News seeping out this afternoon that TransLink called staff to a meeting to say that two top TransLink planners were gone. Both were very experienced people at the top of the heap and doing the actual planning. One, Brian Mills, was director of systems planning and research. The other, Tamim Raad, director of strategic planning […]

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So a little dust storm of media reporting this week, once again, on the foreign ownership issue after UBC geography professor David Ley spoke at a conference last weekend put on by Simon Fraser University’s Urban Studies department. Ley, who has done extensive research on the impact of Canada’s immigrant-investor program and published a book […]

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As downtown office development continues to attract various people, in spite of a building boom that is sure to drive up vacancy rates, two big owners have approached the city about getting extra density for their sites. The sites? Sinclair Centre, home of the 1910 post office in one of its corners, and the 1958 […]

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Got to tackle the land-assembly craze that people have been noticing around the city lately, as signs have sprouted all all over the place with whole blocks for sale. As any number of land-assembly specialists told me, this is all about people stampeding to redevelop when a community plan changes to allow for more density. […]

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Gotta say, I still don’t understand what just happened. There were increasing complaints from the public every month since federal law on medical marijuana changed last April and marijuana dispensaries suddenly bloomed like a thousand flowers in Vancouver. City types kept saying there was nothing they could do because the federal law had created a […]

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On the off chance that this savvy crowd missed this on Friday: Supreme Court Justice Elliott Myers dismissed the petition from Randy Helten and others to have the mayor and councillor Geoff Meggs removed from office for conflict of interest or accepting gifts (those were the two provisions of the Vancouver Charter the case relied […]

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This just out Vancouver – The Vancouver Police Board announced today that they had chosen a new chief constable to lead the Vancouver Police Department. He is 28-year veteran VPD Deputy Chief Adam Palmer. “The Police Board was very pleased that we had two outstanding internal candidates as finalists. Just before the final interviews were […]

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This memo from city manager Penny Ballem just in from the troops. I’d heard about Peter Judd from hallway gossip this week, but the rest is news to me and I’m not totally sure what it all means. Dear Colleagues, Since the start of the new Council term, I have been working with various members […]

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People wanting to jolt themselves out of a state of contentment may want to watch the angst-ridden proceedings tonight aka the public hearing for 508 Helmcken, the current site of Jubilee House social housing and the future site of a 36-storey tower. I did a story in the Globe today summarizing the surge of pros […]

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I’ve been hearing about psychiatrist Steve Mathias for years, his efforts to bring mental-health services to street kids in the West End and the Downtown Eastside. I finally got to spend some time with him and hear about his big idea for how to get better psychiatric services to more kids in B.C. His storefront […]

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