worrisome. It’s key that a developer has a good relationship with the community.”
Ironically, the only additional feature the project has that the city could turn down is a request to transfer 10,000 square feet of density to the Concord project from a social-housing site owned by the Portland Hotel Society. The density transfer will give the society money needed to do necessary renovations on a building that will eventually house low-income residents.
Concord had at one point considered asking the city for significant additional density, for which it had been willing to provide some low-income units in the project. But Webb said the company abandoned that idea when it became clear that it was going to take city planners some time to decide on an overall policy about trading density for social housing.
© The Vancouver Sun 2008