The staff report is just in on neighbourhood response to holding car-free days every Sunday for three months during the summer. The new Vision council had been hoping to encourage that kind of activity in three or four districts this summer, following on the wild popularity of the one-day car-free festivals that have been taking […]

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Last June, a man was found dead in an apartment near Broadway and Balsam, apparently after having inhaled fumes from the ecstasy that he was refining on his stove. The story intrigued me, especially since several people I know had known the man who died, Paul Haden. I wasn’t sure what I would find when […]

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Mike Howell, the hardest-working reporter on the civic beat and someone who makes me feel tired whenever I look at the volume of stuff he produces on a weekly basis, has been keeping on top of the city hall investigation into the leaked document on the village’s finances last fall. His story is here.

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It’s official. The Ritz-Carlton project being developed by the Holborn Company is now being cancelled, with letters going on to buyers this week, as reported by Bruce Constantineau at the Sun. This is sure to rev up the engines of those critical of what’s happened at Little Mountain, the social-housing project that the province awarded […]

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Sorry, it’s taken me a while to get this up (I’ll spare you the details why), but I promised in my Twitter tweet to provide more details on Gregor Robertson’s speech to the Urban Development Institute, aka the developer crowd, Friday. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It […]

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As I’ve said here before, I try to keep this site as open as possible to all commenters whether I agree with them or not, think they’re making rational arguments or not, and whether they can spell or not. In general, I think that’s worked out well and it cheers me up when I wake […]

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In case some of you missed this in the comments, here is Wendy Pedersen’s take on her neighbourhood, which she advocates for through the Carnegie Community Action Project. FROM WENDY PEDERSEN Hello. If you want to know what low-income DTES residents think about their neighbourhood, you can read this report: http://ccapvancouver.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/ccapvisionwebsm.pdf Its called Nothing About […]

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I know some of you, my blog readers, are perhaps not completely in the Olympics “party” mode at the moment, but here’s a reminder — culled from Kwantlen university’s “special events” calendar — of how others are viewing this. I leave it up to you to post your ironic suggestions for additions to this tour. […]

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Robert Matas’s story in the Globe this morning gets on the record the Vision Vancouver council’s discomfort with the idea of having a czar for the Downtown Eastside, a constantly recurring idea that had been floated again recently. The Vision mayor and council didn’t criticize the idea at first, but behind the scenes, they were […]

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It’s hard to get a read on Vancouver’s homeless situation through either direct observation or statistics. Few of us monitor the streets at night to do a count and what we see in the daytime can often be deceiving. Lots of people who have homes are still out on the streets during the day. Even […]

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