For those who haven’t spotted them yet, the orange neon grizzlies emerging from the concrete wall by the Canada Line Langara/49th station are a must-see. Apparently they have generated at least one call to the city from a realtor ranting that they are lowering property values in the neighbourhood. Well, they’ll be gone soon. I don’t think the Canada Line public art stays forever, too bad.

Picture and a tiny bit of info here.

For several years, there was an unprecedented ceasefire between developers and residents in this city. After a huge brawl in the early 1990s with the public over the development of the Arbutus lands where the old brewery had been, city planners worked to find another way to talk with the public and that seemed to succeed to those looking on. All was quiet. But ever since former mayor Sam Sullivan started talking about EcoDensity, little wildfires of community resistance started popping up. That’s continued and grown as the Vision Vancouver team introduced its Short Term Incentives for Rental program. The email below, from the group Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver, is the latest testament to that movement.

It’s been perplexing to many people who’ve watched the city, where almost 100,000 people in new buildings got absorbed into the downtown with barely a bleat from anyone. And now, these little protests here and there about STIR projects, about social-housing projects, about this and that project. They were dismissed at first at fringe conspiracy theorists. Some of that may be true about certain players, but they are picking up steam here and there.

I’ve come to believe that what’s going on is that, for years, there was no problem because the growth was absorbed into mostly vacant industrial land on the edges of Vancouver. A few people mourned the resortification of the waterfront or the former grubby area around Granville Street but, by and large, there was little outcry. That’s even though there was far, far more density packed into the new Downtown South neighbourhood — heritage density bonus transfers, more density bonuses given for theatres and art galleries and Orpheum additions — than the West End will ever see.

But now the available downtown space is almost gone and developers are looking for other opportunities in Vancouver: the West End, the Cambie Corridor, various nodes along Kingsway. As well, as Housing Minister Rich Coleman has poured money into social housing, both philosophy and the city’s available land parcels have dictated that some of those 100-unit towers would be built outside the usual Downtown South/Downtown Eastside Bermuda triangle of cheap housing.

That means a lot more conflict with existing neighbourhoods. City council’s policies haven’t changed that much, really. Developers haven’t changed. Developer donations to civic political parties, whether NPA or Vision, haven’t changed. What has changed is the location of development into the established residential communities and that’s proving to be a much tougher go than plonking towers onto vacant land around False Creek. It will be a test of this council and future councils how they deal with that new reality. Just wait, by the way, for the insurgency that develops as people find out about the plans for density all along Cambie from 25th to 49th.

In the meantime, here’s the media release from NSM and Ned Jacobs

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Another symbol of an era passes on. First of the stories here.

The journey of the Marine Gateway project through city hall is one worth following.

This, for those who haven’t read it before, is the largest development ever considered for rezoning outside the downtown. It will also, I believe, set a certain level of expectation for the kind of density that might be considered for other transit stations on the Canada Line and elsewhere.

As those who were at the urban-design review panel meeting Wednesday heard, as part of the planning context for the building, the city is considering density for much of the length of Cambie between 25th and Marine Drive to capitalize on the new Canada Line and its stations. Four to six stories in some areas, like around Queen Elizabeth Park, six to eight stories around King Edward, potentially something similar around 33rd, where a future station might go in, a node of even higher buildings around Oakridge, more density along the “transit corridor” from 41st to 49th, and then a tapering off to residential down to Marine.

Then at Marine, there’s intended to be a very high-density node, with the PCI/Gateway building the highest, but buildings on the other three corners and within 500 feet going up to 15-20 stories in some cases, it looked like to me. The gas station on the northwest corner and the little complex with the Chinese restaurant on the northeast have already been bought or optioned, it sounds like, and developers are already working on towers for those sites. (In fact, three panel members normally there — Jim Cheng, Maurice Pez, and Jim Huffman — had to abstain from voting because they are working for one or the other of those developers and so had conflicts to be avoided.)

So what happens with the node at Marine and Cambie, where the PCI group is proposing a near-million-square-foot development with a residential tower of 350 feet, along with a smaller office tower, an 11-screen theatre, and a retail complex, is important.

The project was not supported at the urban design panel on Wednesday night, as I noted, in a 5-4 vote.

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I wrote in today’s Globe about the impending review of the giant Marine Gateway project at the foot of Cambie, accompanied by some neighbourhood unease about the size of this project, which you can read here.

Since that appeared this morning, the urban design panel has reviewed this project and voted 5-4 not to support it. I’ll post more details tomorrow — sorry, it’s been a long day — but I’ll just note that no one except architect Bruce Haden, the chair, said they thought the project was too dense for that area of the city, though several said they didn’t like the tower design and/or the massing. Many on the panel said it was an exciting concept and a project that would provide an interesting exclamation point to the end of the line, as well as an urban node outside the centre.

The hunt is one for two plum positions at the city, as I see by reading the career ads in the Globe and Mail this morning: General Manager, Engineering Services and Director, Corporate Communications.

For those not in the know, those positions are vacant because 1. Tom Timm retired as head of engineering recently. He gave two weeks’ notice and is now gone. 2. Ryan Merkley, who had been filling in as interim director after decamping from Toronto Mayor David Miller’s office to come to Vancouver temporarily, has decided not to stay on in the position. (He tells me it was a hard decision, but in the end, he and his family decided to stay in Toronto, where his wife runs a successful magazine.) You’ll recall that prior to Merkley (who had also worked for Vision Vancouver on their election campaign), the director was Laurie Best, now running the web operations. For past history there, check my blog archives and Sean Holman’s publiceyeonline.com.

Okay, history lesson over. Now on to the exciting new jobs.

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The Sun has been covering the B.C. human-rights tribunal hearing this week on allegations of discrimination by Vancouver’s downtown ambassadors. There’s been a lot of commentary on this blog about ambassadors and security guards (sometimes erroneously seen as one and the same), so I thought you’d be interested in this if you haven’t already seen it. I should point out that the coverage so far has come from people brought forward by Pivot Legal (someone who ‘went undercover’ with the ambassadors and then testified about his experience earlier this week; today, a UBC expert). The testimony from the ambassadors or the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, which hires them, is presumably yet to come.

As I discovered yesterday, when I made my Sunday morning run to the YWCA, the new Dunsmuir bike lane is going to do more than just turn over a lane of road space to bikes. It is also being accompanied by new traffic regulations.

So far, there are new signs at both Seymour and Hornby prohibiting right-hand turns off Dunsmuir, something I noticed as I was halfway through my (now illegal turn) onto Hornby.

That means anyone wanting to go north on these streets will now have to jog over to Georgia at some point from Dunsmuir in order to take that route north. (DON’T turn on Beatty, because when you get to Georgia, you will discover it is one-way going east at that point. Cambie and beyond is okay.)

So far, there do not appear to be any no left-turn signs at any of the other north-running streets. At Beatty, there’s a warning to yield to cyclists before turning. Cambie and Homer are not signed with anything.

All very confusing and reinforces my sense that this bike lane is going to require much more serious adjustment for people than the Burrard Bridge lane did.

I suspect that not many people get how unusual it is to have business leaders donating money directly to government to help create social housing. There certainly hasn’t been anything like this in Canada.

The closest you get is in the United States, where large foundations (using money derived from the earlier robber-baron capitalist endeavours, in some cases) will donate money and/or help broker complex deals for housing projects involving private developers, who get tax credits from the federal government, non-profits, community groups and more. Occasionally, there will be direct contributions from businesses into the mix.

What happened here in B.C. last week is really a new model, as I touched on briefly in my Globe article Friday.

Thought-provoking article from the folks in Seattle analyzing why Vancouver buses get more riders per bus and, more important, why increasing bus frequency typically does not automatically mean more bus riders. (You can bet TransLink planners are looking at this kind of research while they figure out which bus routes they’re going to scale back on which to increase as they try to do more with existing dollars in the next year.)