I’m told city council won’t decide until January sometime what to do about regulating short-term rentals. But, in the meantime, Airbnb is doing everything it can to sell itself to council and the general public. The numerous ads are still running (“It helps me pay the bills in this expensive city” “I would never have […]

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It’s become the norm this fall to attend news conferences announcing upcoming policy issues at council. There was yet another one Wednesday, where Mayor Gregor Robertson and staff outlined the details of the city’s proposed new empty-homes tax. My story here and the city’s report here. The interesting part now is going to be who […]

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UBC is a huge presence in Vancouver: a university, a land developer, a research centre, a generator of start-up businesses, and a hotbed of intellectual ferment. So it means a lot to the city what kind of leader is chosen. The board’s decision to pick Santa Ono, then former president at the University of Cincinatti, […]

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I was in a classroom yesterday morning where yet another person, one of a series I’ve heard in the last week, talked about how important architect Bing Thom was to Vancouver. Alden Habacon, UBC’s senior advisor on intercultural understanding, told the roomful of young people that Bing was the first person to say that Vancouver […]

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The efforts to “do something” about Vancouver’s historic Chinatown are never-ending. And it’s not just in Vancouver. Cities from Edmonton to San Francisco are also fretting about what is happening to their Chinatowns, either because they went into decline and are empty or, somewhat the reverse, they are being infiltrated by a host of non-Chinese […]

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Unbeknownst to any of us, city staff tackle Airbnb hosts behind the scenes, letting them know that their ads have been noted and their neighbours have been complaining. Usually, that’s enough, according to the city’s chief licensing inspector Andreea Toma. But that didn’t work with one particular owner, East West Investments, which owns eight units […]

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TransLink CEO Kevin Desmond has been on the job a little more than six months now. Things have been going mostly well, I’d say. The volume of anti-TransLink stories has gone down — even though the agency is out doing a public consultation about a $3-a-house tax hike and five- to 10-cent fare hike to […]

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You, the general public, may not have paid too much attention to this, but a lot of others on various inside tracks are taking note of the fact that David Negrin, who used to manage development for Aquilini and, before that, Concord Pacific, has been hired by the three local First Nations, who hold a […]

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  When Vancouver’s new planning director, Gil Kelley, made his first public appearance last Wednesday in a speech at the Vancouver Playhouse, he did so at the invite of an organization called the Urbanarium. One of the group’s key members, architect Bruce Haden, started the evening with a thought-provoking and very candid introduction about the […]

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Got this by email from a former Nelson city employee and SFU grad student who has spent some time thinking about Airbnb. As the former City of Nelson employee responsible for preparing its upcoming short-term rental regulations (Nelson is one of the case studies that Vancouver staff reviewed) and as a tenant in Vancouver, I […]

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