The debate over the contract terms of the city’s new chief financial officer was quite lively here, so I’m sure you’ll all be interested in Chapter 2. Allen Garr has an analysis of why one element of this story in particular showed the kind of bad reporting that bloggers with an agenda and the media [...]

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While many of you were watching a couple of hockey teams face off on Tuesday night, there were two other teams facing off at city council over an issue that is key to what kind of city people think Vancouver is about: how much housing should be allowed downtown and how much of the downtown [...]

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Faced with mounting bills at TransLink and no way of paying them except to keep going back to transit fares and property taxes, the region’s mayors have decided to make transit funding a campaign issue. They’re holding their (required) in-camera meeting tomorrow to talk about their plan to ask for some of the millions in [...]

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One of my sharp-eyed phone buddies noticed that President Obama’s plan for high-speed train links throughout the States also includes a couple of stops north of the border. One of them is, you guessed, the Terminal Lotus City itself, Vancouver. The link is here. That would be pretty exciting for those of us who like [...]

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Last year, the city’s financial statements came out and no one paid attention to the paragraph buried deep inside saying that the city had provided a loan guarantee of $190 million for the private developers of the Olympic village. Even councillors didn’t notice it. It’s quite a different picture this year, where the statements detail [...]

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The City Caucus blog posted the details of the contract for Vancouver’s new CFO, Patrice Impey, yesterday. CTV followed up by getting a response from Mayor Gregor Robertson here, which City Caucus then fulminated over in a second post here. I’m interested in your thoughts on this. Is this a reasonable price to pay for [...]

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I notice that other media keep reporting on what people around Gregor have to say about the mayor’s enthusiastic introduction of Gordon Campbell a couple of weeks ago (previous story here). You know, the introduction that would have gone unnoticed if the province weren’t on the brink of an election and if people weren’t looking [...]

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For my latest in Vancouver magazine, I got to spend some time with the province’s ambitious Housing Minister NOT at housing announcements. Love him or hate him, no one can deny that Coleman is pouring a lot of energy into the housing/homelessness issue. The question for some is what the long-term consequences of his vision [...]

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Just what Vancouver needs: A new kind of industrial building that stacks pre-fab floors into a zigzag tower on top of a podium whose leaf-like roof is a garden. Or how about this: A new kind of laneway housing where small, two-storey, pre-fab rectangular cubes face onto back lanes that are filled with gardens, a [...]

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I’ll be talking on CBC’s The Point this afternoon about the ongoing research into what parts of our environment get us walking — the shape of our neighbourhoods, the transit we take and so on. There’s been a lot of research in recent years basically saying people in the suburbs walk less and are less [...]

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