“We know what happens when we put poor people in a tower.  It just increases ghettoization and violence.  It increases all the bad things in society”

Which vision fits Broadway and Fraser Best?

Better Vision of Housing

50-unit mixed social housing and Neighbourhood based shopping

Vs

Proposed Development

The proposed 11 story building housing 103 core-need singles with limited support services

The proposed building is four times taller than anything around it, is not in keeping with the Mount Pleasant heritage aesthetic, and we fear its conspicuous nature will only serve to further stigmatize its residents. It also does not align with the results of the Mount Pleasant Vision Planning process.

Our Mission

"We will use evidence and a unified voice to ensure that the supportive housing project at Fraser and Broadway is of a size, scale and resident mix that is a good fit with the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood and is reflective of what current social science research tells us about how best to plan, design and build sustainable supportive housing."

There are many problems with the City and The Native Housing Society’s (the Proponent) plan for a proposed Single Room Occupancy supportive housing complex at the corner of Fraser and Broadway (i.e., the ‘Project’). It can be built better to meet the needs of both its proposed tenants and the neighbourhood. It currently meets neither.

Our Concerns include:
  • The proposed Project is too large in both height and number of dwellings. The size of the proposed building is inconsistent with the Mount Pleasant Community Rezoning Policy and the Mount Pleasant Community Planning Program It is many times taller than any building around it and will remain so because of height restrictions in the proposed Mount Pleasant Community Plan.
  • Three of the 5 non-downtown core supportive housing buildings are located in Mount Pleasant for a total of 379 supportive housing units, or 78% of all non-downtown core units. 
  • The Project has been marketed as housing homeless in the community, yet only 15% of over 1,000 comments in the Mount Pleasant Community Action Agenda indicated homelessness as a social issue for the neighbourhood
  • The tenants will mostly have addiction or mental health issues, or both with no support or treatment facilities included in the Project and bare-bones 24-hour support services consisting of only two staff members, one of whom may have largely janitorial and maintenance duties.
  • Empirical evidence suggests that large-scale supportive housing developments are associated with an increased crime rate , and that even smaller-scale supportive housing developments may damage property values if they are poorly sited, in a highly visible location where they can be easily stigmatized.
  • The only academic to thus far publicly weigh-in on the appropriateness of high density towers for homeless people in Vancouver has said that the “planned developments in Vancouver are well above a threshold where neighbourhood harm is likely to occur”
  • The proposed mix of tenants with mental health and addiction issues AND youth is a highly questionable demographic mix, particularly for the youth who are already ‘At Risk’.
  • The proposed project includes the ‘potential’ for 25 market rate rental units, but the City’s Recommendation is to eliminate this housing component because of budget constraints.  A mixture of market and non-market housing is critical to a supportive housing project’s long-term sustainability.  We want the city to guarantee market rental units in the proposed building.
  • The proposed commercial units along Broadway are market-rate only with no guarantee of providing commercial space that benefits the Neighbourhood.  This is because the city must prove a ‘return on investment’ to taxpayers.  Its very likely that these commercial properties will lie vacant or be rented to McDonalds, cash stores, more social service providers and dollar stores.  Do you want that?
  • The City's rezoning process does not build in meaningful consultation with the residents of neighbourhoods affected by proposed supportive housing developments. City staff have indicated to our members that this project is "a done deal" - before a public hearing has even been scheduled. To date none of our requests have been incorporated into the proposed building.
  • The city's urban design panel of architects had several serious concerns about the look and function of this residence and only supported the proposal because it was for social housing. In other words, this project is substandard housing from the start, but is satisfactory for the city's most vulnerable citizens. Such an attitude is disrespectful to the prospective tenants, the professionals who are supposed to care for them, and our neighbourhood that is trying to support them all.
  • Vancouver has many examples of long-term successful social housing projects; all of them are low-rise mixtures of less than 60 market and subsidized suites (look at False Creek and Granville Island) and none of them look like this tower. We want the City to continue using a proven model of lower density mixed-use social housing.