After being stung by four years of criticism about its giveaways to developers to create rental, Vision Vancouver politicians (oops, of course, I should say, “staff”) have decided to test a new model for building rental apartments. The city will give four pieces of land to a consortium of non-profit housing groups and the B.C. [...]

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Suddenly, the Broadway line is front and centre. After several years of not saying too much, Vancouver has really built up a head of steam the last couple of months (sorry for that bad pun and more to come) championing a Broadway subway line. Here’s my story from last week with the mayor and the [...]

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Chapter 43. BTW, I hear that the park board and associations have selected a mediator and were starting talks yesterday.

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The first open house for the viaducts (4-7 Tuesday in the Woodward’s atrium) was packed. Another one today and then Saturday. Here’s what the proponents are saying that taking down the viaducts will do: create one great street instead of two half-used semi-highways, improve the park space, bring a grand ceremonial street (Georgia) down to [...]

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BC Place and PavCo have no idea what they walked into by putting up three digital billboards on the side of the arena when it re-opened after renovations last fall. We’ve tended to look at the flashing signs — and the local resident complaints about it — as just some local piece of whininess or [...]

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In spite of a valiant effort by a whole group of people hoping to save the 120-foot tulip tree in the West End, it was a no. Architects Bing Thom and Michael Heeney, the former head of real-estate services for the city, Bruce Maitland, an arborist and a landscape architect were not enough to convince [...]

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I wasn’t at the day cruise/TransLink AGM (see previous post) but others were. Here are the reports from two pretty dedicated TransLink watchers, Frank Luba at the Province and Vancouver city councillor Geoff Meggs.

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We’ve been seeing a lot of action at city hall lately when it comes to bike lanes in a few areas. But there’s a much bigger, more comprehensive re-think coming in the fall, when the city will start talking about an update to its 1997 Transportation Plan. One topic for sure that is going to [...]

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It was the best kind of theatre, being at council last week when West Enders showed up to voice their concerns about the Vision council’s program to create permanent rentals, the Short Term Incentives for Rental or STIR. Councillors tried to keep the bemusement out of their voices, but weren’t all that successful as they [...]

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When I started working the city-hall beat in 1994, I was plunged into furious debates about casinos. The Mike Harcourt NDP government was entertaining a proposal to have a big, destination casino on the waterfront behind Gastown. The NPA city council of the day took the public opposition to that and ran furiously with it, [...]

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