BC Rental Project- Vancouver Breaks Its Own Rules to Build Middle-Income Housing—A Sign of a Broken Market
In a striking demonstration of how dysfunctional Vancouver’s rental market has become, the city is being forced to break its own regulations just to make a middle-income housing project viable. This raises serious concerns about government interference in housing development and its role in exacerbating the affordability crisis.
h/t Cameron
No one in their right mind would invest in rental housing in the regulatory and fascist quagmire of BC and particularly Vancouver. Hogtown is likely as bad too. Investors in increasing the housing supply in these dystopian experiments in city-statism are shrugging.
You couldn’t pay me enough to be a landlord in Ontario. Every law is skewed in the tenant’s favour.
“The project is being promoted as a way to generate future revenue for the city”.
I see a problem already.
It will provide revenue for friends of the NDP during the planning and construction phases.
It will be a massive loss for the taxpayer.
The biggest slumlord in all of Canada is the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, does whatever the Vancouver equivalent is want to challenge TCHC for the title?
And yes, they will lose money on every unit, but claim they are making it up on volume.
I love the phrase “community amenities contribution”.
That’s where the city refuses to issue you a building permit unless you agree to build a new park, or pave the entire street, or put up a row of new street lights. Extortion, pure and simple.
I posted recently about the fact my tiny little city has 15 stoplights in our mile long main boulevard. The last 10 stoplights were all provided by building developers. Why? Because those developers were required to provide expensive “traffic reports” which indicated their projects would cause the intersection traffic to deteriorate from level-B to level-C.
The only thing that has deteriorated those intersection traffic levels … is the new stoplights that have caused traffic to unnaturally stack up.
But stoplights = safety … Right? And who can be against “safety” no matter what the price!? Didn’t we just learn this lesson from COVID … as our government saved millions of lives [sic].
I bet traffic would flow faster if each intersection had four-way stop signs instead of lights.
It would. And it would be “safe”
What citizens have learned in Edmonton is that – bylaws are simply suggestions when a developer decides to build a tower anywhere. Residents who would point to bylaws meant to protect the residents community, or require appropriate design/green space, or protect low income housing, are changed at the request of the developer, every time.
It is primarily a need for additional tax revenue for COE, as it is believed the city is bankrupt.
Government can never compete on a level playing field with private businesses. And in an environment of governance where it has the opportunity to tilt the field in its own favor, why would it?
Doesn’t help that the two biggest contributors to a municipal election are public sector unions and property developers. They don’t give a crap about the residents, especially the taxpaying ones.