This story has been brewing for weeks. Okay, years. Here it is, the start anyway, of the city’s news release. More to come.

The City of Vancouver and Millennium agree to receiver

The City of Vancouver and Millennium Southeast False Creek Properties, the company that owns the Millennium Water development, have today negotiated an agreement that will see Ernst & Young Inc. appointed as the receiver for the company. Ernst & Young Inc. will assume control of Millennium Southeast False Creek Properties and the Millennium Water development.

One of the sadder urban events for many of us is when a long-time business is forced out of its location when an area gets hip and rents go up. I still haven’t really recovered from the way Galloway’s got pushed off Robson Street back in the 90s sometime.

I’ve tried to work out in my own mind something that city halls or businesses could do so that they’re not so subject to market craziness and we get to keep those shops who form part of the identity of our neighbourhoods. Some people might say, yes, it’s all very sad but we can’t protect businesses that aren’t succeeding.

However, there have been many occasions when businesses that are actually successful still get forced out because the rents spiral way beyond the normal rate of increase. (Kind of like what most of us have experienced in the housing market.) That was the case for Duthie Books, which was doing well, but just couldn’t absorb a significant, beyond-inflation rent increase.

So when I heard about this trend of retail shops buying their own places, it gave me some hope for the future. Now, to find a way for small retailers with limited cash reserves to get into the property-owning business …

The neighbourhood plan for Mount Pleasant is finally out. It’s something that every neighbourhood struggling with development and calling for a neighbourhood vision should look at, as it shows what a three-year planning exercise with a community looks like.

You’ll notice that it doesn’t get down to zoning in actual blocks and there are still thorny issues to be resolved. The plan notes that residents are the most divided on the issue of height (though not density) in the neighbourhood. As a result, the actual height of any building that might form the core of one of the area’s four planned shopping areas is still up for discussion.

That would mean developments like the Broadway/Kingsway project by Rize. In a process I still don’t understand, the project went through urban design panel and was approved recently at 26 stories, but it is now going to be opened up to the public for comments (which it couldn’t be while the public was still working on a community plan, apparently??). The Rize’s CEO, Will Lin, says there will be a storefront open house set up soon where everyone will get to register their thoughts on what he’s proposing and to have people decide whether this fits in with the overall vision for the neighbourhood.

But that’s just one issue in the whole plan and there are lots of other interesting, thoughtful ideas here. I’d love to hear what others think of this as a plan, both from inside and outside the area.

People who attack others because they’re gay (or think they might be) are a mystery to many of us. We can understand being enraged over all kinds of things, from traffic on the road to managerial incompetence in the office to the people partying all night next door at home.

But to beat someone up, someone you don’t even know who has done nothing to impinge on your life, because of who you think they are: That’s another world.

Thanks to Peter Regier and David Holtzman, the two men who got attacked this June on the doorstep of their near-Chinatown condo, I entered that world a little. As I mentioned in my story for Vancouver magazine, what struck me the most about what happened after their assault was the way their neighbourhood rallied around them.

The second thing that struck me, when I did all the research, was how little we really know about the people who attack. Police investigators and lawyers often see them as just not very bright, quick-to-violence types who are inclined to get into confrontations with all kinds of people, not just gay men.

As a result, much of the research and analysis is done by those who see homophobic assaults as such an alien, horrifying crime that the perpetrators come off as not really human. So we never get much insight into what’s going on inside those minds.  Which would be a good thing to have if we’re going to try to stop this in the future.

This just in tonight. No surprise, from all the chatter I was hearing all week.

It would have been gruelling for Dianne Watts to try to turn the party’s tattered brand around within two years. As well, it would have meant exposing herself to the kind of merciless flaying that seems to be the norm these days in politics, the kind of flaying that she has been exempt from so far.

Although I have no desire to become the Two Wheels vs. Four Wheels blog, I can’t resist this news release just out from Vancouver police: (And video from Vancouver Sun here.)

Cyclist and Electric Concept Vehicle Collide
Vancouver – Vancouver Police are investigating a collision involving a cyclist and an electric concept vehicle that was participating in the Zero Emissions race near False Creek Friday morning. Shortly before 10:30 a.m., a cyclist collided with the side of an electric concept vehicle at Athletes Way and Manitoba Street. The injured 50 year old male cyclist had to be taken to hospital for treatment.
The VPD Collision Investigation Unit is handling the investigation and members have spoken with event organizers, the driver and a number of witnesses in an effort to determine what led up to the collision. 
 

Following up on the news that Telus is planning a new office tower on Georgia Street, I gathered up bits of information I’d been hearing for a while about various businesses moving back in to Vancouver, along with office towers being planned.

Along the way, I came across numerous updates on commercial leasing in Metro Vancouver that indicated that expensive Vancouver’s vacancy rate was going down, while the vacancy rate for cheaper commercial space in several suburbs has been going up. Seemed strange to me during a recession, but as John Tylee from the Vancouver Economic Development Commission explained in my story today, that’s the way recessions work. Businesses go two ways — super-cheap (and I saw in one commercial real-estate newsletter that those who are locating in the suburbs are bargaining hard for lower prices) or upscaling.

There are other factors at work making downtown Vancouver or the Broadway stretch attractive: transit, for one.

(I understand that one of the problems for Microsoft in Richmond — possibly just urban myth — is that many of their young workers coming from downtown, where they prefer to live, weren’t available to work until 3 a.m. because of the restrictions on their N licences. )

Metro Vancouver mayors met yesterday to look at the letter and plan from the TransLink board, headed by the long-suffering Dale Parker, for how to go forward in 2011.

Parker said there’s no way to get new sources of revenue by 2011 but TransLink needs to sign an agreement by the end of the year so that construction on the Evergreen Line can go ahead. So he’s recommending that they approve a property-tax increase for 2012, in the hopes that the province will give something new (carbon-tax revenue or whatever) or that they can figure out how to put a vehicle levy in place by then.

Vancouver Councillor Geoff Meggs, who keeps a close eye on TransLink along with his many other activities, said that idea did not get a warm reception at yesterday’s mayors’ meeting, which ended too late for any of us media types to get reaction from them by deadline.

The battle of the exclusive polls continues. Vancouver Sun latest up at bat here. Critics will note that approval seems to have gone from 78 (Stratcom, June, leaked to the Sun) to 69 (Justason, September, given to the Globe) to 43 (Angus Reid, now). And only one-third say he deserves to be elected.

Echoing also what I have heard in casual conversations, the Hornby bike lane is a real hot potato, with the city very divided over it.

I leave the floor to you, ladies and gentlemen. By the way, can we just start a Twitter hash tag now for the 2011 election. Maybe #yvrvote?

This story coming in tomorrow’s Report on Business section from me and business reporter David Ebner about the application from Telus + developer Ian Gillespie for a massive new office tower on Georgia Street, which has been percolating at city hall for several months now.

Although Telus’s head office has been in Vancouver for many years, the perception has always been that its main centre of operations was the giant boot out on the border of Burnaby and Vancouver — a visible symbol for many of the way big companies had fled Vancouver for the suburbs.

If this Telus tower goes ahead, that perception will be turned around symbolically.

Between Telus, Oxford developing two properties in the CBD, a proposal from Austeville Properties to develop a 19-storey office building on the old Budget site on Georgia, the Aquilini office tower resurrected, and Bentall’s new tower on Thurlow, Vancouver is starting to feel like a healthy downtown.

(Now all the city needs is a project on the Bay parkade site, a decision on Larwill Park, and a decision on the Canada Post building and Georgia will really be cooking.)

Both the Vancouver Board of Trade and city planners, of course, see this as the good result of a policy to shut down any condo development in a wide area around the central business district.

I’d like to hear from my usual suspects on the economics of this. Is it really the condo ban? Or is it the shortage of office space, which according to Bob Levine from Avison Young is driving rents for Triple A space up to $40 a square foot and making office development financially viable?