Influential city shaper Bob Rennie, who masquerades as a condo marketer, will be giving his annual address to the Urban Development Institute today where he analyzes the market and sales based on statistical research that he gets done for this talk every year. The speech will have lots of facts and figures, along with Bob’s [...]

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Okay, he put it in more lawyerly language than that, but essentially that’s what Richard Peck said about Vancouver’s “code of conduct,” its definition of “confidentiality” and its whole process for reporting on misconduct at the city. It’s in his eight-page report due out tomorrow on what to do about the city’s in-camera meetings, in [...]

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The Globe’s Gary Mason has a story today about the city getting close to coming to a deal with Fortress, the lender on the Olympic village project, to take over the financing. It’s not a completely done deal yet, of course, since Fortress’s syndicate partners have to agree to this too and the city still [...]

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That’s the subject of my Globe story in today’s paper. I should note that, while the construction industry is grappling with what to do while the housing market/office market/economy seems to be, some people are breathing a sigh of relief that things have slowed down. Gives everyone a chance to collect their wits and attempt [...]

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Off to the 9:30 press conference this morning, where the premier and Housing Minister Rich Coleman are about to announce another big end-of-year buy of residential hotels and older apartment buildings for the third year in a row. All part of the plan to secure this private stock so it can be used for housing [...]

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One of my blog readers reminded me that I forgot to link to this story I had in the Globe lately on the team behind our new mayor: Mike Magee, Bob Penner, Joel Solomon et al. Here you go, for your reading pleasure on a snowy day. Oops, realized after I posted this that the [...]

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Here’s my story in today’s Globe that has a succinct overview of the platforms from Vision Vancouver and the Non-Partisan Association. There’s much more to say on both of these, both of which show that we are fully in the grip of policy wonks. (Each platform contains over 50 points and refers to strategies like [...]

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While the focus so far this week has been on Millennium Developments and its current problems with cost overruns and financing, there’s another story in this city about what’s happening with development generally. As many people told me over the last two days, it’s been disastrous the last few weeks since the financial crisis started. [...]

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For those of you who missed Saturday’s Globe and Mail, here’s the link to the story I wrote about the city’s plan to allow the current small neighbourhood electric cars to be driven on city streets. Although I didn’t put it in the print story, this is an example of the kind of initiative that [...]

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I have a short story on the final report from the 2008 Metro Vancouver homeless count that was done in March. We heard about the raw numbers back in April. This report looks more closely at the trends behind those numbers. To read it all, go here. For my short summary, go to my story [...]

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