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Vancouver tries to kickstart rental housing

June 16th, 2009 · 9 Comments

Many cities have complained about the lack of rental apartments being built. Few have done anything. That’s largely because it’s been seen as beyond the financial ability of cities to start subsidizing something as expensive as housing. But Vancouver is going to give it a try, as I outline in my Globe story here.

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Mayor wants Northeast False Creek to “push the green agenda”

June 3rd, 2009 · 12 Comments

It’s a difficult story to follow but the Saga of Northeast False Creek is a fascinating one and will continue to develop because there are so many interests at play in that area, the big stretch of land that faces the Olympic village across False Creek. There’s a tussle over whether the Vancouver Art Gallery […]

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Open meeting on how to create affordable housing

April 24th, 2009 · 21 Comments

If you’d like to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon at the cemetery listening to people talk about how to create affordable housing in Vancouver, you can. The Vision Vancouver council’s latest task force/brainstorming/collective put in place to hone in on an issue — in this case, how to create affordable and rental housing — is […]

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Ritz-Carlton project death sure to prompt questions on Little Mountain

February 24th, 2009 · 1 Comment

It’s official. The Ritz-Carlton project being developed by the Holborn Company is now being cancelled, with letters going on to buyers this week, as reported by Bruce Constantineau at the Sun. This is sure to rev up the engines of those critical of what’s happened at Little Mountain, the social-housing project that the province awarded […]

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Mr. Mayor gets a warm reaction from developer crowd

February 22nd, 2009 · 10 Comments

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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The myths of affordable housing

February 16th, 2009 · 29 Comments

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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Affordable housing the latest project to get a SWAT team

February 12th, 2009 · 5 Comments

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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Solving homelessness, beyond spin 2: David C’s response

January 7th, 2009 · 5 Comments

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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South Vancouver gets its moment of glory on inauguration day

December 1st, 2008 · 4 Comments

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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Comparing the platforms of Vision and the NPA

October 28th, 2008 · 2 Comments

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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