The city’s 35-page housing plan is rich with tantalizing one-liners about new things that are going to be tried to create affordable housing for working people squeezed out of the market and homeless people just squeezed. I’m working my way through, line by line, and came across one on page 31 that said five neighbourhoods [...]

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Lots of interesting info from the presentation on housing and homelessness yesterday, currently only in PP form, no report.

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As indicated by media reports earlier this year (Mike Howell in the Courier, I think), the city is re-opening one of the two shelters under the Granville Bridge. This time, it will be open 24 hours, which is intended to prevent the line-ups and crowd mayhem that nearby condo residents objected to last time. Presumably [...]

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Just back from the announcement about the new emergency shelter opening in the Downtown Eastside, an unusual one in that the building and cost of renos were donated by mainly by businesses, with the provincial government providing the money to run the shelter. AND all the permits and work got done in a miraculous seven [...]

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There’s nothing more tempting when travelling around Europe to look at some beautiful aspect of city life or another and think, “Why can’t Vancouver be more like this?” I had that thought frequently in Bologna, where I recently spent part of a week. It was my first time in Italy and my partner and I [...]

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I’m surprised no one has picked up on this, but amid the raft of reports about closing down streets, rapid-bus lanes and you name it, there’s also this report from crazy busy report-writing crew over in engineering. It recommends reducing the minimum and maximum required parking spaces to be built in for new commercial and [...]

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Sean Holman has a doozy of a story in today’s Globe. Sean has a copy of an e-mail from former board member Mike Bruce, announcing he is quitting the party and urging others to do the same, because of the mayor’s silence on explaining to party members why he made comments during the campaign appearing [...]

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It’s been a gloomy time around city hall lately, with the hiring freeze having stalled many initiatives in their tracks and hit some departments, which had always operated with a lot of temp-contract people particularly hard. Then there’s been a lot of turmoil, with people leaving or hinting that they’re open to leaving. To provide [...]

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Brad Cran has been named as Vancouver’s new poet laureate and will be official inducted tomorrow at council. You can read his official bio on the city website, but here’s a brief literary pause to read one of his actual poems which has, you’ll be pleased to note, a kind of urban development theme. On [...]

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Because this topic seems to be generating a lot of controversy, I will do a bit of notebook dumping here to give everyone all the evidence available before they come to a verdict.  And then we can move on to other things.

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