“If there’s a silver lining to the COVID crisis and the economic crisis, it’s that it has revealed the true weaknesses, the broken parts of our urban systems,” Kelley told council Wednesday. “We need to think about how we want to remake some of the basic underlying parts of the city’s fabric, and that includes normalizing a healthy housing market which has not been normal or healthy for the better part of the last decade.
The city will need to engage private and community housing sector partners to support market and non-market developments, and work with government partners to increase their affordability, Kelley and Garrison said. It will have to update policies to allow more non-profit and co-op housing, as well as market and below-market rental.
He said the pandemic has shown that private SROs aren’t an acceptable part of a sustainable housing system, and so the city has been talking with partners in recent weeks about acquiring and rapidly converting them into self-contained social housing. “This is going to be a fundamental part of moving forward into the new future, rather than trying to go back to the way things were, because we need to remember that the way things were wasn’t working for a lot of people,” Garrison said.
While this sounds ok at first read, is acknowledging the failure of YVR housing system & trying to make the current system dance a huge step? Or is it akin to saying 'lets put mag wheels on a Smart ForTwo to show we're really serious about performance'?