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When Vancouver city council approved a five-storey rental building late Tuesday, it marked the culmination of a years-long process that helped illustrate the wide chasm between different sides of the housing question.

Before council could vote on the proposed building on Grant Street in East Van, they heard from dozens of speakers over almost seven hours spread over two nights.

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Among those supporting the proposal, a segment that skewed younger and included many renters, the project represented only an incremental step toward addressing the city’s rental-housing shortage. The Grant Street project took three years and a series of design revisions to get to a contentious public hearing, for approval of what supporters called an innocuous five-storey apartment building in an area with an acute rental-housing shortage and well-served by transit.

Meanwhile, those in opposition tended to be longtime homeowners in the area, decrying the idea of their neighbourhood being “overwhelmed” by such a building or even “destroyed.”