I spent a lot of time in Richmond in the late 1970s and the 1980s. I worked as a commercial fisherman with boats based in Steveston for several years, had a set of relatives there and took my son to Suzuki violin classes every week for more years than I care to remember. It was the archetypal suburb, a place so devoid of anything approaching culture that we routinely drove into the big city if we wanted decent Chinese food or a drink someplace besides the Steveston Hotel.

At the time, it seemed like nothing could be done to make this into anything resembling an urban place.

Now, it has an elevated transit line that runs through more towers all the time. It has something that looks like a main downtown crossroads. It has fabulous Chinese restaurants. And now it’s even going to have that ultimate central Vancouver perk — its own high-end neighbourhood, as I wrote in the Globe today.

My assignment: Compare and contrast the annual general meetings of Vancouver’s two major political parties, the Non-Partisan Association, once all-powerful, now hunting for its way forward, and Vision Vancouver, the new ecocapitalist party, still riding high on its 2008 win.

(Someone once said being a journalist is like having homework the rest of your life. How true.)

Vision Vancouver: West End protesters outside the downtown BCIT building, handing out pamphlets claiming darkly that “huge subsidies are being offered to private developers” as they continue their battle against two towers proposed under Vision’s ambitious STIR program. For those who don’t recall, that’s the program Vision brought in quickly after being elected, aimed at boosting the stalled construction industry while creating some permanent (as opposed to investor condo rentals) rental apartments in the city.

Inside, about 200 people all feeling the love. As Jeremy Osborne said, when he made his pitch to be elected to the executive, “I’ve been getting more excited about the city since Gregor’s elected. When I see all the stuff that’s going around on Facebook and Twitter, that makes me proud.” Someone posed a gentle question to the mayor about the STIR program, which has generated significant opposition in the West End, and he said there were going to be community consultations set up. End of dealing with difficult issues.

Gender breakdown: Hard to get an exact count, but I’d say women represented slightly more than half.

Over at the Museum of Vancouver, it was nothing but painful issues, as the 80 people at the NPA meeting struggled with whether to initiate a search for a new name and whether to go out into the community and talk to them about possible NPA policies that should be developed.

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This little story just keeps going on. Latest info here.

On the off chance that you’ve decided that you’d rather be inside a small room with a bunch of diehard political junkies talking about party governance  than channel-surfing, tonight (Wednesday, April 28) is your lucky night.

Both of the two main civic parties in Vancouver are holding their annual general meetings. The Non-Partisan Association, which has seen itself reduced to near oblivion in two elections since Y2K, is going through yet another struggle to figure out if it should re-brand itself and change the modus operandi it’s had since the 1930s, when it was formed to ensure the more organized socialists didn’t take over.

At that time, and for 60-some years since then, it’s seen its role as getting together a group of good candidates and supporting them to run for office under a common name. No party policies, no platform per se, which made it relatively easy for federal Liberals and Conservatives to work together in the non-party party. But the NPA brand, formerly seen as gold, has taken a beating and it’s also been difficult for its politicians to articulate exactly what they stand for, especially as city politicians have gravitated more and more to the centre. The party’s hard times were evident in the fact that no one could get it together to organize a fundraiser last fall, something that’s been a traditional time to rally the forces even in dark times.

The meeting tomorrow is to talk about changing the name but to something with the same NPA initials — a rather confusing proposition. I’m sure I don’t need to invite my inventive readers to come up with suggestions. But there will be a more meaty discussion about going out and talking to the membership about developing new policies that would help define the party better. I personally can’t see that working. People who are members are the choir. Someone needs to set out a new vision that can attract potential voters besides the party faithful.

At any rate, we wish them luck because I don’t think anyone in Vancouver is excited about the prospect of decades of one-party rule by Vision Vancouver.

And, speaking of VV, they’ll also be having their AGM, which party types have faithfully sworn to me is going to be very boring and just procedural. How tame. Why don’t they round up some of those disgruntled Vision voters who are forever signing their names to angry emails these days and have a discussion about how VV went off the rails? No hope, I guess.

I try not to join the howling media masses who are always wringing their hands about the faults of the recently elected administration, whoever and wherever they are. It’s so adolescent, this falling in and out of love at every election. But I do get a sense of genuine deflation and confusion from many, for whom the excitement and euphoria they felt two years ago, as this party was picking up steam with the mayoral-nominee race, has evaporated.

It’s not just the usual naive disenchantment — oh, they promised to change the world and now they’re acting so cautious, just like everyone else! Instead, the party feels like it’s disconnected and withdrawn from the public, hunkered down and not venturing out to say anything without direction from the strategists.

That’s why it would be interesting if someone kicked off a real discussion at the meeting and brought that underground dissatisfaction into the open. Then at least it could be addressed, painful as it was.

For those wanting to join the festivities:

The NPA is meeting at the Museum of Vancouver starting at 6 p.m.

Vision Vancouver is meeting at the BCIT downtown campus on Seymour starting at 6 p.m.

You can cycle on the new bike lane on Burrard Bridge to get from one to the other.

Every time I drive around the region, I’m jolted again by some new architectural trend even more hideous than the last one in this city that is allegedly the envy of the world.

Each new version of the archetypal Vancouver special is so spectacularly more ghastly than the last one — decorative glass doors! wedding-cake tops! startling new colours! fake white bricks stuck on the front! — that it makes me long for the days of the original specials, with their simple, clean lines and restrained colour combinations of white and stucco.

Then there are the fake Tudor rowhouses, the suburban monster houses in all their varieties, the boring all-glass point-tower condos that litter the city. The past two years have brought some a new decorative touches that just make you puzzled: strange splashes of colour in the condo forest, as others try to emulate James Cheng’s lego-like touches on his Spectrum towers, for one. The saddest of all — those who’ve taken to trying to upscale their modest World War Two stucco bungalows by putting Whistler-style rock facades on them. A little Home Depot is a dangerous thing.

So it was nice to get a small book in the mail the other day that is a reminder of some of the beautiful buildings that have been built here the last 20 years. I flip through the pages and remembers it’s not all a horror show out there, as I see pictures of Bing Thom’s wavy-roofed Sunset Community Centre, the glass and concrete Salt Tasting Room in Gastown’s Blood Alley, the First Nations House of Learning at UBC, the simple and elegant Celebration Hall at Mountainview Cemetery, among many others.

A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Vancouver is a companion to similar books in Toronto and Montreal. (See reviews/links here and here.) The Vancouver version, overseen by UBC architecture prof Chris MacDonald, is filled with micro-essays by local architecture critics Adele Weder and Matthew Soules, two local writers who have been bringing playfulness, lovely descriptions and rigorous criticism to their observations about Vancouver for a while.

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Until last week, I had only heard the rapid-transit line from Commercial to Broadway referred to as the Millennium Line extension. TransLink seems to be calling it now either the Broadway Line or the UBC Line.

We know those names will be replaced at some point with something more brand-y. How about suggestions? And we might really need two names if there is one that runs along the Arbutus tracks to the north of Broadway, as well as the Broadway line.

I was thinking Creme de La Creme Line, to capitalize on that famous phrase used by a Kerrisdale resident arguing at a city hall public hearing many moons ago against the city’s decision to designate the Arbutus line as a transportation corridor. But that should probably be reserved for any future rapid-transit line that runs south from Broadway on Arbutus.

The names we’ve had so far are so … I don’t know, like something dreamed up by an advertising company that’s never set foot in Vancouver. Expo Line, Millennium Line, Canada Line, Evergreen Line.

Los Angeles is no help. They’ve named their lines boring things like Orange and Red. I kind of like London’s names, because at least they evoke places or images: Circle Line, Picadilly Line, Hammersmith & City Line. New York? Well, they’re so world class they can name a train the D Line and it still sounds exotic. Paris is not that because they go by colours and then the names of the stations at either end of a line — geographically evocative, once more, but it only works because they have great names. So French-sounding! (La Defense-Chateau de Vincennes; Porte des Lilas-Gambetta) The sound of Commercial-UBC just does not make my heart race.

We need something with romance, something that evokes Vancouver, something people could write a song about.

There has already been a lot of information and discussion posted here and elsewhere about TransLink’s early planning for the Broadway Line.

Here’s my Globe story today, which has a bit more reaction and commentary from various observers and TransLink’s new planning guy, Mike Shiffer, the public point man on this.

Hi there!

There’s a fair bit of interest in the public consultation open houses for the Broadway West-UBC rapid transit plan.  Could you please let your viewers/listeners/readers know the dates and times of the five sessions?

• Thurs. Apr. 22 UBC Student Union Bldg., 2^nd floor Party Room
• Tues. May 4 St James Community Square, 3214 W. 10^th Ave.
• Thurs. May 6 West Point Grey United Church, 4595 W. 8^th Ave.
• Tues. May 11 Centre for Digital Media, 122 – 577 Great Northern Way
• Thurs. May 13 Vancouver Masonic Centre 1495 W. 8^th Ave.

All sessions run from 6 – 9pm.

This internal memo was passed on to me recently, a decision by the Vancouver planning department that a proposal for a new tower added to the existing Beach Towers complex is not going to be allowed to go ahead. One less sore point for the West End.

April 19,2010

Martin Bruckner

IBI/HB Architects

700 – 1285 West Pender Street

Vancouver, BC    V6E 4B1

Dear Mr. Bruckner:

RE:  

         1600 Beach Avenue (Beach Towers)

       Thank you for your rezoning inquiry for the above property which we received February 23, 2010.  You inquired about rezoning the Beach Towers property from RM-5A to CD-1 under the Short Term Incentives for Rental (STIR) Program to permit construction of a fourth residential tower at the corner of Cardero and Harwood streets, and townhouses at grade along Beach Avenue with a café at the corner of Beach and Bidwell Street. 

This site was originally developed in the 1960s with three residential towers at 19 and 20 storeys, or 176 to 180 feet.  The existing density is 3.39 FSR which is legally non-conforming to the RM-5A maximum of 2.20 FSR.  You propose to retain the 447 rental units in the three existing towers and indicate that the tenants would not be displaced by the proposed construction.  The proposed fourth tower would add 165 rental units, plus another 25 rental units in the proposed townhouses.  Three options for the tower were shown in the inquiry ranging from 15 storeys to 22-storeys (199 feet).  Density would increase from 3.39 to 4.88 FSR in all three options.

STIR Program

Under the STIR Program, rezonings to higher density and/or height can be considered where new rental units are built and secured through a long-term housing agreement, provided existing tenants are not displaced by the development.  In considering such proposals, Planning staff review the policies, guidelines and regulations that apply to the site and its context.  In the approval of the STIR Program in June 2009, it was specifically noted that the program does not suggest that the City’s interest in achieving rental construction overrides prevailing policy or guidelines, or reasonable urban design considerations.

RM-5A Tower Separation Guideline

After reviewing the RM-5A Guidelines with regard to your submission, we note that your proposed tower does not meet the specifics or the general intent of the guideline for tower separation [4.3(a) on page 8].  This guideline calls for 400 feet (121.9 m) of spacing between towers that are within the same block-face and over 110 feet (33.6 m) in height. 

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Here is my fuller story on the city decision yesterday about the Olympic village, although we’ve had quite an exhaustive and thoughtful analysis by Michael Geller in an earlier comment.