My eyes are a little tired these days.
That’s what happens after you attempt to read a draft of the new $1-billion, 30-year community plan for the Downtown Eastside.
It’s 220 pages.
Add the staff report that accompanies the plan and we’re talking 320 pages of text, photos, graphs and easy-to-explain terms such as floor space ratio.
Not exactly a page-turner.
I confess I haven’t read it all but I’m getting there and I did attend a media briefing at city hall last week on the plan, which goes before city council March 12.
After the briefing, us media types got to ask Brian Jackson, the city’s head planner, questions about the plan. Didn’t get a chance to include his responses in my Feb. 28 web story, so here’s a bit of what he told us.
What do you say to the people concerned about gentrification?
“We have to provide the assurance that we are — through the plan — making sure that the people who want to continue to live in the Downtown Eastside have that opportunity. But it has to be in improved forms of housing. There is a lot of housing in the Downtown Eastside that is clearly not very habitable and we have to make those improvements. But at the same time, we have to allow for development opportunities to be able to leverage the private sector to build even more housing for the people who want to live there.”
What will East Hastings Street look like in the future?
“It won’t be a wall of buildings that are 12-storeys high. It will be a series of buildings which vary in their heights, have retail at the base to allow for the opportunities for future development along Hastings for retail and community services and also provide a mix of condos, rental housing and affordable rental for all the types of people who want to move into the Downtown Eastside."
What are developers saying about the plan?
“We have the people who are saying that we’re too conscious of the people who are living there and we’re not providing enough development opportunities. And that’s why I’m hoping the plan going before council represents that good old Canadian compromise of coming down the middle, recognizing the pressures we have on the left as well as on the right in terms of being able to deliver a truly achievable plan over the next 10 and 30 years.”
So what would you say to those owners in the Oppenheimer Park district worried about property values and limits on development in what many are calling a condo-free zone?
“If an owner of a property there wants to take advantage of the density bonuses being offered as part of the zoning bylaw for the area, they will have to build 60 per cent of the rental housing as affordable units and 40 per cent as market rental. We believe that the plan and the policies for that particular area still allow a developer to achieve a reasonable rate of development for their property.”
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