Vancouver unveils plan to build thousands of rental homes on city-owned land

The City of Vancouver is getting into the landlord crippled successful a bid to boost the availability of section rental housing.

Mayor Ken Sim announced the archetypal of 5 planned developments successful a aviator task to usage city-owned onshore to physique marketplace rental lodging nether the umbrella of the caller Vancouver Housing Development Office (VHDO).

The archetypal physique would beryllium a brace of 54- and 40-storey towers astatine Hornby and Pacific streets that would present an estimated 1,136 rental homes, ranging from studios done three-bedroom units.

“That’s implicit 1,000 homes for individuals, for families and for workers close successful the bosom of our metropolis adjacent to jobs, schools and amenities,” Sim said Thursday.

“Too galore of our people, young professionals, families and indispensable workers, are struggling to find a spot they tin spend to telephone location successful Vancouver.”

Once built, the apartments would beryllium disposable astatine marketplace rates for radical with a household income betwixt $90,000 and $190,000, according to the city. Tenants volition beryllium means tested.

Sim said on with producing caller rental housing, the inaugural volition besides present a semipermanent root of non-tax gross for the city.

Following the Hornby and Pacific project, the metropolis aims to make purpose-built rentals astatine 4 different sites: Granville and Pacific, Main and Terminal, Marpole and 2400 Kingsway.

“We would beryllium processing these projects with partners and we would beryllium moving them arsenic marketplace rental buildings with a spot absorption limb and they would tally conscionable similar immoderate marketplace rental improvement successful the metropolis of Vancouver,” said VHDO’s marketplace rental lodging manager Brad Foster.

“As acold arsenic we are alert we are the lone metropolis that’s trying to bash this from a marketplace rental constituent of view.”

The projects are portion of the city’s Housing Vancouver strategy, which aims to physique 84,000 caller homes implicit a decade.

The City said the projects are successful the aboriginal stages, truthful it could not supply an estimation connected archetypal costs to get the programme running. However, unit estimation that erstwhile the developments are complete, they could make billions of dollars successful revenue.

Each improvement volition request to spell done a implicit rezoning process followed by nationalist consultation earlier shovels tin deed the ground.

The City hopes to taxable the archetypal task for rezoning this spring.