The Tyee and Canada’s National Observer consistently produce independent journalism worth our attention. While browsing recent stories at The Tyee, one stood out. It’s an account of a billionaire family receiving a tax break for a long-vacant Vancouver property that once housed hundreds of low-income residents.

Today, Little Mountain is devoid of residents, despite years of promises that affordable housing would return.

The Tyee story is about more than a tax concession. It illustrates how politics in British Columbia has shifted over time.

Founded on principles of economic equality and public responsibility, the BC NDP now accommodates large private capital interests. Policies that once would have been challenged as favouring wealth and privilege are increasingly defended as pragmatic governance, leaving many traditional social-democratic ideals at the margins.

The result is an environment in which policies benefiting wealthy property owners coexist with a persistent shortage of affordable housing.

Vancouver Tenants Union member Nathan Crompton wrote in 2023 about the history of the Little Mountain property near Main Street and 33rd Avenue:

…Little Mountain was born from a working-class struggle in the 1940s and ‘50s that went against the odds, accomplishing what had been declared impossible and utopian: a public program to build social housing and a plan to begin prying Vancouver’s housing away from the imperatives of profitability, corporate greed, and private ownership.

The years immediately after the war in Vancouver saw the beginning of an unprecedented mobilization that forced planners, city councillors, and federal politicians to reluctantly break with the market-oriented housing policies of the previous decades.

…In 1970 Little Mountain became the first tenant-run social housing in Canada, operating within a framework of tenant self-management and user control. Despite its limitations, this model was unthinkable in private rental housing both then and (especially) now.

British Columbia could have embraced the style of Vienna. The Austrian city has a population larger than Vancouver, although Metro Vancouver has more residents than the Vienna region.

Leadership in 20th-century Vienna embraced public ownership. More than half of residents live in subsidized or city-owned public housing. CBC reported in 2016 that Vienna had eight times as much social housing as Vancouver. The result in 2026 is a city where housing is relatively affordable when compared with other major European centres.

Nathan Crompton explained why public housing at Little Mountain remains a low priority for politicians who hold the levers of power.

…Prominent social democrats had switched entirely to the other side of the housing conflict, symbolized in Jim Green’s public relations campaign on behalf of the property developer at Little Mountain.

…The social democrats who had overseen the decline of the left were now sharpening their knives on the corpse of Little Mountain.

…In late 2009, Vancouver’s “progressive” city council (under the leadership of Vision Vancouver and then-Mayor Gregor Robertson) granted the demolition permit for the 224 units of on-site social housing, collaborating with the provincial government’s sell-off of Little Mountain.

…To this day, the vast swathes of land that sit empty throughout Vancouver are a living testament to the social tragedy of neoliberalism, but also a testament to the failures of center-left brokerage politics in Vancouver and across BC. 

The Tyee updates the sad story of Little Mountain:

A patch of long-delayed development land in Vancouver has been temporarily turned into dog parks and a community garden. To some neighbours and critics, it looks less like a public amenity than a way to lower the tax bill on land that has sat unfinished for years.

The land is part of the Little Mountain redevelopment, a 15-acre site near Queen Elizabeth Park bought from the province in 2008 by Holborn Group, a company owned by a Malaysian billionaire family.

…The land was being taxed at a business rate. But in the fall of 2025, Holborn converted two portions of it to community gardens and dog parks, which are taxed at a lower rate.

And Holborn isn’t the only developer getting a tax break by shifting how the land is used. A recent City of Vancouver report says this year 10 properties were reclassified, a decision that will force other taxpayers to make up a tax shortfall of $913,300. Two Holborn properties accounted for roughly $315,000 of that total.

…For neighbours, the tax numbers add to frustration with a site where the developer made big housing promises that have remained unfulfilled for years.

…Holborn had paid only $35 million of the $334-million purchase price by 2021 and received an interest-free payment extension to 2026 as well as an $88-million low-interest loan to complete the social housing…