On the Mike Smyth show to talk about the “super tall” proposal downtown

There’s a proposal for a 79 storey building downtown. It’s a mix of condos, rentals, hotel, and commercial space and is part of a 4-tower project across two sites, including a 38-storey social housing apartment that would transferred to the City.

I was on the Mike Smyth show today to talk about it. Link here, audio embedded below:

I don’t really care about this one proposal, but to me the opposition about it is a typical example of why we’re in a housing crisis. If we can’t build a tall building at Georgia and Seymour, in the most urban part of the country west of Toronto…where can we build anything?

This proposal is for a 79 storey tall tower. They’re already building an 80 storey one in Burnaby! Surrey has a multiple 60+ storey tall towers now! It’s perverse that we’re building that tall in the surbubs while it’s a battle to get anything at all built in the urban core. That’s not how cities organically develop–they develop from the core out. The fact that we’re stifling development in the core and pushing it out to the suburbs is a big part of why we’re in a housing crisis.