Amendment – Social Housing 1405 Main Street
Motion 8 · Public Hearing, February 3, 2026
Summary
- Proposed requiring 20% social housing units within the 1405 Main Street development.
- Mover argued city-owned land near prime transit is exactly where social housing belongs, and that future council direction on revenue use cannot be guaranteed.
- Opposition held that any affordability requirement at this scale would make the project financially unviable without substantial public equity injection not currently available.
- Councillor Maloney abstained; same voting split as Motion 7.
Vote
Abstained 1
Transcript
7 segments
Thank you for your question, Councillor. I'm going to defer this to my colleague in engineering. Are they online? Okay.
Yes, thank you for the question. Kaveh Imani with Development Major Projects and Engineering. Staff acknowledge the concerns heard today. The rezoning conditions have been established to help with local improvements to address safety for all road users. This includes upgrades to street lighting, construction of new sidewalks and lane crossings. The proposal also means you utilize the existing lane for vehicle access and egress. Also, the northeast corner of Maple and 49th has a corner bulge, which reduces pedestrian travel and reduces the travel distance for the residents and students there that visit the school. Based on the transportation review, the proposal is not considered to adversely affect the peak traffic demand, as families in these homes will likely just walk to school.
Could I ask a clarifying question? Just in follow-up to that is we've had some partnerships with the VSB around slow streets with schools. Would this be eligible? Is there an opportunity to explore that?
Thanks for the question. Sorry, Kaveh, I'll just jump in quick, but if you'd like to add as well. So in terms of VSB, we can certainly take that back and further understand and explore what they're looking at. That typically wouldn't be triggered by a site-specific individual rezoning application like this, but I'll pass it to Kaveh as well for any supplemental.
Thanks, then, Polar. Nothing further to add.
Okay. And then... I had another question, but I lost my train of thought, so I'll go back. I see Councillor Orr is on the queue, so I'll let him go first. Thanks.
Councillor Orr? Yeah, thanks. So, yeah, a question through the chair to the staff. I mean, we've heard some pretty strong language here. Monstrous, absolute chaos, irreparable harm to the community, things like that. How did we sort of get here? I mean, I know we sent out... 1,244 notices. We received 33, both positive and negative. Is there something better we can do to sort of communicate around, you know, what we heard there, you know, around we're going to be looking at, you know, safety upgrades, street lighting, new sidewalks, lane crossing, parking, regulatory signage. You know, is there something more we can do to sort of communicate? you know, what we're doing to listen because the petition, you know, the petition says that consultation has been minimal and, you know, and feels performative. I just wonder, you know, it might be a difficult question to ask or to answer, but, you know, is there anything we could do to communicate that we are listening?
Thanks for the question, Councillor.
So certainly as part of rezoning applications, there's certainly some site-specific interest that is generated from projects, and we certainly have the public consultation process in an effort to provide information on the project itself. We have the Shape Your City platform, our Q&A period that often is enabled through that. But I think a lot of the bigger concerns that we're hearing from the public are more system changes and improvements, whether it's school site capacity or infrastructure capacity. We do have a lot of those functions that we perform through area planning work whether it's through the villages work whether it's through our capital planning improvement processes to understand where those capacity constraints are through our public benefit strategies to make sure that we've got the cultural amenity and public use spaces to ensure that we can meet those requirements what I think we're finding from this particular project on a site specific is this project won't detrimentally or have an adverse effect to the problems that already exist it's not necessarily growing those problems and it's still incumbent upon the city to find systems and means to address those more broadly as well. So what I think we're finding from these proposals is this project is consistent with those policies to encourage this kind of transition form of housing in terms of heights and densities through the SRP policy to rise and meet the occasion of providing sufficient housing options for the residents of Vancouver, which align generally as well with our Housing Vancouver strategy and Vancouver plan, for example.