Every year, all of us (heavily mortgaged) landowners get that property assessment notice in the mail and think generally one of two things: 1. Aha, I’m worth way more than I was last year. But wait a minute — does this mean I have to pay more taxes or 2. Ha ha, my assessment didn’t go up as much as everyone else’s, so I get to pay less taxes.

Only a few of us thinking of actually challenging the B.C. Assessment Authority on their complex set of decisions about what a piece of property is worth.

My story in the Globe this weekend took me into the world of that rare group of people who do appeal their assessments, the kinds of arguments they make, and how successful they are.

I also calculated whether it all makes a difference.

It’s not in my story, but — using the mill rates published last year — a $100,000 reduction in assessment value in Vancouver meant a $421 reduction in taxes:  $214.86 in city taxes; $155.10 in school taxes, $37.93 in TransLink taxes; and other reductions for a total of $421.36.

If Al Dreher had been successful in getting his assessment lowered by $375,000, this would have been the payoff. : $805.73 in city taxes, $581.10 in school taxes, $142.23 in TransLink taxes and other taxes – including $24.84 to help pay for the assessment office – for a total of $1,049.58

Getting more confusing. The DTES/Chinatown height report was scheduled to be discussed at the 2 p.m. meeting, with 80 speakers scheduled.

But now Councillor Raymond Louie has already introduced a motion in the last hour that sends Chinatown to public hearing and DTES off for a social-impact review.(Georgia Straight blog post here.) WTF? Can’t keep up.

What a surprise. (Not, when I think about it for 10 seconds.)

After a last-minute, intense lobby against a proposed city policy to allow taller buildings on a select group of sites near Chinatown — a lobby that included the city’s two former directors of planning and former mayor Mike Harcourt — Mayor Gregor Robertson has announced there needs to be more community consultation on the Downtown Eastside locations.

Mayor to introduce motion for more public consultation in Downtown Eastside

Mayor Gregor Robertson will be introducing a motion today at council to have more public consultation and engagement on planning in the Downtown Eastside, saying there needs to be more community consultation before moving forward with proposals for taller buildings.

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Never seen anything like this before. A large group of profs, many with in-depth knowledge of gentrification and housing dynamics, have mobilized to oppose allowing taller new buildings in the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown.

Dear Mayor Robertson and Councillors:

Re: January 20, 2011 Council Meeting on the Historic Area Height Review Update.

We, the undersigned, are professors at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia with an interest in the fate and well being of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.

We therefore note with concern the recommendation before Council to change the allowable heights in the ‘Historic Area’, which includes much of the Downtown Eastside. The effect of this will be to increase permitted heights on several sites. Assuming, as seems inevitable, that this facilitates market housing, we fear that this will lead to a further reduction of affordable housing in the surrounding area, particularly that of the residential hotels. This will have a devastating effect on low-income residents and the continued vitality and viability of the neighbourhood as a whole. We believe that planning in the Downtown Eastside should have at its centre the interests of the most vulnerable, rather than risk further destabilizing a community that is already facing intensifying pressures.

Market development, if wisely managed with the insights of the low-income community, can bring benefits to the Downtown Eastside. However, it can, and has, also led to increasing rents, conversions and displacement. We encourage Council not to proceed with the Height Review until a more thorough community based planning process is conducted, a cornerstone of which should be the improvement and protection of the affordable housing stock of the Downtown Eastside.

[Read more →]

There’s a community-sponsored forum on the casino being planned for Feb. 7, as a post from Sean Bickerton has informed us. I’m reposting his info here for those rare people who don’t read all the comments. Here’s his full set of comments. I am assuming this will be in addition to the public meeting that is now being organized by the city, as per a decision at council yesterday.

The proposed casino expansion will triple the number of tables and addictive slot machines from the number currently in Edgewater Casino. Triple.

Instead of a locally-owned business responsive to community concerns as Edgewater was, we will have a massive Vegas gambling corporation that has made absolutely no effort to reach out to the local community or address our many concerns.

They are also contributing no local amenities other than the Smithe Street extension designed to deliver traffic to their door and not connect to Quebec as originally promised.

They have made no provision to provide daycare for their own shift workers, downloading this cost onto the local community when daycare slots are rare and heavily subsidized by the city and non-profits.

And finally, we have all seen reports on TV about the failure of the program to help protect problem gamblers. Yet the staff report indicates this casino will impact nearly 25,000 Vancouverites with that devastating, family-destroying problem.

The RCMP have raised very serious concerns about money-laundering and the failure of existing casinos to report large cash transactions as required.

There is no need for this massive expansion of gambling in downtown Vancouver, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. This huge behemoth in our midst will change the character of our city forever.

My simple suggestion is to keep Edgewater the same size and allow the new owners to move it nearer the stadium. It already makes millions of dollars every year for the owners and provides $10 million to city coffers annually as well.

I should add that a broad-based coalition is opposing the casino expansion and we will be hosting a public forum on February 7 to debate the merits of this proposal. Save the Date!

Our group includes the False Creek Residents Association, Strathcona Residents Association, Grandview Woodland Area Council, BC Charitable Gaming Association representing charities and non-profits, and the Alliance for the Arts in Vancouver. Others are joining us and I encourage anyone interested in joining our fight to contact us at [email protected]

Website: http://dontgamblevancouver.wordpress.com

I’m not surprised Burrard has crashes, as this interesting story from Mike Howell in the Courier details.

I rode the suicide lane on that street once back in the old days (buses on one side, a steady stream of cars and trucks on the other) and decided that I wanted to live until at least my next birthday and so wouldn’t ride it again.

Councillors are about to vote right now on sending Vancouver’s super-jumbo casino to public hearing.

But they have a few questions about its future operation: Money-laundering. How much money will go to non-profits, who were promised 33 per cent of the profits in a time long ago and now only get 10 per cent. Is it a good thing or a bad thing, in general? (Suzanne Anton said she would have liked to see more assessment of this in the staff report.) Who will pay for the policing? What impact will it have on the city’s other casinos. (Some of those are outlined in my story in today’s Globe.)

They’re not going to vote against holding the public hearing. But they will be talking at length about wanting answers to those questions as it unrolls.

This is a complicated story to understand all the details of, but essentially the city’s planning department is recommending that, instead of requiring Concord Pacific to reserve land for affordable housing in its new Northeast False Creek phase, that the city accept two other properties Concord owns on Hastings Street instead.

One of those properties, 58 West Hastings, was the object of protests and demonstrations before and during the Olympics as Concord proposed to build market condos there.

We now have various people opining that, if the city builds just social housing there, it will just entrench income segregation in the city. NPAers Suzanne Anton, on council, and Michael Geller, not, are saying that the city should instead have asked Concord to give the city one or more of the six sites already reserved on other portions of Concord’s False Creek developments and that the city should instead have lobbied to get provincial money for supportive social housing there.

Downtown Eastside activists, of course, would like to see Hastings sites become strictly social housing.

And the city, in public and elsewhere, is saying that it may consider other options besides just provincially subsidized social housing, at least for the 58 West Hastings site, to create some housing that’s aimed at a bigger range of low-income households than just the most seriously challenged that the province is focusing all of its efforts on these days.

In an era where governments seem to be outdoing each other to encourage their citizens to live better lives (no smoking in restaurants and bars in France or Spain; no trans-fats allowed in New York restaurants; no unhealthy food in Vancouver food carts; no cars allowed here there and everywhere), Los Angeles is earning headlines for its decision to prohibit any new fast-food joints from opening in south-central LA.

Thank goodness it’s not banning the old ones. One of my favourite outings in LA was to deepest, darkest Compton to search out a place called Honey’s Kettle Fried Chicken that had been recommended in LA magazine’s Cheap Eats issue. All the bars on the windows were scary. So was the air of general desolation on the dusty, bare streets. So was the realization that we might possibly be in the minority, by not carring a gun. (Being tourists, we hadn’t quite realized Compton wasn’t Venice Beach til we got there.)

But what I now realize is that our lives were mostly in danger because of the nutritional composition of the fried chicken and biscuits we ordered.

I wasn’t going to post this story from the Province about Vancouver’s low numbers of registered chickens, with everything else going on this week.

But I woke up this morning in the middle of a dream that two chickens — horribly, scrawny ones with most of their feathers gone and their red, scabby skin showing  — had somehow gotten into my bedroom during the night through the window, which is a long way up from the street, and were running around in the room. I think I was waiting for city licence inspector Tom Hammel to come and get them out of my house, but in the meantime, they were actually scary and creating quite an uproar in the house.

I’m fairly certain it was all generated by reading Tom Hammel’s quote about chickens just walking down the middle of the road.

So I’m seeing it as a sign from the Chicken Gods that I should link to this story.