The city that Vision Vancouver has tried to make as bike-friendly as possible has been trying to get a bike-share system here for two years (remember when there was talk of a trial during the Olympics, using Montreal’s Bixi’s on loan during the winter?) but still doesn’t have one. This is going to be the [...]

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As council comes up to a vote on where to go with laneway houses this Thursday, my look here at their popularity in Vancouver and elsewhere. There are many issues I didn’t address in this story that I have elsewhere (complaints about the sizes of some of the larger ones, the outsize city fees that [...]

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When Vancouver city manager Penny Ballem started talking about reorganizing the city last year to make it more efficient, I heard a lot from people inside city hall saying saying everyone knew there were things that needed to be fixed, but no one had ever had the jam to actually take action. Too hard to [...]

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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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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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The ongoing saga of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s efforts to get more space and/or move to another site have been going on for years, starting sometime in the 90s. (There’s a wild conceptual image from that early era of the plan to double the gallery’s space at the existing location, which you can find on [...]

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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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Police announced this morning that they won’t be laying any charges in connection with the Olympic village documents that went missing last fall. They say it’s partly because some councillors declined to take a polygraphy test. As far as I can determine, that includes all the Vision councillors at the time — Raymond Louie, Tim [...]

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The wheels of Freedom of Information grind slowly, slowly, but I finally got an answer last week to two questions: What record was there of meetings attended by the city’s chief financial officer, Estelle Lo, related to the Olympic Village? And what emails did she send to city hall staffers or councillors about the village? [...]

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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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