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.”
Time to diversify our home choices and styles. Here are some winning examples.
Scot Hein is an adjunct professor in the master of urban design program at UBC. He was previously the senior urban designer with the City of Vancouver. SHARES Craft beer tastes better. Apply its lessons to how we build affordable homes and liveable neighbourhoods.
Photo: Shutterstock.
Forty years ago, Molson, Labatt and Carling O’Keefe collectively owned 96 per cent of Canada’s beer market. Their shared monopoly produced little experimentation with a reliance on traditional formulas. Beer was expensive, and weak, made with minimal hops and large amounts of corn or rice. The market imposed a reality of bland lagers on purchasers.