My latest column in Vancouver magazine takes a look at all the people and organizations who were part of his world and who found themselves at odds with each other when Arthur died, leaving confusion behind him.

Marsha Lederman and I have a story today in the Globe on the decision and what gallery director Kathleen Bartels is hoping to do. I’m sure this is not the end of the discussion.

Don’t be celebrating too quickly. Even the city’s chief real-estate optimist is not willing to say anything of the sort, as I document in my latest story on the always-interesting village finances in today’s Globe. It’s going to be close call, according to Bob Rennie and many others. Likely the Maleks will have to sell off the retail components of the village, plus the 110 units that were supposed to be rental apartments to make the numbers come out even at the end of the balance sheet.

Others I’ve talked to said that the developers will likely make a very small profit or take a small loss. But before you start saving your pennies to pay for the shortfall, one interesting thing to remember — even if there is a small loss, the city of Vancouver is still making money on the loan since it’s charging the Maleks more interest than what it’s paying out to its lender.

One of the biggest is what is happening with the Vancouver Art Gallery. If you’ll recall, Premier Gordon Campbell made the strangest announcement of all time last May when he said the gallery would be relocating to a site near the old Expo Plaza of Nations. That was even though he is 1. not the owner of the land 2. not the director of the art gallery 3. not a city planner or council member. Whatever.

There was an obscure line in the news release saying that the landowner, Canadian Metropolitan Properties, which now owns the Plaza of Nations land, was willing to allow the gallery to move there in return for “future development considerations” from the city. We’ve NEVER had the details on what all of that meant and neither has the city. Staffers to this day will talk about how the announcement came as a “total surprise” to them, even though they were in the midst of allegedly trying to plan this area.

At any rate, fast forward a year and the VAG has has feasibility studies done by architect Richard Henriquez. Neither I nor anyone on council has seen the report, but there seems to be a lot of information floating around from it about the negatives for the site. It’s essentially fill, which means construction will be tricky. The water table there is high, which means you can’t go underground for storage or parking or anything.

I haven’t heard anyone specifically mention it, but it is a bit of a bold move to put an art gallery in an area that currently doesn’t attract what I’d call a super-arty crowd. There are two sports stadiums, a casino, a Costco, a nightclub and, if I’m not mistaken, a sports-video-gaming type place. As well, it’s cut off from the rest of the city by the stadiums, the two sections of Pacific Boulevard and the mini-cliff at that edge of the downtown.

On the other hand, you could imagine that area transformed into a dramatically new kind of waterfront filled with activity, like London is along certain parts of the river. The Tate Modern, which occupies a former power plant on the river, has turned into a hub of activity, with all kinds of bars, restaurants, and other forms of entertainment clustered around it. There are many who’ve criticized Vancouver over the years for creating such a boring waterfront, with walkways and parks and nothing else. An art gallery on the seawall might be just the ticket to start changing that.

So it could potentially be a great spot, if everything converged in the right way — or it could be disastrous.

However, it is sounding increasingly as though that argument is moot, as you can read here. People from the gallery are holding to the line that they are still looking at the site as an option, but I am hearing from several, including mournful ones who would have liked to see the gallery there, that it’s increasingly unlikely.

The speech will have lots of facts and figures, along with Bob’s characteristic digressions and observations, but one of the many messages that he’ll be delivering is that, although there are signs the real-estate market is rebounding, it’s coming back in a different way. My Globe story on this is here.

And, by the way, for those of you who, like me, used to have to hunt with limited success on the Globe’s website for B.C. stories, the paper has now created a snazzy new hub that is dedicated to coverage of our unique province.

Just that option has been enough to get a lot of people in Chinatown riled up, as I’ve noted in my Globe story today. It will be interesting to see what proposals staff bring to council in July, after distilling the public feedback to the various options. It seems likely that at least some kind of modest increase in height limits will be allowed, since people are looking for ways to bring more life back into Chinatown. But those towers? We’ll see.

It was a sunny afternoon, but the who’s who of the development scene was there (I kept saying that if a bomb fell on the place, the industry would be wiped out) along with the most battle-hardened of the housing advocates. And people came with lots to say. Rob MacArthur from Polygon brought along a three-page single-spaced list of suggestions and background — just a sign of the level of detail people were willing to get into.

After a little speech from housing planner Jill Davidson on what the city is hoping to do (create some short-term incentives for rental to be in place by the summer break! kiss your family goodbye, staffers!!) and some anxious questions from developers on what the city might impose, everyone broke into small groups to bat around ideas. It was fascinating to see the groups at work: Brent Granby from the West End Residents Association at a table with Bob Rennie, Andrew Grant of PCI, and architect Gregory Henriquez while city planner Chris Warren took notes; in another corner, the city’s head planner at the whiteboard with developer Bruno Wall, community activist Ned Jacobs, architect Walter Francl and real-estate analyst Jay Wollenberg of Coriolus. Mayor Gregor Robertson hovered here and there, leading two groups to claim that they were his “favourites.”

It’s impossible to capture all the suggestions everyone made — or to imagine what staff are going to do with them, especially since a few of them directly contradicted each other. A and it wasn’t just the developers disagreeing with the advocates, by the way.

There were also some important questions raised, especially about whether the point is to create just any old rental housing or affordable rental housing. The city can probably tinker with things enough to make rental housing projects feasible.  A little graph in the initial presentation showed how the city could tinker a bit — reduce parking, give a little density, reduce fees — to shave $2 million off the cost of a four-storey wood-frame building in East Vancouver, and that would be enough to tip from not worth doing to viable. But is just creating more supply the point? Many people raised the issue (a disgruntled Wendy Pedersen sitting beside me being one of them) that increasing that kind of supply doesn’t really bring on the kinds of apartments that are really lacking in the city: places that rent for less than $1,000.

Real-estate services director Michael Flanigan said obviously the city wants to do both, but the first wave of incentives is probably going to encourage just regular supply through quick and fast regulation and fee changes, while a second wave, which can be done on sites where the city gets into a negotiation with developers, could produce deeper discounts on the cost (along with agreements to specify who will get those cheaper units). He didn’t mention it, but obviously a theme throughout the afternoon was that, if the city were willing to give its own land at a discount, that could create rental at prices that would get down to the lower rates.

Okay, all of that being said, here were some of the suggestions that came up . This is only a partial list, which doesn’t get into the technicalities that some people brought up, like CMHC financing.

- consider allowing smaller units, 275 or 325 sq ft

- allow developers who are willing to create rental in one building to transfer the bonus density they get for doing that to another building

- give an additional FSR to all existing zoning, if the extra space is used for rental only. (Planning speak for newbies: FSR is floor-space ratio and it’s how the city decides how much building you can put on a lot. Most single-family lots are .6 FSR, which means the number of square feet in your house must equal 60 per cent of the square footage of the lot. A small commercial building might be 2 FSR. The Shangri La tower is 13 FSR.)

- don’t insist that building projects be 100 per cent rental. Allow a mix of owned condo and rental.

- shorten up the time for a rezoning (lots of agreement on that one)

- rents for anynew building should match the demographics of the neighbourhood

- let investors be allowed to put a covenant on their title promising to keep the unit as a rental unit for at least 10 years (this crafty suggestion from Bob Rennie, as an answer to something the city is worried about — what if all those individual condo investors currently renting their units all decide to sell when the market improves. Could be a renters’ disaster scenario)

- don’t encourage property-tax exemptions as this could result in inequality and would get murky very quickly

- consider allowing the six-storey wood-frame buildings that the province has been proposing (this came up several times)

- allow building condo apartments that have internal, locked-off parts that owners can rent out, so that apartment owners have the same kind of potential for mortgage help as homeowners do with basement suites

- look at other types of rental forms than the tower and podium or 3/4-storey low-rise.

- city should not allow strata councils to restrict rental

I’m sure I’m missing a lot that was interesting here, so I’ll turn the blog over to the commenters for their additions and analysis.

As I said up above, I’m not sure what staff is going to do all of this. There were so many suggestions and many of them, I have to say, can’t be totally new to anyone. You almost didn’t need everybody there to come up with much of this list, though I have to say, it was fascinating to me to hear developers presenting their ideas with such passion and specificity. And it was also an interesting exercise to get housing advocates, architects and developers to debate the ideas together.

In the meantime, it was a great chance for me to try to understand this breed of developers in town who want more than just to make money. They want to make money, don’t get me wrong, but they also want to make their mark on the city. I think Vancouver gets more of them — those (almost always) guys who start out in the suburbs and then move into the downtown so they can play in the big leagues — because there was until recently just so much going on here.

Awaiting your comments.

And the answer is, once again: Mostly the development industry for the two major parties. Unless Vision Vancouver surprises us on Monday, with the news that the bulk of its money has come from organic carrot farmers, yoga-mat producers, and graphic designers.

VV’s details on its rumoured $1.5 million campaign aren’t in yet — deadline is Monday. Nor are those of the Coalition of Progressive Electors, which has said it spent $300,000 on its campaign. (By the way, that works out to a cost of just under $100,000 per successful candidate for VV and a bargain basement $50,000 per successful candidate for COPE.)

But the Non-Partisan Association filed its disclosure today, as have a few of the candidates, notably Peter Ladner, Kim Capri and Elizabeth Ball. You can look at the documents here, which the city has helpfully — thanks to a motion last May — started providing on the web this year instead of requiring us to down to city hall dressed like Queen Victoria and copy out the numbers with quill pens, as was the previous practice. (Sorry, I just had a beer with dinner and am feeling silly.)

All very helpful, except that the NPA has many documents laid out in such a way that you have to turn your head sideways to read them and keep scrolling back and forth to figure out which development company donated $10,000 and which only donated $2,000. But I quibble.

I can’t quite tell what the total NPA spending was, because they file for the party and for candidates but the candidates give money to the party, though not everything they raise and so on. But it appears that the party raised just over $1 million, Peter got brought in $200,000 after paying his money to the party, Suzanne about $70,000 in total but she gave some to Peter’s campaign and then some to the party, etc., so I’m going to estimate the total was around $1.3 million. The list of the city’s prominent figures in the development industry is fairly complete.

Bob Rennie appears to be the biggest donor, having turned over $35,000 worth of his advertising pages (I presume in the Vancouver Sun) to the party. Developer Rob Macdonald gave at least $12,625; Imperial Parking kicked in $12,500 ($7,500 to the party; $5,000 to Peter); Concord Pacific gave around $12,000, Jimmy Pattison’s company, $10,000; Henderson Developers gave $12,500; the Keg restaurants gave $10,000. There are a couple of newcomers (to me, anyway, it seems) on the scene with big money. The owners Harbour Centre Complex, the Sears tower to oldtimers, gave $10,000. That’s odd, considering that the directors of the company, Rainer Hackert and Carl-Gustav Staelin, are from Missassagua and Germany respectively. Another newcomer donor is David Sidoo, the ex-football player, investment banker and owner of DB Bistro Moderne. Those last two also gave $10,000 apiece.

What does new NPA president Michael Davis make of all this? Well, he’s glad the party’s not in debt. They came out of the debacle with about $3,000. But he’d like to see a limit on donations from unions, developers and businesses. Gee, maybe there could be bipartisan support for this idea at last.

Now we’re waiting to see what Vision will file.

BTW, for those waiting to see what Sam Sullivan and Raymond Louie spent on their failed campaigns to run for mayor — keep waiting. Davis said the current law does not appear to require Sullivan for sure and Louie, maybe, to file. A candidate who runs for a nomination and loses has no requirement to file later, so we will never never find out who Sullivan’s great supporters were. (I should note that he gave $15,000 to the party through donations.) As for whether Louie, who ran for a mayoral nomination and lost but then ran for a council nomination, got it and then was elected, has to file his expenses for the mayoral nomination — that’s not at all clear, says Davis.

I would like to note for the record that I spent a quarter tank of gas, plus the cost of a coffee (with an NPA organizer) and a lunch (with a Vision organizer) on the day of the election.

You can read my story here.