West Point Grey Safeway proposal, 450 market rentals, 115 non-market

Running into fierce local opposition

TLDR: The Safeway at West 10th and Sasamat, just east of UBC, has been closed since 2018. There's a proposal which has been underway for years to build badly needed purpose-built rental housing on the empty site, 450 market apartments and 115 non-market. It's running into a tremendous amount of local opposition. There were 300 people at the open house on February 8, mostly opposed. And they've been emailing council.

If you'd like to help counterbalance the opponents (or write to express your opposition, if you think this is a terrible idea), it takes literally 60 seconds to send an email to the mayor, council, the city planner, and the director of planning.

Subject: Support for 4545 W 10th Ave

To: ken.sim@vancouver.ca, rebecca.bligh@vancouver.ca, christine.boyle@vancouver.ca, adriane.carr@vancouver.ca, lisa.dominato@vancouver.ca, pete.fry@vancouver.ca, sarah.kirbyyung@vancouver.ca, mike.klassen@vancouver.ca, peter.meiszner@vancouver.ca, brian.montague@vancouver.ca, lenny.zhou@vancouver.ca, scott.erdman@vancouver.ca, matt.shillito@vancouver.ca

The email itself can be as simple as "I'm writing to support this project. We need more housing."

Direct links for GMail or Outlook.

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City website for the project.

Housing being so scarce and expensive in Vancouver isn't a law of nature. Land here is limited, but elevators exist. We have people who want to live and work here, and other people who want to build housing for them.

Problem is, it's extremely difficult to get permission to build practically anything that's not a detached house. You need to get site-by-site discretionary permission from city staff and from council to build multifamily housing, which takes years. "It's easier to elect a pope."

One big reason is local opposition: almost everyone agrees that we need more housing, but they have all sorts of reasons why it should be built somewhere else, or it should be a different project.

I sympathize with their fear of the unknown, but because we're not building enough housing to keep up with jobs, prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels to force people to give up and leave. Vacancy rates are near zero. Younger people are being crushed and driven out by high housing costs. It's a terrible situation. It's also bad for older homeowners themselves: how are we going to sustain the healthcare system when the only people who can afford to live in Vancouver are people who moved here and bought a place 20 years ago? How can younger nurses afford to live here?

New housing frees up existing housing. Every time new housing opens up with a few hundred apartments, that's a few hundred people who are no longer competing with everyone else for the limited supply of existing housing.

In this case, the opposition, Friends of Point Grey Village, is very well-organized. In fact one of the leaders used to work as a planner for the city. They've been encouraging people to email mayor and council directly, which is why it's important to counterbalance them.

What the opposition is saying:

• Lots of concern about shadows, building height (there's two buildings on 10th that'll be 17 and 19 storeys), and the buildings being too close to 10th. (The current design is based on the city's requirements, which were to make the buildings narrower and taller, and to put them right on 10th to minimize shadows on 9th.)

• As with the Jericho Lands, the opposition has hired their own architect to prepare an entirely different site concept with four-storey buildings.

• Providing market and non-market rental housing isn't enough. The development should include a library branch. (A new library branch opened across the street last year!) The development should include a daycare. If there's not enough money to support that, then the project should be changed to condos instead of rentals.

Also, I hate to say it, but exactly the same group is complaining about how all the businesses in the neighbourhood are shutting down. When younger people can't afford to live in the neighbourhood (houses there are $3M), that's exactly what happens. Douglas Todd: The crumbling of Vancouver's affluent Point Grey Village, May 2023.

Posted to Reddit.