Catching up on some stuff here, but all still relevant.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the group of younger people that has coalesced into a kind of pro-density group called Abundant Housing, partly inspired by the YIMBY groups that are springing up in other cities — San Francisco being the first. They are showing up at council meetings to support new projects in the city, especially rentals. (One group of projects they don’t support: Burnaby condo developments built by tearing down the low-cost apartments there.)
In an unplanned coincidence, Kerry Gold wrote (also in the Globe) about the young people who started the group Housing Action for Local Taxpayers, which has focused much more on the demand side of Vancouver’s wacko housing problems.
These two groups represent a new wave of activism — albeit from different perspectives — from young people who feel like the housing system and policies in the region really aren’t working for them.
All of us should be watching to see where these articulate and impatient-for-new-solutions groups and people end up — my guess is they will increasingly have an influence over how the region is shaped in the next 50 years.
1 response so far ↓
1 peakie // Aug 11, 2016 at 11:09 am
“All of us should be watching to see where these articulate and impatient-for-new-solutions groups and people end up”
But the solutions have already show up in older jurisdictions ( > 1886, though I would say >1920 and the end of the post-war building boom that filled in much of the city proper), Vienna’s public housing, Colombia’s 1950s, 1980s booms, etc.
Even Calgary, with Mayor Nenshi, has an estimated 12,000 units of existing affordable housing, among a dozen groups.
Even Toronto, which parvenus to Vancouver want to emulate has nearly 60,000 low- and moderate-income households live in their Toronton Community public housing in neighbourhoods across the city.
Frances Bula did an Atkinson Scholar study of them.
Of course Chip Wilson, the Walls and such are currently intent on taking those lands for their own hipster warrens.