Allen Garr
Van. Courier
That sound you may have heard Thursday morning was Sam Sullivan backing up on Bill Good’s radio show. He was debating Jim Green, who will be his main opponent in the mayor’s race if Sullivan first wins his battle for the NPA nomination with Christy Clark.
The topic was the Woodward’s project, the massive redevelopment of the derelict department store at Hastings and Abbott in the Downtown Eastside. At Tuesday’s council meeting, city staff presented a report asking councillors to remove the last political hurdle and to endorse the project in principle. There were 13 recommendations in all dealing with the design, the sale of the property to the private developers and the cost-sharing and benefits that would accrue to the city.
Sullivan voted against them all. He said he found the staff report “very upsetting.” It called the redevelopment “an expensive and risky undertaking” and said because of soaring construction costs, increasing one per cent a month, and the doubling of the social housing from 100 to 200 units, the city’s funding shortfall was $13.5 million. The overall cost of the project is about $280 million.
At one point Sullivan asked city staff whether a new and different city council following November’s election could make significant changes to the deal to “get us out of this mess.”
Green has pushed for years for the redevelopment of the building, which closed as a department store 22 years ago and accelerated the economic collapse of the whole area.
A number of private developers tried and failed to put together a project on the site that would be economically viable.
In its most recent incarnation, the city bought the building from the province about two and half years ago-very early on in COPE’s term governing the city. The deal was worked out by Green, Mayor Larry Campbell and Premier Gordon Campbell.
When the NPA was swept out of office, it left behind an intractable squat of homeless people and anti-poverty activists at Woodward’s demanding social housing in the building.
The building’s sale was seen as a boost for the 2010 Olympic bid because it potentially satisfied demands for more social housing as an Olympic spinoff. Now the development has come to symbolize what the left on council stands for. They may be fractured over RAV, support for the Olympics and slot machines. But on Woodward’s they are unflinchingly united.
Before I go further, I should point out my interest in the project. For the past three years I have been president of a non-profit society providing housing for people with severe physical disabilities. We have been negotiating with one of the developers and working with their architects to secure 36 units in the project to provide accessible housing. We are crunching numbers.
Young disabled people have a particular problem accessing post secondary education. We were attracted to the project because of the possibility of an SFU campus on the site, another a few blocks away and an accessible bus service to UBC.
Now back to the politics.
Green, his Vision Vancouver party and the folks in COPE would be tickled pink to run a campaign against Sullivan and the NPA on the single issue of the Woodward’s development. They see this as the equivalent of the Four Pillars drug policy and the promised safe injection site that swept Campbell and COPE into power three years ago.
Woodward’s is even more widely supported than the drug strategy because of its potential to revitalize a huge part of downtown. One of Green’s strategists described Sullivan’s vote Tuesday as “a gift.”
That’s why Sullivan is now frantically trying to back up. He’s telling anyone who will listen-including the developer-that if he becomes mayor, he won’t kill the project.
