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Entries from January 2016

Plan for 10,000 more in Commercial Drive ‘hood gets cautious approval from residents for now

June 28th, 2016 · 46 Comments

It’s been one long haul, but finally city planners have come up with the draft for a Grandview-Woodland plan. (They presented it to the citizens’ assembly Saturday night, after which several attendees went for beer. This planning thing is not for amateurs.) Here is the city’s summary of the plan, which envisions about 7,000 new […]

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Alarm over the sale of a Chinese-society residential hotel gives glimpse of hidden world

June 21st, 2016 · No Comments

The May Wah Hotel is a relic of old Chinatown, built in 1913, filled with tiny rooms where Chinese seniors and not-so-senior others have an extremely affordable haven. But the Shon Yee Benevolent Association that owns the building and runs it decided, after many years of debate, to put it up for sale recently. Some […]

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A tour of Alberta cities (with some tours of mayors offices thrown in)

June 21st, 2016 · 5 Comments

I’m from Regina, so a Prairie kid, as all good Canadians are. But it’s been a long while since I’ve travelled east. So it was a pleasurable surprise to do whirlwind visits to Edmonton and Calgary recently. I interviewed the mayors of those two cities. (Story here, for comparisons on who among Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton […]

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A question from a reader: What is this Chinese word in the real-estate brochures?

June 6th, 2016 · 5 Comments

Dear readers, any answers to this question that just came in over my blog transom? An advertisement from a realtor appeared in our mail today, with the usual pictures of houses just sold (prices ranging from over 8 million to 2.5 million). Some of the pictures have “just sold” or “new listing” printed on them, […]

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Is it possible for Vancouver to do an affordable home-ownership plan, given our insane land prices?

June 5th, 2016 · 4 Comments

Vancouver has said it’s going to start a small “affordable home-ownership” program, with an initial 300 units over three years. It’s hardly the first city to do this. There are programs all over the continent that have started up as resort towns, universities, mid-sized cities, and large cities have all tried to find a way […]

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Vancouver mayor (again): Do something, province, about “unregulated speculative global capital”

June 5th, 2016 · 6 Comments

Temperature just keeps going up in this city. The climate change of debate heat. June 5th, 2016 (Vancouver, BC) – In the past week, we’ve heard a growing chorus of concerns about the economic risk posed by skyrocketing housing prices in Vancouver. Both the Bank of Nova Scotia and the National Bank of Canada urged […]

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