People who care for the homeless and those living in the worst conditions (shelters, SROs) are frantic about the lack of resources and preparation for the vulnerable group they serve. My story here and in text below. 

[Read more →]

People love their neighbourhood small businesses. Politicians say they’re the lifeblood of the community. But one of the most perplexing parts of covering city hall is hearing the constant stories about how this or that small business went through hell to get a minor commercial-renovation permit. Some just give up; others grit their teeth and […]

[Read more →]

Budget and property-tax-increase time is never a fun period in the year. But it’s feeling especially fraught this year, as there are big debates and objections and announcements about big new hikes in various cities. It seems to me that it’s all a product of the secret burden cities have been carrying for years, where […]

[Read more →]

So, we kicked off last week with the story that the Squamish Nation has updated its plans for the land it owns around the south end of the Burrard Bridge, with a project that would have 6,000 units in 11 towers, one of them 56 storeys. My story in the Globe and the follow-up story […]

[Read more →]

Cities like Minneapolis and Portland are getting huge coverage in the U.S. for saying that they are ending the restriction of single-detached-only homes in large areas of their cities. Vancouver is part of that movement in Canada. But, as I discovered when I went to do a follow-up story on how this is all working […]

[Read more →]

Way back when, I was a social-issues reporter at The Vancouver Sun. No one really knew what that meant. It wasn’t supposed to be traditional social issues, but more like trends and social-science research. I can’t remember how I got started on this talking through computers network thing. I believe it might have been Larry […]

[Read more →]

Apparently Google loved my story about Burnaby, Vancouver’s beloved neighbour that has served as its bedroom community for decades, is going to create a downtown at the mega-fortress-mall of Metrotown. (Full text attached below) Burnaby did originally have a kind of town centre at Edmonds, but that sort of disappeared in the 1970s, as the […]

[Read more →]

Like many reporters, I just love census data and census-like data. So it was Christmas Day when TransLink released its big set of data from its 2017 “trip diary,” a massive study the agency does every five years to monitor how people are getting around in the region. Lots of great info to ponder. Their […]

[Read more →]

Engineers at Metro Vancouver tell me that they get asked about this topic by reporters more often than any other issue, including sea-level rise or drugs in sewage. What to do about the by-products of the tens of thousands of dogs in the region seems to endless fascinate people. The breaking on news on this? […]

[Read more →]

Okay, 361 people voted in my silly little poll asking if our housing crisis is the result of “basic flaws of capitalism” or cheaters taking advantages of a basically good system. And 64 per cent picked door number 1, although I have to note that a number of Twitter commenters said I was posing a […]

[Read more →]