Lawn signs opposing a 12-storey tower at Commercial Drive and Venables have been sprouting up like mushrooms around the Drive.

But as quickly as they go up, somebody’s been taking them down.

“We lost another four this morning,” said Tom Durrie of the No Tower at Venables and Commercial coalition. “There were at least 15 before that.”

The No Tower forces have distributed 96 lawn signs and collected 1,777 signatures from residents opposed to the tower.

“Our feeling is that a large tower on this corner is just totally out of character and out of place with the neighbourhood,” said Durrie.

“We have a table at Grandview Park on Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., and we’re averaging 20 signatures an hour there. We have a scale model of the proposed development, and people are shocked.”

But the tower does have its supporters, because it’s a mixed-use project with a sizable social housing component.

No proposal has been submitted to the city yet, but developer Daniel Boffo says the plan is for 150-200 market units and 30 social housing units run by the Kettle Friendship Society, which works with people with mental illness.

The cost would be $95 million, and the market units would pay for the social housing units, as part of the city’s community amenity contribution program.

The Kettle has been on the Drive for four decades, and operates a drop-in centre on part of the development site. Executive director Nancy Keough said the Kettle serves between 120 and 150 people per day.

“Our building is really small and overcrowded, and needs a lot of work,” Keough explains. “So we were looking at ways that we could come up with something.”

The Kettle has been talking to the city for several years about redeveloping the site for social housing. In 2011 they started working on a mixed-use project with Boffo, which bought the buildings on either side of the Kettle.

In 2013, the Kettle and Boffo presented the city with their own 600-name petition “to stress the urgency of the project.” The city’s Emerging Directions plan for the Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood included a 14-storey tower on the Kettle site.

But Grandview-Woodland residents rejected the Emerging Directions plan, and put together a new plan through a Citizens Assembly.

The new plan called for the city to retain the Drive for four-storey buildings, although a dissenting group in the Citizens Assembly supported a tower at the Kettle site.

The proposed development would occupy a triangle of land between Venables and Adanac at Commercial. It would rise in tiers from five to 12 storeys.

“We’re trying to avoid being a Yaletown podium type project being plopped into Commercial Drive,” said Boffo.

“We’ve been in the neighbourhood a long time, as has the Kettle. We want to be proud of the homes that we bring, and the building that we bring, and we’re trying to make sure that we follow good urban design rationales.

“(We would) keep the ground space open, and put more of the density up above, where it’s less noticed.”

Along with the 30 social housing units, the Kettle would get 12,000 sq. ft for a drop-in centre, up from the current 7,500 sq. ft. There would also be 16,000 sq. ft of retail.