For swap: Prime penthouse spaces near Vancouver's Olympic Village in exchange for your promise to build some cheap units that you promise to rent out at reasonable rates.
That's what Vancouver appears to be prepared to offer developers with property in the city's Southeast False Creek neighbourhood, as the city's new council looks for ways to pay for its campaign promise to create affordable housing.
But that motion - to allow up to two floors of penthouse space on top of each private building around the Olympic Village neighbourhood, being put forward by Vision Councillor Raymond Louie - has some critics worried. They fear council is prepared to forgo park space or daycares - the kind of community benefit the city used to trade bonus space for - in exchange for rental housing.
"The city is giving a lot of density to build rental housing," said Non-Partisan Association Councillor Suzanne Anton. "But is that really a public benefit? And where will we get the parks for mothers to sit in with their babies or community centres for their children?"
The motion highlights an ongoing dilemma for Vancouver politicians and planners, who are perpetually short of money to provide community facilities for the growing city, while being enticed by offers from developers to provide what they need in return for being able to build bigger and higher.
Until recently, the city mainly traded density for parks, daycares, cultural centres, heritage preservation or social housing. Now, trades will also be available for developers who include some affordable rental units in their buildings - loosely defined as anything that they promise to maintain as a rental unit for at least 20 years, with rents starting out at $2 a square foot.
Mr. Louie said that the city is prepared to make that kind of trade because it serves two of council's main goals: affordable housing and a denser, therefore greener, city.
"Affordability is a high priority for us," he said.
But Ms. Anton wants to know why developers would be given extra space - a prime commodity in Vancouver worth hundreds of dollars a square foot - to create rental-housing units that are not really a benefit available to the whole public the way a park or community centre is.
"This council is creating a new form of benefit that is really a handout to the private developers."
And she wonders why the Vision council, which insisted in its previous term that the Olympic Village should be a low-rise and relatively low-density neighbourhood, is now turning around and allowing nearby private developers to build taller towers.
"The whole neighbourhood was squashed down and made smaller and the city lost money because of that," Ms. Anton said. "The city land could have been a very lucrative property. But it wasn't. Now they're inviting the private landowners to increase their density."
Besides those problems, the motion is also confusing. It sounds as though the city is prepared to offer density to developers who build greener buildings.
And Mr. Louie seems to back that up, when asked to explain.
"We may allow extra density to achieve some green goals, like having a net-zero building," he said, using the term for a building that produces no net greenhouse-gas emissions because of the energy and recycling it achieves on site.
But the city's planning director says that no developer will be offered extra space in order to build a greener building.
"It is not the city's practice to trade off density for green design," Brent Toderian said.
The motion, if approved, will turn Southeast False Creek into the latest downtown neighbourhood where residents will be paying for some of their local city services by living in much higher density.
Over the past couple of decades, city planners allowed developers to add a considerable amount of density into its Downtown South neighbourhood, the chunk of land between Yaletown and Burrard. That was in order to help pay for the preservation of heritage buildings in Gastown, or in exchange for benefits like the VanCity Theatre, the Contemporary Art Gallery and the few small parks in the area.
The result is a neighbourhood that has the highest number of residents per hectare of anywhere in the Lower Mainland, with the lowest amount of park space per person.
