It’s been one long haul, but finally city planners have come up with the draft for a Grandview-Woodland plan. (They presented it to the citizens’ assembly Saturday night, after which several attendees went for beer. This planning thing is not for amateurs.) Here is the city’s summary of the plan, which envisions about 7,000 new […]

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The May Wah Hotel is a relic of old Chinatown, built in 1913, filled with tiny rooms where Chinese seniors and not-so-senior others have an extremely affordable haven. But the Shon Yee Benevolent Association that owns the building and runs it decided, after many years of debate, to put it up for sale recently. Some […]

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I’m from Regina, so a Prairie kid, as all good Canadians are. But it’s been a long while since I’ve travelled east. So it was a pleasurable surprise to do whirlwind visits to Edmonton and Calgary recently. I interviewed the mayors of those two cities. (Story here, for comparisons on who among Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton […]

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Dear readers, any answers to this question that just came in over my blog transom? An advertisement from a realtor appeared in our mail today, with the usual pictures of houses just sold (prices ranging from over 8 million to 2.5 million). Some of the pictures have “just sold” or “new listing” printed on them, […]

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Vancouver has said it’s going to start a small “affordable home-ownership” program, with an initial 300 units over three years. It’s hardly the first city to do this. There are programs all over the continent that have started up as resort towns, universities, mid-sized cities, and large cities have all tried to find a way […]

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Temperature just keeps going up in this city. The climate change of debate heat. June 5th, 2016 (Vancouver, BC) – In the past week, we’ve heard a growing chorus of concerns about the economic risk posed by skyrocketing housing prices in Vancouver. Both the Bank of Nova Scotia and the National Bank of Canada urged […]

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My favourite thing. I got to work for a month on a story about how commuting is changing (or not) in the Lower Mainland. It was an eye-opener. I heard a lot of stories about how people make their transit choices with factors I hadn’t thought about. Childcare is key. (Living close to a daycare […]

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I will admit straight up that I don’t fully understand the negotiations going on between the province and cities over how they will come up with their $370 million to match the $370 million the feds are willing to put into transit locally from this year’s budget. I had a long interview with Minister Peter […]

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People who have worked on housing issues for decades haven’t seen this much fear and anxiety about housing in Vancouver ever. When it was just working-class people and the homeless who were having trouble, there was a kind of low-grade concern. But now that middle-class people working two decent jobs feel like they’ve been priced […]

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No wonder Vancouver is always in an uproar about some development or another. There’s just so much of it in the city, as I was made aware when someone pointed me to the statistics on housing starts in the region. Vancouver, in spite of being an almost built-out city and with very little greenfield (never […]

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