Sorry, it’s taken me a while to get this up (I’ll spare you the details why), but I promised in my Twitter tweet to provide more details on Gregor Robertson’s speech to the Urban Development Institute, aka the developer crowd, Friday. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It [...]

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Monte Paulsen at the Tyee has one of the most succinct and incisive analyses of affordable housing that I’ve seen in 10 years of reporting on this topic. You can see it here. He challenges the myth that supply alone with create affordable housing. He also challenges the one that says the government should build [...]

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Remember the Vision Vancouver promise to create an affordable housing boom? Here comes the task force to accomplish same, as you can see in this motion coming up next week from councillors Geoff Meggs and Raymond Louie here. It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of solutions they can come up with, given how dramatically [...]

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Hi Frances, Thanks for your response to my pre-Christmas post on homelessness. It’s important there be a real debate about these issues, and it seems to have started. So let me respond to some of what you have written. 1. You write, “ … Housing Minister Rich Coleman announced he had bought 10 Downtown Eastside [...]

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In what seems to be a determined effort by Vision Vancouver to reprise 2002 but do it better, the team has decided to have its inaugural ceremony at Bing Thom’s beautiful new Sunset Community Centre. For those with short memories, i.e. most of us, the winning COPE crew in 2002 decided to take government out [...]

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Here’s my story in today’s Globe that has a succinct overview of the platforms from Vision Vancouver and the Non-Partisan Association. There’s much more to say on both of these, both of which show that we are fully in the grip of policy wonks. (Each platform contains over 50 points and refers to strategies like [...]

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The long series of debates between Vancouver’s two mayoral candidates drew the biggest crowd ever tonight, i’m told more than 1,000 were at the event at St. Andrew’s Wesley, as people came out to hear the two talk about what they would do when it comes to solutions for homelessness, affordable housing and mental illness. [...]

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For many people, the news that house and condo prices are dropping and that developers are even offering things like mortgage payments for a year, discounted mortgage rates or free upgrades on finishes is great. But the reality is that, even though prices are softening, they still haven’t — and won’t — drop down to [...]

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It’s hard to believe some people chose to go to a hockey game tonight when they could have been sitting with all of us at the Vancouver Public Library talking about municipal policy. A loss for them of 90 minutes of action-packed excitement, but fun for the 300 or so of us there. Okay, kidding [...]

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After I posted my little vignette about the trauma of renting my basement suite (hundreds of calls from desperate people), I got a couple of comments from people who went through similar experiences recently, at either end of the rental trauma. I also got this question from regular correspondent RossK: “Sure would be interested in [...]

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