If their party is re-elected next month, Mayor Gregor Robertson and some of his Vision Vancouver candidates promised Wednesday that all children 14 and under will get one round of free beginner swim lessons at city pools.
Though it will mean a loss of roughly $120,000 per year over the next council’s four-year term, Vision Coun. Raymond Louie explained those costs will eventually be recovered from children continuing to seek more lessons.
“We believe that we’re going to recover those monies easily over the subsequent lessons that will occur,” said Louie, noting the popularity of people renewing their OneCard pass to use community centres, pools and rinks.
With learn-to-swim packages averaging eight lessons that cost about $50 per child, Louie said children normally want to continue with lessons to become proficient in the water.
“With the first lessons, you introduce the child and, more importantly, the family into our community centre pools,” said Louie, noting about 200 kids per month participate in the city’s swimming lessons. “In the end, what happens is we’ve now encouraged kids to learn how to swim – it’s a safety issue, it’s a quality of life issue – and the parents and the child’s siblings will come to the community centres and use the facilities more often. It creates a more cohesive and better community, overall.”
Louie said he recognized parents have complained about swim lessons already being heavily booked. But, he said, Vision will “put effort into clearing those lines and putting in the resources necessary to make that happen.”
Free lessons was a plank Vision introduced Wednesday as part of its “affordability agenda.” Using the playground at Grandview Park on Commercial Drive as a backdrop, Vision promised to build more than 4,000 new rental housing units, increase the number of two and three bedroom apartments for families, ensure the city’s new “affordable housing agency” to use city land for housing and create 1,000 new childcare spaces.
Though the promises for more childcare spaces, using city land for housing and rental housing units are already contained the city’s capital plan and housing strategy, increasing the number of so-called family units from the present 25 per cent to 35 per cent is new.
That means any new condo development built in the city must have a minimum of 35 per cent of the units be two bedrooms or more. These units would likely be private which, depending on location and quality, could be expensive for a family to purchase.
“We know that these multi-family units are cheaper and much more affordable than buying a single-family home,” said Louie, noting the 35 per cent target is to increase the stock of multi-bedroom apartments. “We know that we’re losing children out of our city because there’s no space – not just because of affordability – there’s just no space.”
The NPA has yet to release its plan for affordable housing but that could come early next week. Asked to comment on Vision’s “affordability agenda”, NPA mayoral candidate Kirk LaPointe told reporters Wednesday that he hadn’t had a chance to review the plan.
“They appear to be largely a re-announcement and, in some cases, they don’t appear to be practical in terms of allocating certain quotas to particular types of housing,” he said at the end of a press conference where he promised to roll back parking meter limit times from 10 p.m. to 8 p.m. “But I want to be able to study them a little more carefully before being able to fully comment.”
LaPointe, however, did say the city needs an overall development plan.
“Both neighbourhoods and developers alike are confused by the ad hoc approach that this government has taken to development, particularly when it comes to some of these community amenities and how the spot rezoning is affecting their basic business plans and the neighbourhoods’ expectations about what’s going to be there.”
Asked about Vision's plan for free swim lessons, LaPointe said: "It would be great, if you could actually get into a swimming pool."
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