Open this photo in gallery Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart, second left, talks with Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer, left, as Faye Leung, front right, speaks with an attendee after an inauguration ceremony for the new mayor and council, in Vancouver, on Nov. 5, 2018. DARRYL DYCK

A three-decade-old vision of creating a socially mixed community on downtown Vancouver’s former industrial lands is finally being realized in a deal that returns some significant pieces of land intended for social housing to one of the city’s biggest developers.

Concord Pacific Developments Inc. will retain three of the six sites it has been reserving for social housing on former Expo lands, in an agreement reached with the city and the province as one of the last acts of the majority Vision Vancouver city council.

The city will still get three sites and provincial money – for the first time in almost 20 years – to build three higher-density projects on that land than was envisioned. This means there will be more units of social housing built than under the old deal where the city would get all six sites.

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Housing advocates and critics of Vision say it’s probably the best the city could get, under the circumstances.

“I think it’s good. We need to move forward with completing the neighbourhood,” said former councillor George Affleck, with the opposition Non-Partisan Association party. He was part of the private meeting of council that voted on the agreement.

And the CEO of the province’s non-profit housing association agreed.

“I think the city made a great deal, given the options it had on the table,” said Jill Atkey from the BC Non-Profit Housing Association.

How good an agreement it might be is unclear so far, because there is no information available yet on what compensation Concord Pacific will give to the city in exchange for the three sites it is keeping, nor what the value of all the sites is.

City manager Sadhu Johnston said the city and Concord agreed on a process for figuring out what the land is worth, but haven’t set a dollar figure yet.

He said the city agreed to accept only three sites because the three it didn’t get were difficult pieces of land that would have been expensive to build on.

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The city will get slightly more units – around 600 – than was envisioned for the six sites back in 1989, when Concord Pacific agreed to reserve space for social housing on its huge swathe of land on the perimeter of the downtown peninsula. That’s because the city will zone the land to allow for taller towers, which social-housing developers are now able to build.

“They’re going from six to three because they’ve actually become more efficient. They’ve shown they can build a non-market building that is higher than eight to 10 stories,” said Matt Meehan, a senior vice-president at Concord. “Concord supports this, it gets these three sites developed.”

However, both the number of units allowed for the Concord lands and the price of land has increased considerably since then.

The goal of having a mix of housing on the former industrial lands in Vancouver’s downtown was set in the 1980s, when then-mayor Gordon Campbell introduced a policy of requiring 20 per cent of all megaprojects be subsidized housing.

That worked out well in the early years, when the federal government still had a national housing program that provided money for new projects. Provincial governments also contributed a lot, since any money from Ottawa typically required matching funds from provinces.

Several social-housing projects – the Coal Harbour Housing Co-op near the Bayshore Hotel, and the Roundhouse Co-op and Quayside Housing on the north False Creek lands – were built before Canada ended its social-housing program in 1994.

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In all, five social-housing developments were built on Concord Pacific land, from among 12 available sites, before the federal money dried up.

B.C. continued to put money into social housing, but the majority of it went into other kinds of housing or programs.

The province bought Downtown Eastside hotels and built some towers for the city’s poorest and most troubled residents, as well as putting some money into seniors’ projects and rent subsidies.

That left nothing for the kind of subsidized housing that used to be the norm – buildings that had a mix of residents and incomes at different subsidy levels, aimed at helping people who were working but not earning enough to get decent housing in the Vancouver market.