Dan Fumano: Vancouver may reduce the requirement for social housing in "the heart of the low-income community" of the DTES from 60 to 20 per cent.

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The City of Vancouver is seeking public feedback on a plan to transform the Downtown Eastside by boosting private-sector development and nearly tripling maximum building heights to enable 32-storey towers.

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By allowing the private sector to build more market homes and less social housing in each project, city hall hopes to bring in a mix of incomes and people to the neighbourhood, which is home to a vibrant, tight-knit community but is also the epicentre of some of B.C.’s most intractable social problems.

But the proposal will likely fuel fears of displacement of low-income people from a neighbourhood many see as one of the last refuges in an increasingly unaffordable city.

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“We’re trying to strike a balance,” said Dan Garrison, Vancouver’s director of housing policy and regulation.

City planners want to ensure it’s financially viable for private landowners to add more market — and more new social housing — while also redeveloping existing single-room occupancy hotel rooms into new self-contained units.

But, Garrison said, they don’t want to see land values in the area escalate significantly.

“There’s no point in making changes that will not generate viable development options,” Garrison said. “On the other hand, you do have to be careful about the extent to which you allow those kinds of options because of the concerns about land value and speculation in this area.”

The policy changes, which are set to be released for public consultation on Wednesday, would update the

approved in 2014 by the Vision-majority city council of the day. That plan aimed to build........

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