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A better city together One community at a time and with a little help from our neighbours to the south

I recently travelled to Portland, Oregon, to see how they do things differently, and how that might apply to Vancouver. I met with planners, urbanists, business owners, housing activists, neighbourhood associations and city officials. I could write several articles on what I discovered there: affordable, human-scale housing initiatives; small business incubation; robust multi-modal transportation and genuine place making.
But what really drew me in was the Office of Neighbourhood Involvement.

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Strathcona/DTES Disappear on New City Website

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Strathcona/DTES Disappear on New City Website
September 3, 2012

Like Many Vancouverites, when the City announced it’s new $3million dollar website last month – I was curious to check it out.

But when I went looking, I found that our neighbourhood had been disappeared.

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What does the City’s viaduct plan say about Prior Street?

So what does the City’s viaduct removal plan say about traffic calming on Prior Street?

Unfortunately for Strathcona – not a lot. In fact, the map illustration shows a new six-lane Prior Street extension that connects to Main Street, Quebec Street and a new expanded six-lane Pacific Boulevard ends before Gore – with no details about what happens to those six lanes of traffic east of Main. Prior street is identified as the “direct east-west link to the downtown for commuter vehicles and large goods-movement trucks

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On Dog Waste, Yellow Journalism and What to Doo About It.

Drinking my morning coffee, I listened to the CBC radio follow up on their recently posted story about the scourge of uncollected dog feces throughout Vancouver. According to the CBC, the problem is so widespread that it is set to break the City’s records for the most amount of complaints received in any single year. Of course, no one likes to step in dog shit, and the rant-line messages re-enforce that reality as a second day’s worth of angry callers launch into tirades about horrible dog owners.
A record breaking number of complaints, I think to myself, that must be a lot of dog doo. I watch the CBC report with interest: that record breaking number of complaints? Forty-five. That’s right, 45 complaints – possibly set to break last year’s record of (wait for it) forty-eight complaints.