There’s nothing more tempting when travelling around Europe to look at some beautiful aspect of city life or another and think, “Why can’t Vancouver be more like this?”
I had that thought frequently in Bologna, where I recently spent part of a week. It was my first time in Italy and my partner and I were [...]

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I’m surprised no one has picked up on this, but amid the raft of reports about closing down streets, rapid-bus lanes and you name it, there’s also this report from crazy busy report-writing crew over in engineering. It recommends reducing the minimum and maximum required parking spaces to be built in for new commercial and [...]

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Sean Holman has a doozy of a story in today’s Globe.
Sean has a copy of an e-mail from former board member Mike Bruce, announcing he is quitting the party and urging others to do the same, because of the mayor’s silence on explaining to party members why he made comments during the campaign appearing to [...]

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It’s been a gloomy time around city hall lately, with the hiring freeze having stalled many initiatives in their tracks and hit some departments, which had always operated with a lot of temp-contract people particularly hard. Then there’s been a lot of turmoil, with people leaving or hinting that they’re open to leaving.
To provide some [...]

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Brad Cran has been named as Vancouver’s new poet laureate and will be official inducted tomorrow at council. You can read his official bio on the city website, but here’s a brief literary pause to read one of his actual poems which has, you’ll be pleased to note, a kind of urban development theme.
On Childhood

Do [...]

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Because this topic seems to be generating a lot of controversy, I will do a bit of notebook dumping here to give everyone all the evidence available before they come to a verdict.  And then we can move on to other things.

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Oh, poor Paul Hancock, the city’s Freedom of Information officer. He must be working overtime these days, dealing with all the FOIs that have flooded in in the last four months.
Here are the latest results from one of my requests. The details of Judy Rogers’ severance agreement. Not much new in terms of the money, [...]

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Some of the comments following a recent post showed me that people aren’t sure what these pre-fab housing units for the homeless will look like. People were asking whether there’d be bathrooms inside and so on, after I posted recently that the city is proposing to put almost 200 units on two city lots downtown.
Chris [...]

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The city’s housing director came to council with a late report yesterday on a plan for interim housing — i.e. housing for the 500 or so people now in the emergency shelters the city set up in December and January that will give them a place to stay once the shelters shut down in June [...]

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This illuminating email exchange went is making the rounds today in the city, with two very different approaches to finding solutions to homelessness.
Hello Michael,
Would you publically, along with HEAT, Streets to Home, BCS, Gregory
Henriquez and Housing Providers, have a press conference and say to the
province and feds that we need them to fund 800 units [...]

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