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Four or five dozen tent campers had been occupying the lot, and their protest culminated on Aug. 2 when Mayor Gregor Robertson met with them, heard their demands and obligingly signed his name to the following statement scrawled on a leaf of easel board paper:

“We commit to 100% welfare/pension rate community-controlled social housing at 58 West Hastings, working with the community to develop a rezoning application to proceed to council by the end of June 2017.”

It didn’t look so much like the culmination of city policy as a capitulation. The mayor, as he has been known to do when it comes to the homeless, went all in. It was Robertson who in 2008 pledged — prematurely, rashly, stupidly, pick your adverb — to rid the city of street homelessness. Instead, the numbers have grown. So was the mayor’s signing off the result of months of carefully considered staff recommendations, or did he do so to burnish his public image on an issue that has made him look like a chump?

Some context: At the moment, there are 25,629 units of government-subsidized non-market housing in the city of Vancouver proper. That’s nine per cent of the city’s entire housing stock, a not insubstantial percentage.

To break that down, 15,250 0f those units are for people who live independently but have incomes too low to pay market rents. Another 4,599 are supportive housing units for people who need support for a range of conditions like cognitive impairment, addiction or physical disability. The remaining 5,780 units are co-op units with below-market rent.