What is the province’s message to cities these days? Hard to tell, as we seem to be getting multiple messages.

There’s a lot of chatter in the background about how the province wants cities to boost their density around transit and help speed up supply by reducing the time to get permit.

But on the record, different ministers are saying different things.

I had an interview last weekend with Housing Minister Rich Coleman and TransLink Minister Peter Fassbender. They delivered a soft message, saying they’re not going to force municipalities to do anything, but will have “conversations” to encourage more density around transit and more “conversations” to talk about extracting money from developers because of the increase in their land values around transit, as a way of paying for said transit.

Then Rob Shaw at the Vancouver Sun had Finance Minister Mike de Jong with a somewhat harder line in this week’s paper, talking about carrots and sticks to force cities into zoning in more density around transit and, specifically, speeding up their permit times.

Sure sounds like developers have the ear of cabinet ministers whenever I hear that last line. Indeed, it’s true that some cities can be glacially slow about approving even routine developments — not even those that are generating resident backlash.

But the way the province keeps bringing up the “100,000 projects waiting for permits” in the region is an over-reach — some of those are only inquiries, for one. Others are perhaps rightly being held up because the project is crap.

I’ll be waiting to see how this one plays out and whether anything really happens, or whether this is all just noise to make it look like someone is doing something.

I used to hear the term “community land trust” about once a year. Now, I seem to hear about it almost every month.

Cities like New York and London are looking to community land trusts as a way to deal with the general real-estate insanity that appears to be prevailing in key cities around the world.

What are community land trusts? To use a definition scalped from one of the above articles:

A community land trust (CLT) is a model of non-profit land ownership in which a board of community stakeholders governs the use of land, while regulations ensure the permanent affordability of the rental or home-owner housing on that land.

Now a growing group of people in Vancouver are hopeful that this could become a more widely used model here.

As I note in my Globe story (which will appear in the Saturday print edition), the idea got a big boost here when the City of Vancouver turned over four valuable pieces of property worth $25 million to a group of non-profits and co-op housing to create a community land trust.

The group has started construction on the 358 units that will eventually exist, and which will function through a system of cross-subsidization. (The people who get the lovely condos fronting the river will pay max dollars, and their rent will help reduce the rent of someone in an apartment further away.) Warning: this system can’t bring rents down to a fully subsidized level. That would take provincial and federal help.

But it’s certainly an improvement from the unfettered market.

Gregor Robertson’s former chief of staff, Mike Magee, has told any number of councillors that he has no plans to do any lobbying work for developers or others as he strikes out in his new post-city hall career.

But he is visiting with people in the development community and, not surprisingly, observers are unclear about what kind of work he might be looking for and whether it involves lobbying on any level. My story here on what’s going on and what people are thinking of it.

It’s all a bit mucky because there are no rules to prevent anyone, councillor or staffer or ex-mayor, from lobbying people at city hall the day after they quit their municipal jobs.

Former deputy city manager Brent MacGregor also went straight to work as a development consultant for Concord Pacific after he quit in 2007.

Former COPE councilllor and mayoral candidate Jim Green turned to development consulting and lobbying at city hall after he lost his bid for the mayor’s seat to Sam Sullivan in 2005. There wasn’t too much complaining about it at the time, I think likely because he was in the awkward position of lobbying his political opponents.

Theoretically, these insiders have something valuable to offer — their knowledge of how the system works and how the personalities are — without having to do any lobbying. (Though some I talk to say that it’s really the lobbying that any developer would hire them for because the sophisticated developers in this town already know very well how the system works and who the personalities are.)

There’s also the tricky question of their relationships with staff who remain. It’s awkward for them when a former councillor or staffer calls, because they know that person and maybe even are friendly with him/her, but they’re put into the awkward position of potentially being asked for information or being lobbied in a way that’s not available to the general public.

I understand from city manager Sadhu Johnston that he did advise senior managers at city hall that they had no obligations to take any calls from a former chief of staff, in case there was any confusion about that.

There’s been vague chatter for months now indicating that the province has its eye on the profits developers are making as they build towers next to SkyTrain lines (calling Derek Corrigan at Brentwood) as a possible source of revenue for big new spends on transit.

But TransLink Minister Peter Fassbender amped up the temperature on that lately by going public with talk about a “transit-supporting levy” that has been proposed (among other things) at a couple of roundtables he’s held recently.

Every mayor I talked to said it’s worth having the discussion about taking back some of the windfall land-value increase that developers get along those lines and using it for transit.

Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner said any discussion about a funding source that can be counted on as an ongoing and reliable source of transit money is worth having.

But the mayors are anxious. First off, they see that money as unequivocally theirs, not the province’s. They come up with the official community plans, they do the work of shaping where density will go, they take the heat from residents who don’t like those plans. They want control over that money to decide which community services it should go into.

Secondly, for cities like Surrey, the idea of adding on yet another tax to development, when it is struggling already to attract developers to its projected new downtown, is worrisome. My stories on this are here and here.

Mr. Fassbender said he doesn’t want to go into the cities’ piggy-bank and there is no discussion of where the revenue will go. But there are only a few options, as anyone can see.

The province can do what cities have asked for already last December, and create a new development cost charge whose money would be dedicated to transit. (Cities have that already for roads, water, sewer and park acquisition.) And then the province could say, Yes, all that money is yours. And since you have it, your share of all transit projects should be higher. (Currently, since the Trudeau government stepped in, the share is 50 per cent federal, 33 per cent provincial, 17 per cent municipal. The cities have said it should be 50/40/10, given the share of the tax pie each level has.)

Or the province could say, let’s talk about splitting it and we’re open to adjusting the share each of us pays based on that revenue.

Or it could just take part of it and use it for the standard 33 per cent it has always maintained is its fair share.

No one really knows which way this discussion is going. We await more news.

I write about, I think, some fairly weighty issues that deserve public attention. But, I have to say, nothing seems to attract attention like when I do a story about disappearing gas stations. I guess it speaks to people’s sense of how the city is changing.

At any rate, I did a story a while ago about Shell putting its gas station on Georgia, across from the Bayshore, on the block, a site that surely has to be attractive, as developers race to build designer-y new luxury towers there. (White Spot patrons next door, I would get those Monty mushroom burgers while you can, because I can’t imagine White Spot resisting the pressure for long.)

More recently, I did another story about Shell putting up another five stations for sale on the west side, all prime locations for low-rise apartment buildings, I would think.

Their site at Broadway and Alma, in particular, I can see becoming a new little hub on the west side. There is a development proposal for the mini-mall kitty-corner from there. (True Confections fans, get your hits in now.)

There’s a mini-mall backing onto that gas station (facing 10th). And Land Developments owns the empty lot on the southeast side of 10th and Alma, with development planned soon, I’m sure. Alma Village, here we come.

Those aren’t the only places to go. Small bank branches, mini-malls around the city are being eyed.

A fun assignment recently, to take a look at the prevalance of room-mating as the housing crunch continues unabated.

There’s no doubt that the phenomenon of sharing is on the upswing in many high-priced cities. I remember reading a story from London that said the big dream for young people there was not their own apartment, but just their own bathroom.

I had noted in other stories I’ve done recently how many millennial couples I’d come across who were sharing an apartment or a house with a third person. But, for this story, I stumbled across an even more extreme example of the room-mate phenemonon: two professional couples, each with a young one, sharing a four-bedroom house.

That was along with people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s taking to the room-mate life, finding benefits not just in the money-saving, but also the extra company, the sense of security, and the expanded set of friends.

My story here. (Makes me wonder if any of will get to live alone until we hit the old-age home.)

The first round of spending to tackle the drug-overdose crisis adds up to $2 million, mainly to staff an additional medic unit, to create a new community policing station for Strathcona, and to train more city staff in Naloxone use.

The next $1.5 million available is still unallocated, although staff are looking at things like creating supervised drug-consumption sites in some of the Downtown Eastside residential hotels, where most of the overdoses and deaths are occurring. (More on this from social-policy director Mary Clare Zak in my story today.)

The city report will be debated next Tuesday or Wednesday (the latter, if there are speakers from the public who want to address the issue). I’m wondering if the tone will be any different, after the news yesterday that the death count from overdoses reached 914 last year.

TransLink is going to be rolling out many, many announcements about improved service in the next while — all aimed at reminding people that their tax money is going to good use. They had their first on Tuesday. (My story here.)

But amid the celebrations over more cars for Canada Line service, 15-minute service on the SeaBus, and other such add-ons, there was also a cloud hanging over the announcement because the federal government appears to have slowed down in its rush to provide transit funding. In fact, Liberal MP Jonathan Wilkinson made an odd remark at the announcement about funding decisions being on hold until mayors come up with a solid plan — something they did two years ago.

Local mayors had hoped to see something specific about phase 2 funding by now. At the moment, though, it appears as though nothing will be announced until the federal budget is set in late February. That means that negotiations with the province can’t really begin until after that. And the province will be entering election-campaign phase by April.

For Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner, both hoping to show their voters that transit dollars are here by the time the municipal elections roll around in 2018, this is all bad news, as it likely means no real funding agreement will be reached before fall — all of which delays the real work on the big Broadway and Surrey rapid-transit projects by a year.

I’ve been covering B.C. politics for more than 30 years. In that time, the fundraisers for various parties have been part of the scene. But none of them has achieved the high profile or hostile public reaction that Bob Rennie has. (Back in the Gordon Campbell days, Marty Zlotnik used to be the chief fundraiser. People would talk to him occasionally, but he was never in the spotlight the way Rennie has been.)

Now he says he’s stepping back. (My story here.) He’s raised pots of money for the party, the Liberals are in good shape, and he’s going off to do other things.

There’s already been speculation on Twitter that his “resignation” is somehow connected to the New York Times story published last week about the unfettered campaign fundraising in B.C.

But Rennie has been talking about quitting the fundraiser job for a while, though I’d always understood that he was going to stop after the election. As I said on Twitter, I’d be more inclined to believe that, if there is any hidden agenda, this an agreement between him and the party to remove some of the fuel in the anti-developer fire that has been licking at the Liberals’ doorstep in the last two years, as people have grown more resentful about the local crazy high housing prices.

In the way that journalism works, the germ of this story sprouted at a public meeting where I was a moderator. The panel was focused on housing as a human right. But there were a lot of young people in the audience who were hungry for more — they were looking for practical solutions to Vancouver’s housing dilemmas.

Among them were Anastasia and Sam, quoted in this story, who have gone beyond just individual interest in tiny houses to trying to create the momentum and focus for the change needed to permit them in local cities.

They’ve created a website to collect information and they’ve made connections with city planners, post-secondary institutions, and other housing advocates. I’m not sure how long it will take them to get anywhere (the two city politicians I talked to were interested but, I’d say, a bit wary) but they are definitely taking all the right steps to start a wave.