Here’s Vancouver’s proposed Social Housing Initiative map. Purple areas would allow 15-20-storey social housing buildings. Yellow-orange areas indicate six storeys. The Dunbar area has plenty of both.
By Carol Volkart
Information sessions are now underway on the city’s plan to spread 15-20-storey social housing towers across Vancouver, including in Dunbar.
In our area, those towers could be built on two blocks on both sides of Dunbar Street, from Wallace to Blenheim, with no rezoning or public hearings required.
Under the same Social Housing Initiative, the city is also proposing six-storey social housing in its new “village” areas. Here, that would begin at Blenheim and stretch east as far as Larch and Elm.
The city is holding several information sessions (listed below) and a survey, but the closest for Dunbar residents will be at the Kerrisdale Community Centre, 5851 West Boulevard, from 5 to 7 p.m. on June 24.
The Social Housing Initiative has been controversial since the idea was first proposed by then-councillor-now-NDP-MLA Christine Boyle. She argued that social housing should be built in every neighbourhood of the city, and that allowing staff to approve developments without rezonings and public hearings would reduce costs and save time to make that happen. The first proposal was for 12 storeys; later it grew to 18, and then 20.
Critics have argued that while social housing is a good thing, the way the city is planning to go about it is not.
A key problem, as local architect and civic commentator Brian Palmquist has written, is that only 30 percent of these social housing units have to be affordable for lower-income renters. That means 70 percent can be as expensive as rentals anywhere.
The city’s site explains that new social housing projects, which must be owned by non-profits, co-ops, or government, “are almost always mixed-income and include a portion of higher, near-market rents to help with project viability.” Then as the project’s mortgage is paid down, rents become more affordable, “providing affordable housing options for the life of the building.”
But it still means that 20-storey buildings with high rents will be allowed in many areas without the public having a say.
Palmquist wrote in a column last fall that while he’s not opposed to social or rental housing, having designed lots of it during his career, “I am personally opposed to the imposition of any form of housing in the midst of most of the city’s 22 existing neighbourhoods with no opportunity for citizen input. That’s what’s at stake here.”
Veteran planners Michael Geller and Lance Berelowitz added their criticism this week, telling Vancouver is Awesome that it isn’t a good idea to plunk down 20-storey towers in what have been largely single-family areas.
Both said they’re not opposed to social housing, and agree it should be built across Vancouver, but not at the scale the city proposes. Buildings should be shorter and more attention should be paid to urban design, they told reporter Mike Howell.
“The juxtapositioning of a 15-to-20-storey building on a street lined with two and three-storey buildings — that’s my concern,” said Geller, a retired developer, now a development consultant, who managed social housing for CMHC in the 1970s.
The towers would be fine on Broadway, he told Howell, but when it comes to largely single-family neighbourhoods, “to put a tower on these streets, from an urban design and planning perspective, is literally preposterous.”
Berelowitz, the founding principal of Urban Forum Associates, former chair of the city’s planning commission and who served on Vancouver’s urban design panel, said the new policy, added to the already tower-filled Broadway Plan, will “radically” transform the urban form of Vancouver.
“What worries me is that this is just going to happen without any real thoughtful and nuanced conversation around other forms of housing and scale of development that have served Vancouver very well in the past.”
Former longtime Dunbar resident Bill Rapanos, a planner in Burnaby before he retired and moved to Victoria, said in an email that he has a problem understanding why the city is “throwing out years of orderly plans that have guided the growth of Vancouver since the time of the Bartholomew Plan. If you are going to allow high-density six and 20-storey residential buildings virtually anywhere in the city with no public hearing, I don’t see why a costly city planning department is needed. Just give the developers a building permit and get an engineer to stamp the drawings.”
Social housing doesn’t have to be cheap and nasty, he said, and he’s not impressed with how it’s being done in Vancouver.
“Most of the new social housing buildings are simple blocks, have very little architectural design and seem patterned after the postwar slab buildings that blighted European cities after the war. They provide housing, but have poor livability with few if any balconies, no ground space and no roof decks or common spaces for the residents.”
He said that as someone who worked on social housing as a planner for over 25 years and volunteered on a social housing board, “I very strongly agree with the need to build more affordable housing, but I cannot agree to the shotgun approach of allowing high density housing anywhere instead of in an orderly growth pattern and near services.
“This plan will not help.”
Social housing is a complicated issue in Vancouver. As the city’s site explains, it includes co-op housing, social housing and supportive housing. The latter category can be contentious, as a now-withdrawn housing project at 8th and Arbutus proved.
Pitched as a project for those at risk of homelessness, with on-site supports including health-care, it drew community concerns about safety because of its proximity to schools, daycares and a park. The years’-long battle included a lawsuit that eventually led to the city rescinding the plan, with Mayor Ken Sim later admitting it hadn’t been a great idea. “The number of individuals with substantive mental health and addictions issues in one location would have been a significant concern due to the site’s proximity to an elementary school and women’s recovery centre.”
The Social Housing Initiative went through an earlier round of public engagement in September-October of 2024, and is back for an “engagement update, review and revisions” this month and next. A staff report to council is expected this fall.
Here are the sessions as listed on the city’s website:
- In-person information session on Thursday, June 19, 2025; 5:00-7:00 pm at Champlain Heights Community Centre (3350 Maquinna Drive)(External link) – Interpretation available in Mandarin
- In-person information session on Tuesday, June 24, 2025; 5:00-7:00 pm at Kerrisdale Community Centre (5851 West Boulevard)(External link) – Interpretation available in Mandarin
- Virtual information session on Wednesday, June 25, 2025; 6:00-7:30 pm (register on Eventbrite(External link)) – Available in English only
- In-person information session on Thursday, June 26, 2025; 5:00-7:00 pm at Trout Lake Community Centre (3360 Victoria Drive)(External link) – Interpretation available in Mandarin
Take the online survey until Tuesday, July 8.
Where can we access the map above so we can blow it up to read the printing on it?
Go to pages 17 and 18 of the city’s updated zoning map at https://syc.vancouver.ca/projects/social-housing/vancouver-social-housing-initiative-updated-boards.pdf