The City Caucus blog posted the details of the contract for Vancouver’s new CFO, Patrice Impey, yesterday. CTV followed up by getting a response from Mayor Gregor Robertson here, which City Caucus then fulminated over in a second post here. I’m interested in your thoughts on this. Is this a reasonable price to pay for […]

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I notice that other media keep reporting on what people around Gregor have to say about the mayor’s enthusiastic introduction of Gordon Campbell a couple of weeks ago (previous story here). You know, the introduction that would have gone unnoticed if the province weren’t on the brink of an election and if people weren’t looking […]

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For my latest in Vancouver magazine, I got to spend some time with the province’s ambitious Housing Minister NOT at housing announcements. Love him or hate him, no one can deny that Coleman is pouring a lot of energy into the housing/homelessness issue. The question for some is what the long-term consequences of his vision […]

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Just what Vancouver needs: A new kind of industrial building that stacks pre-fab floors into a zigzag tower on top of a podium whose leaf-like roof is a garden. Or how about this: A new kind of laneway housing where small, two-storey, pre-fab rectangular cubes face onto back lanes that are filled with gardens, a […]

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I’ll be talking on CBC’s The Point this afternoon about the ongoing research into what parts of our environment get us walking — the shape of our neighbourhoods, the transit we take and so on. There’s been a lot of research in recent years basically saying people in the suburbs walk less and are less […]

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I assume I must be one of the last people on the continent who will answer the phone when it’s an unknown number, which is why the Harris Decima phone banker with the heavily accented English was so joyful when he got a live body. As someone who works in media and who lives with […]

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Passing this on from the organizer’s of Jane’s Walk. Lots of interesting neighbourhoods in Vancouver not covered yet in walks. Invitation: Take a Jane’s Walk or Host a Jane’s Walk May 2 and 3 “No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at suburban garden cities, manipulation scale models, or inventing […]

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So many people came to Wendy’s memorial yesterday with memories and thoughts of her life, it was hard for us reporters to put it all in one story or to capture all of the emotion in the room, though we were trying. Here’s my story. My friend, Kelly Sinoski from the Vancouver Sun, also wrote […]

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A friend passed on this story to me in the NY Times, about the desperate measures that cities are turning to for money as budgets get squeezed. This reminds me of one of the most hilarious investigative stories I ever saw on television — an Arizona or New Mexico reporter in the late 80s (remember, […]

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Some of the comments following a recent post showed me that people aren’t sure what these pre-fab housing units for the homeless will look like. People were asking whether there’d be bathrooms inside and so on, after I posted recently that the city is proposing to put almost 200 units on two city lots downtown. […]

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