There couldn’t be a more perfect decisions game than what is going on in Grandview-Woodlands these days. A respected agency that serves the mentally ill, desperate to find a way to renew and expand, partners with a developer to rebuild at the corner of Venables and Commercial, using its own property, the developer’s two sites […]

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There was a lot of praise last week for city council’s decision to hire Sadhu Johnston, the 41-year-old who has been deputy city manager since 2009 and then acting city manager since last fall, as the replacement for Penny Ballem. (My story here.) (The only dissenter I found was Councillor George Affleck who said, without […]

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Alert readers may have clued in to the fact that I was out of the city during February. Among other places visited, I was in Buenos Aires for a week, a city I’ve never been before. And, once again, I was amazed and frustrated and ticked off at how complicated it was to figure out […]

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The province is about to finalize legislation this spring to allow strata councils to sell buildings with only 80 per cent of owners in agreement, as opposed to the currently required 100 per cent. This, combined with the fact that developers are frantically searching for redevelopment sites as cities have rezoned areas for higher densities, […]

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We’d heard there was a New Yorker writer in town a few months ago working on a piece about Vancouver. It’s out now. It’s main job seems to be to continue circulating the catchy narrative about Vancouver. As always, in my role as chief grump and nitpicker, I thought it could have had a tiny […]

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Catching up on a story from last week: The woes of litter and decomposed guck for Vancouver. Some media interpreted the city report on “what to do about this” as calling for a ban. But the city’s head of “les ordures,” Albert Shamess, says that’s probably not the answer. What ever will they come up […]

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If Vancouver residents really want the province to start making changes to try to moderate the officially out-of-control (parts, anyway) real-estate market in Vancouver, just holding demonstrations and/or waiting for newsrooms to provide coverage is not going to do it. My experience of politicians — okay, not all, some do things strictly out of principle […]

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Just a side note: I will be so happy when I get to write fewer stories about the city’s kooky real-estate market. But, now, in the meantime … Lots of chattering these days about the high prices that key pieces of Vancouver commercial real-estate are going for: Royal Centre, $400-million to a German investor. Bayshore, […]

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This just out STATEMENT: DR ARVIND GUPTA Today UBC released a number of documents related to my resignation as President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia. As a result, I am compelled to comment on the documents, their content, tone and the accuracy of what they portray. What was published is a one-sided […]

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I asked to interview TransLink’s new board chair, Don Rose, recently to get a sense of what course corrections the agency is making these days. A couple of days after I talked to him, former interim CEO Doug Allen’s confidential report on what’s right and wrong at TransLink got released through Freedom of Information.

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