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Progressive forward-thinking transit oriented development.

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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The real budget emergency had nothing to do with fentanyl

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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On the Coast on consultation, VCH and supervised injection services

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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Dick Florida’s mea culpa: A 180˚ on “Creative Cities”

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.