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Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson’s office released a statement over the holidays boasting that 1,800 new units of rental housing were approved in 2016, “far exceeding past years.”

“City Hall is doing everything it can to get more rental housing built and to market as quickly as possible,” the statement said.

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Some people in the business of building, buying or managing apartment buildings take this claim with a grain of salt (not that you can get any salt in Vancouver these days).

They point out that not all projects that are approved are built. And developers complain that it can take three years or more to build purpose-built rental housing, largely due to the city’s bureaucratic red tape.

David Goodman, a real estate agent who specializes in rental apartment building sales and development sites (and publishes the Goodman Report on the subject), disputed the city’s claim that 2016 was a banner year for rental housing. In fact, there were far more market rental apartment completions in the 1960s through the 1980s — peaking above 4,000 rental units in the 1970s, due in part to federal programs such as the Multiple Unit Residential Building (MURB) tax provision — than there are today. The MURB tax measure was eliminated in 1981.