The rental apartment at Broadway and MIRHPP looks just about finished! It’s a real beauty:
You can see a lovely detail at the tops: Raven statues!
This is a rental building with 165 homes enabled by the (sadly now defunct) MIRHPP policy: the Moderate Income Rental Housing Pilot Program. The basic idea was to grant bonus density in exchange for 20% of the floor area being devoted to below market rental housing. Sadly, the policy was so unsuccessful it couldn’t even get 20 applications, and less have actually been built. It was a good program, but clearly totally ineffective for a city with a housing shortage the size of Vancouver’s. Not even a drop in the bucket.
Still, I was happy to support this. I went to the open house for it back in February 2020–almost 6 years ago! One of the reasons I like going to open houses is to chat one on one with opponents, who sometimes let their guard down and say the quiet part out loud–I remember this guy well:
I live tweeted the public hearing:
It also made my list of the most important housing votes for that council, you can find some more of my thoughts about it and the successes and failures of MIRHPP here:
I was in the area recently and was thinking about this all, which inspired me to do a video reading out some of the comments from the opponents:
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