The city has had a test going since last September with 2,000 houses to see how residents respond to having their regular garbage reduced to once every two weeks and being encouraged to recycle all their food scraps into their yard trimmings bin. I’ve been wondering how it’s going and yesterday, I got a chance […]

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Marine Gateway at the foot of Cambie. Sold out in a day. Telus Gardens in downtown Vancouver. Sold out before the public launch. Silver in Metrotown. More than 3,000 people signed up waiting to buy. That makes it seem as though it’s all boom times in the condo/real-estate world again. Not so, my friends, as […]

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Another week, another glorious trumpeting of the success of Vancouver’s food carts! Yes, I know some of you are getting tired of the way Vision is riding this golden goose. But don’t be cynical. Think about the days of only hot dogs. Anyway, I did do a story for the Globe here on the latest […]

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Transit funding: the most boring topic on the face of the earth, right? Until its problems happen in your backyard. Here’s a story I contributed to in the Globe about the long struggle of this unique transportation authority to find ways to pay for its system. While there are undoubtedly things to criticize about the […]

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As many of you will recall, the city has been working to adjust its building standards near the Fraser River, False Creek and Burrard Inlet to adapt to new projected sea-level increases over the next 100 years. Many of you weighed in on that. One of the solutions that has been discussed was a flood-control […]

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I did a profile of Christy Clark shortly after she was chosen leader of the B.C. Liberals, a year ago. One of my big takeaways then: This is a woman who loves the political battle and is a master of strategy. (So strategic that she declined to talk to me for the profile, giving me […]

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Catching up on last week’s events, the story of the week was the confusion after Premier Christy Clark didn’t just announce an audit of TransLink — that was welcomed by mayors — but went on to say that she would no way allow a vehicle levy or other “new tax” to pay for transit projects. […]

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With the Marine Gateway project hitting the headlines after it sold out in four hours, you can bet developers will be encouraged to get moving on their projects in the area. First up are the two towers planned for the corner of Gateway, by architect James Cheng for Intracorp. Details are here for the project, […]

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Like Surrey, Prince George and Toronto, Vancouver is about to start a small rent bank, kicking in $150,000 of the total cost, with $350,000 coming from Streetohome, the private-sector group working on homelessness, and others. The bank is aimed at helping prevent homelessness by providing small loans to people to help them get or retain […]

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Tolls spread through the region instead of just the Port Mann, as Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts suggests? More thoughts on how to create lower-cost housing? How to preserve some of our beloved places — the Ridge, the Hollywood — from a city and developers whose attitude seems to be, “Sorry, I know you have some […]

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