Spent the day yesterday collecting stories from people about their experiences with the snow/ice situation, as well as phoning as many municipalities as I could to find out how things were going. It was interesting to hear how many city staffers talked about the big changes they made after the multiple snowfalls that turned into […]

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Through a young friend, I was alerted to the interesting photo project being done by Gu Xiong, a professor of art history at UBC. He has been shooting pictures of some little-known sites that were important to early Chinese immigrants to the province. Even though I thought I knew a lot about that history, I […]

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We’d all been hearing the chatter for half a year that TransLink had sold this prime site at 41st and Oak for a significant sum, far more than it had originally anticipated five years ago. That was seen as one more piece of good news for the agency, giving it a lot more money to […]

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A company I hadn’t heard of previously, Resonance Consultancy, produced an interesting report with loads of data on B.C.’ers plans for moving in the next five years. It was rich with data, collected from interview with 1,700 people by Insights West, which meant that there were a dozen stories in it or more. (As a […]

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After hearing for several years from residents on the west side about the havoc that was being wreaked as older houses there were demolished, city planners came out with proposed policies last month aimed at saving them. They are not modest or incremental. The policies, if passed, will actually give owners who retain older houses […]

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I’ve spoken on dozens of panels in my 34-year career as a journalist — panels for other journalists, for PR people, for non-profit groups, for students, for housing advocates, for business groups, for resident associations, for government employees — but none has generated quite the tizzy in a teacup as the one I was on […]

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The city announced this week it was selling its land at 601 Beach Crescent to Pinnacle for $20 million, a promise of 152 units turned over to the city to be used for affordable housing, and no guarantee of any specific density in a planned rezoning. My story here. That is sure to be watched […]

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I get targeted personally by a tiny but energetic group of people in town on a regular basis, as part of the ongoing very emotional and fraught debate in Vancouver about real estate and foreign investment. As a result, some have raised questions this week about why I’m appearing on a panel Nov. 29 with […]

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It was one confusing council meeting at one point Tuesday, as Councillor Kerry Jang made a motion to amend the empty-homes tax, basically asking staff to study new data coming in in 2017 and decide whether there should be some kind of exemption for secondary homes “frequented for family purposes.” Your guess is as good […]

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That’s the argument that University of B.C. prof Nathanael Lauster is making in his just-published book, The Death and Life of the Single Family House: Lessons from Vancouver on Building a Livable City. Lauster (who walks the walk, living in a townhouse in Kits with his wife and two children) interviewed a few dozen Vancouverites […]

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