On the very day Vancouver city council met last week to consider staff’s voluminous and complex update on its affordable housing strategy, an unexpected bomb was dropped. It managed to blow a staff report, thick enough to give most people a hernia, right off the front page of the local daily newspaper.
That bomb came in the form of an early morning Kettle Boffo Project Team update. After seven years, plans for 30 units of affordable housing and a new drop-in centre at Venables and Commercial Drive, all to assist people with mental health concerns, was dead. And to hear them tell it, the city was to blame.
Kettle Society executive director Nancy Keough said the timing of their announcement, coming as it did on a day set aside to display the city’s determination to address Vancouver’s housing crisis, was “coincidental.” City manager Sadhu Johnston, who stepped up during a news conference once the questions abruptly shifted from city’s affordability solutions to the Kettle announcement, later told me, “It didn’t feel like that to us.”
The Kettle and Boffo Properties called their partnership “Kettle Boffo family.” In addition to the 30 housing units and the drop-in centre, Boffo would build a market-priced condo tower at Venables and Commercial Drive and take the profit from that.
Kettle actually had originally applied for government money for its project. Its application was made at the same time the province was investing in buying up 14 run-down Vancouver SRO hotels, fixing them up and turning them over to not-for-profits to run. Kettle, actually, was given one which it now operates. But when it came to the request for money for those 30 units of housing and the drop-in centre, the cupboard was bare.
And, by the way, it was actually a city staffer who suggested Kettle get together with Boffo.
But in the end, and we have to assume it was the end, the project’s collapse was all about the money — the CAC, or Community Amenity Contribution, to be exact.
CACs are applied only to developments where a rezoning is required. And the money goes to everything from childcare spaces to libraries to fire trucks and community centres.
As far as the “Boffo Kettle family” development, Boffo was given a couple of breaks. While the community plan for the area allowed for developments of up to five storeys, council approved a variance that would allow Boffo to build a condo tower 12 storeys high.
Then there was the matter of the city selling a piece of land to Boffo without putting it up for public bidding — another benefit.
Conventionally, the amount the city expects to extract from the developer as part of the deal once the plan and the rezoning are approved is equal to 75 per cent of the profit the developer anticipates. And that is where things got stuck. One other thing: community amenities are held in the name of the city.
Daniel Boffo said his CAC should be equal to the cost of the Kettle’s new drop-in centre and the 30 units of housing. And he and Kettle wanted those amenities held in the name of the Kettle Society. It was non-negotiable.
Obviously, the city was unprepared to accept either of those terms.
To complicate matters further, Boffo also refused to submit his final plans and an application for re-zoning so that the city’s planning department could actually figure out his costs and probable profit.
The city’s very rough estimate came out to somewhere between $6 million and $16 million additional to satisfy the CAC. But, remember, that was without final plans being submitted or the re-zoning being approved.
In a letter the city manager sent to Boffo on Dec. 18, 2017, Johnston outlines the benefits Boffo and Kettle had been granted. And he makes one more pitch. If Boffo doesn’t like the estimate on the CAC, he can recommend another company on which both Boffo and the city agree. No deal on that either.
At the news conference and since then, the city has repeated its pledge not to leave the Kettle Society hanging. Johnston said this week the city land is still available to help the Kettle reach its goal for more housing and a new drop-in centre on that site.
And it is a commitment worth holding him to.
