Surely we all see the haphazard way officialdom blesses and rejects projects. A 20-storey tower on Fort and Blanshard, good to go. A highrise adjacent to VT gets lead down the path to failure.

We’ll recall, that developers have been trying to get something built on this property for 15 years.

We’ll recall, that developers have been trying to get something built on this property for 15 years.

This is what I'm saying. Perpetual housing crisis (that's why View Towers was built, lest we forget, because the housing crisis was raging back in the 1960s), and yet the prime lots all around View Towers have been stale for ages. The parking lot site has had at least three proposals just during the VV era.

Have you ever noticed, that during housing boom times, the cries over housing supply are the loudest, then evaporate when we hit a building lull?

It’s the war is peace thing.

Even if the View Tower is an eyesore, it still serves (served?) its purpose as an affordable rental site that doesn't need to be propped up by taxpayers. The spillover of addiction and homelessness into the streets is in part a result of people who would at least have a roof under their heads (ergo a semblance of home and stability) no longer having that option. Instead of someone paying their cheap landlords through market forces, now they can't do that anymore and taxpayers have to cover everything from social workers to officers to temporary hotels as a result of the myriad of problems caused by people already struggling with poverty and/or mental health not being able to afford any time of shelter on their own.

Maybe I'm getting a bit defensive here over the ill-reputation of certain buildings, but ultimately shelter is an expensive yet basic necessity and it's never a bad choice to let people build to meet that demand. If the current council were present during the times the VT, the Orchard House and other unsightly concrete high-rises were built, our parks would've long become favelas and we'd be giving Vancouver's DTES a run for its money.

All that said, it goes without saying the CoV proves itself to be an embarrassment once again and we're way past the time of the province doing something about pumping hundreds of millions into a region that refuses to let people build homes while pocketing everyone else's money.