Vancouver’s mayor says an experimental rental-incentive program that led this week to one of the city’s most controversial public hearings – and a razor-thin approval for a 28-storey rental tower – should be made permanent because council and the public have demonstrated steady support for the idea.

“This is showing that this should be a permanent fixture now. [What we’ve approved so far] shows they can fit into all neighbourhoods,” Mayor Kennedy Stewart said Wednesday, the day after the decision. It is the ninth project approved under the pilot program and, said the mayor, the one that showed where the limits of council’s willingness to approve were.

The mayor made his optimistic assessment in spite of several turbulent weeks and a vote that came close to failing for the project on Broadway near Granville, which will be one of the stations for a new subway line that is just starting construction.

The decision has added even more fuel to fierce arguments about whether the new building will set off a brush fire of gentrification or save low-cost apartments in the area.

The project, proposed by a long-time local development family, the Pappajohns, is one of 20 buildings that are part of a pilot project that the previous Vision Vancouver council created as it looked for ways to produce at least some apartments guaranteed to have below-market rental rates.

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