I’m up late trying to make my (bad word bad word) iPod downloads work and browsing the net, which gives me some time to link to these lovely photos that Gord Price has taken of one of our weird and wonderful new community gardens we’ve sprouted. This one is in the heart of the downtown […]

[Read more →]

You may not know this out there in non-media-land, but a major frenzy is about to break out over the opening of the Canada Line. It’s all hands on deck for the opening Monday, where about 40,000 are expected to ride the line in the eight hours it’s open and free. It sounds like parties […]

[Read more →]

For the last couple of years, the potential sale of the grand old Canada Post building on Georgia Street, that massive memento of 1950s architecture, has been of great interest in the planning and development community. There was a bidding process at one point and the city went to great lengths to make sure the […]

[Read more →]

Get ready for it. By the time everyone gets back to work in September in Vancouver and Whistler city halls, it’s essentially going to be all Olympics all the time. As part of that, those two cities, along with others that have venues, like Richmond, have also been identifying who among their staff is going […]

[Read more →]

I was trolling the Internet tonight (an excellent time-waster, for those who have thousands of words of overdue stories to write, once they have checked the last 200 Twitter posts of everyone they can think of in the universe and googled all previous boyfriends from the 70s) and noted that one of my very favourite […]

[Read more →]

It will be interesting to see, in five years, how much new housing is created by some of the city’s “gentle densification” policies, as they call them: laneway houses and lock-off suites inside condos. As other media reported last month, almost two dozen people lined up to apply to build laneway houses as soon as […]

[Read more →]

This column from San Diego is quickly making the rounds here (thanks to Gordon Price’s blog for alerting some of us to it), thanks to its lavish praise for all we do. Just when I thought the complacency might loosen its grip. For those who can’t stand reading about how great Vancouver is — and […]

[Read more →]

A fascinating story here in Street Roots by a former student of mine at Kwantlen, Steve Smysnuik, who has done a solid job of reporting on the sex-trade problem that no one has paid much attention to for a few decades in this city. (I don’t claim to have taught Steve any of his reporting […]

[Read more →]

This just out from city hall, where apparently some poor wretch is still employed to put out news releases while everyone else is on holiday. Howe Street shelter closes two days early The Howe Street shelter has closed two days ahead of schedule thanks to the availability and acceptance of alternate housing by shelter residents, […]

[Read more →]

As anyone who reads this blog even passingly knows, I love markets and street stuff in cities. So I’ve been watching with interest to see how the city’s car-free Sundays, aka Summer Spaces program, is going. I went down to Commercial Drive yesterday, where they had their first non-car-free day of the summer (Main also […]

[Read more →]