Gil Kelley Speaks

An interview with Gil Kelley by Naoibh O’Connor in the Vancouver Courier.

Thanks to Dan Toulgoet for the photo

Q:  Obviously affordability is one of the key issues facing Vancouver whether you want to rent or buy. How will you approach it? Some people criticize the city for protecting single-family neighbourhoods too much to the detriment of people who want to move into the city, while other long-time residents feel their neighbourhoods are being destroyed and don’t look like they used to. How do you bridge that gap or deal with that issue?
A:  I guess I would say it’s not an either or choice and I would resist that framing of it. There is room for gentle infill and change within lower density neighbourhoods, but it doesn’t mean radical change. We’ve got a lot of capacity yet to be tapped in the corridors and station areas and even in the core city, so I want to resist that kind of framing. That said, there’s probably a generational shift coming where some of those single-family homes will be re-occupied by families, instead of older adults, where there might be a desire to add a laneway, cottage or accessory unit to help with the mortgage. That kind of gentle infill, those numbers actually add up over a broad landscape, so I’m not certain yet that we need to go in and wholly upzone single-family neighbourhoods. Maybe widening the corridors a little bit is one thing, but I need to look more closely and get a little bit smarter about the lay of the land here before I can answer your question definitively.