Developer experiments with affordable condos near downtown Vancouver

No parking and no maintenance among the perks lost to make housing for couple working minimum wage

Francis Bula | Vancouver | The Globe and Mail | Monday July 27, 2010

No parking. No fancy finishes. No costly marketing program. No speculators. No one who isn’t willing to do some building maintenance.

That’s the condo experiment that one Vancouver developer is trying in an effort to build housing in the city priced low enough that a couple working minimum-wage jobs could afford it.

“Our objective was to continue the legacy we started at Woodward’s and, at the same time, we didn’t want to just bring a bunch of BMWs into the neighbourhood,” said developer Ian Gillespie. He submitted his application last week for the unusual project at 60 West Cordova…

The 108-unit project is a collaboration involving Vancity credit union, Habitat for Humanity and a Downtown Eastside housing group. Habitat will get four condos suitable for families in the building and will choose who gets them. Another eight units, to be managed by the PHS housing society, will go to local community workers.

The remaining 96 condos will go to buyers who will have to prove that they plan to live in the units and who agree to do some maintenance themselves instead of just paying standard condo-maintenance fees. According to the material submitted to the city, nearly three-quarters of the condos will sell for less than $300,000, and more than half will be affordable to people making between $29,000 and $36,000 a year. That’s the income of an individual earning $15-$19 an hour, or a couple in which each partner makes the $8-an-hour minimum wage.

Architect Gregory Henriquez said the idea of requiring owners to also occupy the condos as a way to keep prices down is something he adopted from his early days of living in the West End. Then, before the legislation that created individual condo ownership was brought in, the only way for someone to own an apartment was to own the whole building co-operatively with a group…

Read the full article at theglobeandmail.com.