Blog

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! Read More

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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At the 2016 Green Party of Canada policy convention in Quebec City a policy to formalize a position of Boycott, Divest and Sanction of Israel was proposed and enacted.

I explain why I opposed this policy, which was later and ultimately overturned.

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At long last, the City of Vancouver has hired a Chief Planner, Mr. Gil Kelley.

Kelley comes with a solid background of West Coast urban planning experience: two years as head planner in San Francisco, fourteen years as director of planning for Berkley, and ten years as the lead in Portland. I’ll admit, as a Portland-o-phile that last bit piqued my curiosity, I’ve long admired the PDX approach to community involvement, human scale density, multi-modal transportation, sustainability, and placemaking.

So can we expect Portlandia-style planning in Vancouver’s future?

Of late, the City of Vancouver has been notoriously secretive about its hiring process, as such it’s anybody’s guess what the specific hiring criteria might have been: but former Director of Planning, Brent Toderian outlined five big fixes the new Chief Planner needs to achieve, (to wit: independence, good design, transparency, community engagement, and innovative leadership) all of which are noteworthy aspirations for the planning department. Ironically, Toderian was the last Director of Planning our city had — hired by the NPA, turfed by Vision Vancouver — the position of Director was re-engineered into two separate positions: Chief Planner and General Manager of Planning & Development (of eyebrow-raising note, those last two placements and the recent hire of City Manager earlier this year mean three of the most powerful five bureaucrats in our city are US citizens).

As far as Portland, we share a lot of similarities with our Cascadian sister city:
Logging towns birthed in the crucible of railways, gold rush, and Western expansion; ugly histories (and legacies) of racism and displacement; former backwaters thrust into the limelight of desirability and imagination in the Pacific age. Both cities are experiencing rapid growth in population and housing costs. Portland’s rate of growth far surpasses our own, though not nearly the rate of housing unaffordability. Sadly Read More

pressingly long, and given the role that the real estate industry can play in that equation — you might be surprised to learn that the City of Vancouver have absolutely no rules or regulations to govern the licensing of realtors doing business in the City of Vancouver.

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The incredulity that greeted last week’s announcement that residential-build-focused Concord paid over three times the assessed value for the protected industrially-zoned Molson Brewery site at the southeast end of the Burrard Bridge needs a bit of circumspection. You don’t get to be one of BC’s largest new home developers by making cavalier and reckless business moves, so at the request of Vancouver Green councillor Adriane Carr, I looked a little deeper.

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