This out from city: We are recruiting volunteers for the 2016 City of Vancouver Homeless Count. The count will take place throughout the city inside shelters during the evening of Wednesday, March 9, 2016 and on the streets during the day on Thursday, March 10, 2016. By volunteering for the count, you will be helping […]

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As likely most of you who read this blog know, a group of UBC and SFU economists and/or business professors put out a joint statement yesterday calling for a tax on vacant homes. That follows an interesting op-ed piece published last week by SFU public-policy prof Rhys Kesselman for a surtax on expensive properties whose […]

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I started hearing this kind of story that last few months almost, it seemed, every time I went out of the house. People who told me they were renting out the condo they purchased years ago, but had moved on to renting a larger house somewhere. My son-in-law was urged by a friend to buy […]

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This is a first for Ivanhoe Cambridge, the global real-estate investment firm, and for the city — a $1.5-billion redevelopment project scheduled for Oakridge Centre is being scaled back. My story here details the many reasons the company gave and that retail consultants also suggested: high construction costs, a hugely long period of construction that […]

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I know people who read this blog are getting a little fried with real-estate discussions these days, which all seem to end in stand-offs and abound in contradictions. In spite of that, you likely want to retain some space in your calendar for an interesting effort being put on by the Museum of Vancouver and […]

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This wasn’t a great year for Vancouver (the city, the region). A transit plebiscite turned into an unproductive brawl that pitted drivers against transit users and then failed miserably. The level of angst over the pace of change in the region and the increasingly incoherent real-estate market, with single-family houses and commercial properties trading for […]

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So odd that Vancouver has to go through this push and pull over opening up winter-shelter beds every year. There was some angst behind the scenes as BC Housing, aka Rich Coleman, said Vancouver would get only the same 170 beds that the city got last year, while new Vancouver-type winter shelters (open for the […]

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Catching up on posting my stories here. This one from a few days ago, about the impact that the big spike in assessments will have for single-family homeowners. There was some reaction on Twitter that, boohoo, these people making hundreds of thousands in real-estate profits should pay up without griping. So this is just a […]

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Reports have trickled out about the hugely popular Marche St. George (28th/St. George) about to lose outdoor seating/right to serve food/right to operate. A sign of the times: City has just issued the following news release. BTW, if the neighbour who complained about the Marche’s operations is ever identified, I would not want to be […]

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The Mount Pleasant industrial zone has turned into one of the hottest pieces of real estate in the city. A story I did last year, based on planner Andy Yan’s maps showing assessment increases, indicated even then that prices had soared. That’s because all kinds of companies have spotted this as a fantastically located and […]

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