Adrian Crook: New homes and amenities next to one of our biggest transit hubs should be an easy win

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I’ve been watching the Broadway Plan work its way (tortuously) through Vancouver city council. Days of hearings and discussion and we still don’t have an approved plan. While there are some valid concerns, such as protections for existing tenants who may be displaced by redevelopment, much of what we’ve heard from local residents is from the same NIMBY song sheet that has dominated local politics in North America for decades.

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Shadow impact studies, traffic hand-wringing, and wealthy homeowners claiming they would support it if only it were more affordable. It’s a sentiment that now seems to permeate neighborhoods we would not have thought to be protectionist.

Staunch neighborhood opposition to change, thinly veiled as concern about affordability, is nowhere more virulent than in the East Vancouver neighborhood of Grandview Woodland.

Bordered by Broadway, Burrard Inlet, Clark and Nanaimo and centered by Commercial Drive, Grandview Woodland is an area with a uniquely successful track record of opposing new housing. Anything more affordable or more diverse than a detached house redeveloped using soaring mortgage equity faces stiff homeowner opposition in this exclusive enclave.

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Don’t believe me? By stats alone, Grandview Woodland has rejected more would-be residents than almost every other Vancouver neighborhood, an illustrious list of gentrified-to-the-max ‘hoods like Shaughnessy, West Point Grey, Dunbar and Kerrisdale. Shocked? Well, between the census years 1996 and 2016, Grandview Woodland’s population grew by exactly zero per cent. That’s right, the population remained static for 20 years. To put that into perspective, over the same period our Metro region grew by 600,000 residents.

At City Hall, Grandview Woodland homeowners, led by the Grandview Woodland Area Council in particular, have come out fighting hard against everything from Kettle Boffo (a seven-year fight to build social housing and a community service center that ended in defeat), to an addiction treatment center with housing at East First and Clark (successful).

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The battleground for neighborhood homeowners these days is written on the “No Safeway Mega Towers” ​​signs stuck on the lawn of a $2-million Grandview Woodland house.

The “mega towers” ​​in question are within the proposed Broadway and Commercial development coming before council later this summer. In three buildings (24, 28, and 29 storeys) comprised mostly of rentals, we would see 345 new market rental homes, 93 below-market rental homes, a new Safeway and a 20,000-square-foot public plaza all at a site that is currently a single-storey grocery store and surface parking lot. In light of what the Broadway Plan will allow just blocks away if it is approved, this proposal should be considered modest.

These new homes and amenities would sit directly atop the nexus of two SkyTrain lines and the busiest east-west bus corridor in the region, meaning it should be the ultimate example of transit-oriented development. And that’s before the pending introduction of the Broadway Line.

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But predictably, despite this proposal being well within Grandview Woodlands’ own community plan requirements, it has been looked at in the local consultation process for six years. Despite the proposal going beyond council-approved policy by being largely rental, and despite satisfying the public benefits requirement by providing a public plaza, the homeowner and Grandview Woodland Area Council saber-rattling has turned a proposal that should be an easy win into what will be one of the biggest fights the current city council has seen.

The “no mega towers” ​​group’s website deploys hyperbolic rhetoric that is a familiar remix of greatest hits that have succeeded in gatekeeping Grandview Woodland for decades.

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For more context, the Grandview Woodland Area Council once famously referred to a proposed six-storey rental building as a “blockbuster” that would ruin the character of the neighborhood.

But, hopefully, current and aspiring Grandview Woodlands residents will instead seize upon this small opportunity to reverse the neighborhood’s decades-long descent into gentrification and offer younger, less-wealthy, more-diverse people a chance to experience the community that has been so good. to Grandview Woodland homeowners. No place to start like a surface parking lot next to one of our biggest transit hubs.

Adrian Crook is a renter and rental housing activist.