Friday, April 17, 2015

The Golden Era's (Very) Long Tail...Mr. Coleman Celebrates Another Failure.

WhereExactlyDidAllThoseFamilies
GoVille


It never ceases to amaze me how, if you just pay attention, you can see the real and true failures of BC Liberals coming from miles and miles and miles away..

And I'm not just talking about the cronification of everything.

Instead, I'm talking about the ideologically-driven policy failures.

This time I'm specifically talking about the original Brownian/Campbellerian plan to get public housing off the public's back by selling all the public housing land to private developers to generate capital.

Which is exactly what the executor of the original plan, Rich Coleman, did with all that land at the foot of Little Mountain in Lotsuland's near Eastern Townships almost a decade ago now.

****

I remember it like it was yesterday.

And even then the kicking out of all the families and the tearing down of all that public housing when there was no plan in place seemed like madness.

And, according to Daphne Bramham in the VSun in it is still is.

Utter madness I mean.

Here is the lede of Ms. Bramham's latest on the matter:

Housing Minister Rich Coleman celebrated last week’s official opening of 53 units of seniors’ housing on Vancouver’s Little Mountain as “a milestone” and “a rebirth of a community.”

But a better description of the long-stalled redevelopment of Vancouver’s largest social housing site might be a disgrace or, at very least, an embarrassment to the province and the city.

Far from addressing the enormous problem of housing affordability in Canada’s most expensive city, the province’s sale of the Little Mountain site may have exacerbated it.

No one knows when — or even if — the site will be fully redeveloped. Yet, even if it is fully redeveloped, the net gain may be as few as 10 social housing units and, at most, 60.

For 50 years, the site that stretches from 33rd Avenue to 37th between Main and Ontario streets had 234 units that provided affordable housing to families and seniors.

Eight years ago, the first tenants began moving out with a promise that they would have first right of refusal when new units were completed in 2010.

BC Housing had sold the property for $300 million to Holborn Properties on the condition that it build 234 new units of social housing and an additional 10 for Musqueam band members. Fewer than a quarter have been built.

The old homes were demolished even though Holborn has yet to gain approval from the city for the redevelopment...



Gosh.

If it was only lemonade stands that these people can't run...

We might not be in such trouble.


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Funny thing about Big Rich's big plans for public housing....Back in the days when he was still running with Mr. Coleman, the CTF's man against transit mega-projects (who was, of course, for them before he was against them) Mr. Jordan Bateman used to argue with folks on various and sundry comment threads (back in the day the then Langley Township Councillor was a blogger too) about how Big Rich was going to transform everything for the better if we would just give him the chance...
The real kicker in Ms. Brahman's piece is the fact that Big Rich's original sell-off deal included no increase in actual public housing units despite the fact that the actual density of the planned private build up was something on the order of a seven fold increase...The City of Vancouver is actually trying to address that in its permitting process...Again, another epic fail for the Martyn Brown/Gordon Campbell doctrine of 'privatize everything!'


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mininster of everything?

Eleanor Gregory said...

I go by the former Little Mountain public housing site (mostly weeds and piles of dirt now) several times a week and always feel a lump in my throat about how decent affordable housing and a strong community were destroyed.

Anonymous said...

http://vaisbord.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Little-Mountain-Housing-wreck-web-size1.jpg

scotty on denman said...

I heard an acquaintance not usually prone to political commentary say the most unprintable thing about Rich (and getting more so).