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A little more than three years after a fire destroyed the homes of 27 Indigenous families in East Vancouver, a new vision for the property will soon rise from the ashes. But not without opposition.
A four-storey apartment building near Commercial Drive operated by the Vancouver Native Housing Society has been empty ever since a fire days before Christmas 2017 left the building uninhabitable. But with city council’s recent approval of a redevelopment plan, the society will more than double the number of affordable homes on the site.
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Inside Vancouver City Hall’s Housing Wars
Voters demanded action on affordability. What they got is so weirdly split we tried to map the mess.
Doug Ward is a freelance writer and previously a reporter at the Vancouver Sun. SHARES Mayor of Splitsville? Kennedy Stewart faces a fractured council when it comes to housing reforms.
Collage by Christopher Cheung. Building images via Google Street. City hall photo by popejon2 via Wikipedia, CC BY 2.0.
When Vancouver voters last went to the polls, the most pressing issue for two out of three was the housing crisis. Tight rentals and skyrocketing home prices were shutting out younger and lower-income residents, and the Vision Vancouver government was due for a shellacking given that 85 per cent of those surveyed said the job it had done was either “bad” or “very bad.”