Dear Editor:
Regarding: They don’t build them like they used to, Burnaby Now, Sept. 6.
The specious statement from our mayor, Derek Corrigan, that “we have not given bonus density in order to get market-rental housing; we’ve only given bonus density to get non-market rental housing” hides the real truth.
Who needs a bonus density when your property has just been rezoned from a three- storey walk-up to a 40-plus-storey tower? The value of that property has been dramatically increased, to no benefit of the residents of Burnaby. Is that not a “bonus density” to market housing?
To then go on and say, “Why should I take taxpayer’s money and....plead with a him (a developer) to build market housing” simply compounds the lie. The very fact the property has been rezoned, has, in effect, taken the benefit of that rezoning and given it to the developer, with little benefit to the taxpayer (and with, indeed, very little pleading).
A simple clause in the rezoning fixes it all: “This rezoning from three-storey walk-up requires the developer to develop, and maintain (for 60 years), the lower three floors as non-market rental.”
Let’s see how many developers walk away from the unbelievable opportunity and financial windfall of crushing a three-storey walk-up, and rebuilding it with a further 37-plus storeys of high value market properties on top of the rebuilt non-market housing.
Oh, and to add to the principled NDP justice of doing this, let’s give the evicted community the first right of refusal on reoccupying their rebuilt community.
Anything short of this is unfettered capitalism and greed, and after all, Burnaby city council is an NDP council, and it is 2017, not 1917.
Peter Fox, Burnaby
