Dear Editor:
Re: Mayor offers to meet with advocates, Burnaby NOW, Nov. 25.
So the mayor finally deigns to have a meeting with the housing activists at ACORN to discuss Metrotown Maywood demovictions. It will be a very short meeting unless he has more to discuss with them than the talking points he and Coun. McDonell gave reporter Jeremy Deutsch.
McDonell claims that Metrotown is about to become Burnaby’s “downtown.” So what does that make the forests of condo towers rising in Brentwood and Lougheed? He needs to get out and experience first-hand the traffic jams which make a mockery of BCA claims about “free” development density bonus payments funding public amenities.
For his part in this fiasco, Mayor Corrigan apparently continues to believe that other governments are not acting on this urgent crisis.
But more than $1 billion in cash and civic land was recently committed to affordable housing by the province, Ottawa and Vancouver. See the long list of allocations just made to assorted B.C. communities – Burnaby being slated to receive 202 units from this year’s funds.
Council apparently continues to believe that permits for new market rentals somehow equate to permits for new “affordable” rentals. This will not rehouse the tenants now in peril of homelessness in a “no-vacancy” Metro Vancouver housing after the latest demovictions.
Council wants us to think he has no jurisdiction over growth, zoning, community planning. Then who does? And what are taxpayers paying them to do?
We at the Burnaby First Coalition (BFC) – the alternative civic political party here in Burnaby – hereby acknowledge a few facts:
1. Permits for “market” rentals can only become permits for “affordable” housing if public funds and lands are used to help developers, landlords and tenants close the gap between market rents and “affordable” rent to lower- and modest-income families.
2. There is at least $35.8 million (20 per cent of all density bonuses) in a purpose-specific housing fund. And over 400 city-owned properties held for resale that taxpayers paid $102 million – worth far more in today’s market.
3. Viable neighbourhoods are not forests of supersize condo towers clustered around malls. Viable neighbourhoods make room for a range of housing forms, prices and ownership. And they make room for a range of employers, including light industry, not just the major retailers in malls.
4. Good community planning allows people to ‘live, work, and play’ in their neighbourhood and could reduces the traffic jams along Kingway and the other thoroughfares. And it will also contribute to ending the displacement of low- and middle-income families too.
It amazes and dismays many that people claiming to be New Democrats could support such policy –even in the name of padding their “development density bonus” kitty with purportedly free money intended for future public amenities.
Janice Beecroft, G. Bruce Friesen, Nick Kvenich, Charter Lau, Heather Leung, Helen Ward, Y.L. Wong, Burnaby First Coalition
