Thanks to Gord Price at his blog Price Tags, here’s the latest rendering for the new Marine Gateway complex down on former industrial land near the Marine Drive Canada Line station.

The unique design is from Peter Busby’s firm.

Things to ponder.

– Look at the sheer size of this project. At 952,000 square feet, it’s almost the same size as the two-tower + university + city offices Woodward’s project (980,000) and about two-thirds the square footage of the 11-block Olympic village. That’s a huge whack of people and space, which will have an impact not just on this area but on other commercial areas, including the downtown, because of the way it shifts the centre of gravity for the city.

– While the West End residents group is mounting a small revolution because they feel targeted by the city’s program to create rental apartments, this project is the biggest rental-creation effort so far, with 187 of the 570 residential units here designated as rental.

– After some confusion following council’s decision to ask the planning department to go ahead with considering this proposal (the department’s official position had been that this site should remain as industrial land), the project has one tower, not the two originally envisioned by PCI.

A group outside the VAG — UBC, SFU and Architecture Canada — have organized a public debate on where the gallery should go. May 20, 7 p.m., Robson Square Theatre. Be there or be out of the biggest cultural/urban planning/architecture debate this city has seen in decades.

VAG.MAY20POSTER

Aha, the Visionistas have decided to strategically give out their latest poll on Gregor Robertson’s popularity.

The highlights here in the Vancouver Sun. Would have been nice to see all of the questions in the poll — maybe a PDF? I’ll let all of you do the analysis.

This memo concerning Robin Adair went out yesterday at city hall, which didn’t come as much of a surprise to me. I’d heard a rumbling a couple of weeks ago that things were not going well in the last while. They’d started out rosy but something happened in the last while.

Although I know Vision Fatwa types will be tempted to blame it on domineering Penny Ballem and/or domineering Vision office staff and/or a political gap too big to jump, I’d heard that there was friction over many other issues with Robin throughout city hall. I didn’t have any dealings with him personally so I’m not in a position to comment on anything directly, but I hear from those without a political axe to grind that it was, as they say, a “bad fit” and that his personal style just wasn’t meshing with people all over the hall.

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People are unhappy when their parks get closed. We heard about it with Oppenheimer Park last year (now opened with grand new design) and now we’re hearing it a Grandview Park.

Here’s the news release from one group. Not sure what the counter-arguments are from others in the area, but perhaps posters can enlighten us all.

SOME COMMERCIAL DRIVE RESIDENTS CALLING FOR PARK PLAN THAT AVOIDS YEAR-LONG CLOSURE

Grandview Park needs sprucing up, but not a major makeover that requires full closure for almost a whole year

——————–
About 40 people met in Commercial Drive’s Grandview Park last Sunday to discuss alternatives to the approved plan that needs the entire park to be fenced off for nearly a year.

The homeowners, businesspeople, seniors, families, students and others attending the May 9 gathering agree that the park needs sprucing up, but nothing so ambitious that the whole city block-sized area will be off-limits for a year after June 30.

“Grandview Park needs a slight facelift, not a $1.5 million new face,” says area resident and parent Hazel Hoyle, explaining that really it is only the washrooms that are in a bad way. The small waterpark and the playground are showing their age, she says, but other than that, the rest of the park is fine and draws hundreds of people every day through the summer, and even more on weekends.

Hoyle feels that the parks board has not consulted the public adequately, and has instead been disproportionately influenced by a relatively small group of homeowners living near the park. Had the year-long closure been widely known, she says, “we believe there would have been an uproar.”

Located at Commercial and Charles Street, about halfway between First Avenue and East Hastings Street, the park and the adjacent Britannia community centre, school and library are at the heart of the Bohemian, iconic neighbourhood.

The “Friends of Grandview Park” homeowners’ group prompted the redevelopment because it feels the park is dangerous for them and their kids. In particular, according to parks board reports, the Friends complain about “non-families” using the playground, and the regular presence of “illegal inhabitants and illegal protestors.”

East Vancouver resident David Beattie says he and many friends worry that such a major makeover will spark a wider gentrification push that will do to “the Drive” what spiralling house prices have done to Kitsilano. The west side neighbourhood retains very little of the “hippie” feel that it had in the ’60s.

“We want East Vancouver and “the Drive” in particular to be a community where you don’t have to be rich to exist,” says Beattie, 51, “and where we don’t criminalize our neighbours.”

Beattie, a freelance writer and ESL teacher, says he and friends are holding a “Block Party” in the park this next Saturday evening, May 15. In addition to live music and dancing, he says, people will be told of the closure and total makeover plans.

There isn’t a growing community in North America that isn’t at least a little bit concerned about how to create lower-cost housing and how to create denser communities with less environmental impact.

Even so, it will probably surprise some to hear that West Van is one of those communities.

The city has negotiated with British Properties’ developers to add townhouses and apartments to the upcoming Rodgers Creek development and reduce the number of single-family homes. It’s legalized secondary suites. And it’s considering its own version of laneway houses, with the first two pilot projects due to be considered later this month or in early June. But that’s not without some angst, as I describe in my Globe story today.

As I noted in a previous post, I’m living the hard life in the backwoods of Oahu. I didn’t realize how hard until I discovered that I had left my only novel behind at my hotel the first night and was trapped in the wilderness without anything to read.

I’d frankly rather go without water and my companion felt pretty much the same, so we set out yesterday to find books in northern Oahu.

That turned into quite an expedition. I knew this was a surfing oasis, but I didn’t know that it meant people didn’t read — not even surfing books. We went to the biggest town in the area, Halei’wa and hunted high and low at grocery stores, gas stations, general tourist stores, art galleries where the most we could rustle up was a few People, Entertainment Weekly and Us magazines. We were contemplating a desperate run to Honolulu and it seemed more than ironic to us that there was a literary and music festival scheduled for the city this weekend, while we were half an hour away, on the verge of breaking into someone’s house to try to find a book.

Finally, someone suggested we try the library in the next town over, Waialua, an old sugar-factory town on the hillside nearby. After a few wrong turns, we found the town and the little local library in the shadow of the sugar-mill stack and hauled away a stack of books from their resale section for a mere $7, managing to pluck out Linda Spalding’s novel set in Hawaii, a biography of Julia Child, Sebastian Junger’s A Perfect Storm and a few other gems from the usual airport dreck.

I also checked out the magazines donated by locals, being recycled. As I suspected, quite a few surfing/outdoors type magazines. But the preponderance were … Fortune magazines. Aha, this is why no one reads. They’re not surfing. They’re counting the ways to make money from their lovely retirement homes.

The big push to sell the remaining 500 Olympic village condos starts this Saturday. As I noted previously, the city’s financial statement for last year says the city is hoping to see $200 million in deposits come in from these condo sales.

In the meantime, CBC has a story about one disgruntled condo buyer there who is angry because he thought he would get a view with his $1.4 million condo, but now apparently won’t. The warning he seems to be trying to give is that, if you buy from plans only, you could end up disappointed.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that, even if you buy only already built apartments, you can be disappointed on the view front. I’ve covered more than a few meetings at city hall where buyers who thought they would have unobstructed views forever were hugely disappointed when a developer put up another tower in front years later.

I wasn’t at the day cruise/TransLink AGM (see previous post) but others were. Here are the reports from two pretty dedicated TransLink watchers, Frank Luba at the Province and Vancouver city councillor Geoff Meggs.

Here I am surrounded by all the usual problems.

The city is strapped for money and is proposing that all city employees take unpaid vacation one day out of every two weeks. The schools are also struggling and have been scheduling unpaid days off as well for teachers.

Affordable housing is desperately needed but a group in Chinatown have mounted a protest against a project planned in their neighbourhood. Not that they’re against affordable housing, mind you, but this housing is for people with serious drug and mental illness problems, which will cause added problems in an area already struggling to keep itself afloat economically.

Elsewhere, community groups are mounting protests against a planned luxury development.

And chickens are ambling around at my feet.

Not, not Vancouver or even a Vancouver of the future. I’m meandering around Oahu (yes, I know — a lot of travelling lately, but I promise I won’t leave town again for a long time) bopping from Waikiki yesterday to a campground on the northeastern end of the island today.

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