Pete Fry

With the naming of the new elementary school in North East False Creek, it seems the debate is still raging and petitions are being circulated after the interim appointed Vancouver School Board decided to go with Crosstown rather than honouring Chinese Vancouver pioneer Won Alexander Cumyow Read More

CN just informed that as of yesterday, they’ve increased traffic on the (Raymur) Burred Inlet Line from zero to six scheduled trains a day.

This means disruption of at grade crossings, more transportation of dangerous good through our community, and a lot more noise…

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2016, what a stinker of a year —right?

Trump, Brexit, Aleppo, record-breaking climate change and biodiversity depletion, geopolitical uncertainty and upheaval, bigotry and intolerance, fake news, an unstable and untenable local housing situation, growing economic disparity, close to 1,000 dead in the overdose crisis gripping our province, the pipeline, Site C — the list goes on!

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Shipping 900,000 barrels a day of tar thinned with solvent through the Salish Sea is NOT the kind of Real Change Canadians voted for.

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Seattle’s is a model similar to Portland’s Dignity Village, which I visited in 2014 and advocated for as a possible solution here. Volunteer labour and faith based groups played a huge role in helping to build these temporary intentional communities, and the results were profound: once they had temporary housing, the average resident was able to find stable permanent housing within 6 months.

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in Greater Vancouver, transit oriented development is not seen as a driver of building of affordable housing, in fact it’s been quite the opposite: In Burnaby we are seeing wholesale demovictions of communities with affordable housing bulldozed to make room for new less affordable towers, In Vancouver, where T.O.D has been employed (Marine Drive and Oakridge) proposed developments offer an abysmal portion of affordable housing, but tremendous condo sales and presales.

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As expected, the City of Vancouver’s 1.8 billion dollar capital and operating budget for 2017 passed yesterday. Also, as (cynically) expected, the people of Vancouver were distracted by a last-minute emergency property tax increase of 0.5% to deal with the ongoing fentanyl crisis.

To be clear, the necessary additional funding for first responders isn’t optional. Emergency services are precisely what we pay taxes for and as we’ve been hearing for months now, our first responders —in particular our firefighters— need more resources to do the life saving work we expect of them.

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Has Vancouver lost its way? Certainly, life isn’t necessarily getting better for many of us here: more homelssness, less affordability, more stress — if anything, the race toward “world class city” and other superlatives often feels like a race to the bottom.

Condon & Beers offer a thoughtful suggestion for a reset:

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It’s a broken process. In the absence of facts and information, rumours and innuendo abound. Last month I attended the local residents’ association meeting to assuage some of those fears and having gone to a VCH open house, I was able to explain the clinical models that the two proposed sites are providing and hopefully gain community support. Of course, I shouldn’t have to be the one to dispel rumours, but because VCH did a poor job of community engagement there was a lot of misinformation out there. That is the nut of the issue: community engagement.

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When people ask what went wrong, and how did Vancouver get to this crisis point of inequality and unaffordability — I’ve often pointed to the Richard Florida mantra of the creative class / creative cities: a school of urbanism that has dominated our city’s politics and planning for the last decade.

Florida’s premise: that economic and urban renewal could result from wooing the “creative class”, that things like hip coffee shops, bike infrastructure, and social engineering with a progressive veneer would fuel urban transformations.

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