Greater Vancouver’s North Shore communities got a big boost to their pitch to be next in line for rapid transit in the region with the release of a provincial study outlining five feasible routes across Burrard Inlet for a light-rail line. Now those three cities will need to prove they deserve to get billions of […]

[Read more →]

There are going to be many changes along Broadway in the coming years, as the subway goes in, 99 buses no long roar along both sides of the street, density of some description is added (once the new city plan or Broadway plan is decided on), and more residents and businesses are added to the […]

[Read more →]

Some of you might not have seen my latest transit story because it ran in the Alberta pages of the Globe. But it’s relevant across the country. I looked at the difference between Edmonton and Calgary and, it turned out, that explained some of the differences in other parts of the country. It explained by […]

[Read more →]

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 →]