Housing affordability, transit, revitalising the town centre and creating a better arts and culture strategy will be some of the key issues Mary-Ann Booth will be working on if she is elected to be the Mayor of West Vancouver. Booth said she is seriously considering to run for Mayor, although she has yet to make an official announcement.
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“There are some serious challenges facing the community, and I think I bring leadership skills that can move us forward and meet community needs in a different way,” she says. Before being elected to the West Vancouver council in 2011, Booth served as a school board trustee and the chair.
A business lawyer since 1987, Booth has been a provincial crown prosecutor and a lecturer at UBC Sauder School of Business. Housing affordability and housing diversity are two key issues she would like to tackle if elected as the West Vancouver mayor.
Booth says she would like to direct district policy for the missing middle, the townhomes, the duplexes and ground-oriented housing that West Vancouver lacks. Booth said the district has lost 45 per cent of the 25-39 year olds, a key segment of population which is needed to regenerate the community and keep it from becoming a ghost town.
“We don’t have affordable housing or the right kind of housing. The young families or young people can’t afford to move, and people that move out of their single-family houses don’t have new suitable housing. Then we have 1700 empty homes, almost 10 per cent of our housing is empty because of off-shore and non-resident buyers,” she says.
Municipalities have one tool she has exercised as a councillor and will do so again as a mayor: Increasing supply. But even that is not enough, she says, since market housing often is out of reach for a lot of people who want to move into West Vancouver.
Part of the problem is the district’s OCP, she says, which doesn’t accommodate the housing middle, but that would change as the council begins an OCP review. Booth says she was instrumental in negotiating a ‘local first’ provision at a Horseshoe Bay development, which took the speculative buyer out for 90 days.
But because of lack of supply, the units still sold at a higher rate than expected. She thinks an antidote to the market economics is asking for rental components in developments that the district approves. For example, she is eager to support the development on district-owned land on 22nd and Gordon Street that will provide a mix of rental and equity condos.
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“We need market rental geared to people’s income and we are going to be providing rental and equity condos on this site but both of them would be regulated so non-market rental and may be some capped equity along the same line as the Whistler Housing Authority,” she says.
She will also support non-market rentals in three upcoming applications under the Marine Drive plan. She says she would lobby with the province to allow the district to charge different property tax rates to penalise absentee landlords in West Vancouver.
“We met with the minister at UBCM but I think you have to be very tenacious and keep going back and back so we have a policy that would allow us to differentiate between owner-occupied and ones that are empty and charge different property tax rates,” she said.
On transportation, Booth says she is supportive of the ambitious plan put forward by MLA Bowinn Ma while bringing all stakeholders on the same page to improve the east-west connections. Booth has also talked to the Translink CEO about the possibility of a gondola pod system.
“One Idea I have is called sky tram, and it’s a gondola pod system and it’s developed by NASA and is being tested in Israel. It’s a pod system. You are literally in pods and you can get off whenever you want and it’s a fraction to build than the sky train,” she says.
Booth will also like to champion the revitalisation of the Ambleside Town Centre. The main corridor, she says, should be vibrant with arts and culture and better dining opportunities. West Vancouver needs to evolve from a bedroom community to a place that offers all of the services that you need, she says.
Right now, the town centre has declined and the district needs to boost it and make it vibrant. “In 1912, the founders didn’t say we want to keep this exactly the way it is. They built ski hills. They had dance halls, and that is our history. You can’t have change without change, and we need to adapt to change to keep young people and young families, which we are losing,” she says.
By Gagandeep Ghuman
Just not in Booth’s neighbourhood, right? She endorses major high-rise developments in Dundarave and Ambleside but I doubt she would like them being built around her home and neighbourhood. She’s your typical hypocrite.