My fuller story will come later, but here’s my brief summary for now on the city’s plan for the 250 units of social housing at the Olympic village, plus their full report. Enjoy the numbers!

But the basics are: half the housing will get some form of subsidy that ensures the rents are no more than 30 per cent of the renter’s low income; half will be rented out at hefty market rates, with first preference given to key essential-services workers, like police, nurses, firefighters, and others associated with those fields. It’s something London, England, kicked off and has spread to some American cities, though it can appear mystifying how having first crack at a $1,600-a-month one-bedroom is going to solve any affordability issues for anyone. (When there’s zero per cent vacancy and you can’t get an apartment anywhere, then it’s advantage, presumably.)

I hope I haven’t gotten myself banned from city hall by mentioning in my fuller story, coming later,  that city manager Penny Ballem gave us a briefing on the report at city hall today.

I’m not sure why we have to have these “off-the-record” briefings from her. I think it’s to ensure that we get the right information, but don’t quote her because it would steal the limelight from politicians. But thank goodness she’s there.

The mayor got five minutes at the podium at the end of the briefing and his answers on how the market-rental housing would work were so confusing that several reporters thought he was saying that people would have to pay only 20 per cent of their income for one of the market-rental apartments in the village.

For the record, the report says that people whose income exceeds five times the cost of the rent on an apartment should not be allowed to rent there. So if you make $10,000 a month, you won’t be allowed to rent the $1,600-a-month one-bedroom. Only if you make $7,900 or less per month. But it doesn’t mean that if someone who only makes $3,000 a month — only, ha! — decides to rent a one-bedroom apartment, that person isn’t going to get it for $600 a month instead of the normal $1,600.

A great analysis of the current Broadway corridor options here, with succinct explanations on the difference between light rail and streetcar (now I know, at last), the dangers of having a streetcar instead of light rail, the rapid-transit gap that needs to be fixed, and the dangers of ignoring the long-distance commuters coming into Vancouver as we plan the line.

And for those who didn’t see the link in the comments on an earlier post, another great site and debate going on here.

I never imagined, when I was spending my 20s studying the contemporary French novel, that I would enjoy reading financial statements as much as I do. But it turns out they’re just as fun as Boris Vian or Michel Butor, in their own way, like seeing where the millions go at the city.

The city’s financial statements were put out late last Friday afternoon (hmmmmm, what could this mean?) with lots of interesting bits in them. Did you know the city has provided a $12-million line of credit to the PNE? I didn’t but there it is in the statements. Or that the city collected almost $40 million more in taxes in 2009 than in 2008. That’s a hefty jump. That was almost entirely to pay for the increase in costs in policing ($15 million), general government ($17 million) and fire protection ($5 million), as every other sector of city government stayed mostly the same or decreased.

But of course the most fascinating section for us city-hall junkies is the Olympic village (pages 23/24), where we learn:

– the private developer Millennium Developments owes the city $710 million as of March 26, 2010 ($15 million more than on Dec. 31, 2009 — how that interest piles up quickly). That’s, of course, just for the construction loan. It also still owes $170 million for the land that it bought back in 2006.

– Millennium got a $1.5 million bonus for on-time delivery of the village to the Games

– the city is paying only .8 per cent interest on $480 million of the money it borrowed from banks to relend to Millennium, but is charging Millennium somewhere between four and eight per cent, depending on how long the loan goes on — that spread is a guarantee for the city that it will get its money even if not all the condos sell, according to the statements.

– and final fun fact: the city expects to see $200 million in deposits put down on the 500 condos that remain to be sold at the village. That would be as of May 15, when condo marketer Bob Rennie is going to launch a new sales phase with a “street of dreams” marketing campaign. As the mayor said so poignantly prior to the Games, “Go Bob go.”

This letter in from Sarah Isaacs:

Response to Vancouver council dumbfounded over backlash to rental program (April 13, 2010).

As a resident of the West End – epicentre of the opposition to the City of Vancouver’s Short Term Incentive for Rentals (STIR) program – I wish to clarify how little our opposition has to do with either eco-density or the STIR program as articulated by City Council.

We oppose three proposals (one approved) to construct towers in the West End. These towers all require rezoning to double or triple allowable height and density, and are only available to developers via the STIR program.

Three towers in a 200-hectare community constitute a visible and substantial change. Because the West End has a south-westerly exposure, they will block views, shroud smaller buildings in shadow, eliminate much-enjoyed privacy, and block hours of sunlight in a rainy, dark city. Additionally, the rezoning represents a substantial departure from decades-long, strictly-enforced West End zoning and development guidelines.

The Vancouver planning department’s recommendations to rezone suggest they are no longer governed by zoning bylaws and guidelines, but instead by trends in urban planning that include ‘eco-density’ and ‘rental in perpetuity’.

Ironically, the West End is the embodiment of eco-density and rental in perpetuity, with 218 people per hectare, over 80% rental, and laws in place to minimize erosion of rental stock. This is the reason for the backlash against STIR: the city is asking us to sacrifice community character, property values, and liveability to implement goals that the West End already embodies to the greatest extent in the city and perhaps the country.

Public-policy nerds, transit buffs, anxious Broadway merchants, anxious off-Broadway residents: start your engines.

TransLink held its first quiet stakeholders’ meeting Thursday to introduce the tentative six options for Broadway rapid transit. As people kept reminding me, these aren’t fixed in stone. The idea is to put preliminary ideas out there to get public feedback and weigh the pros and cons of each, as well as possibly making changes.

The public meetings will be starting soon (check the TransLink website for dates and times to be put up imminently, I’m told).

There are a certain amount of policy talk, but boiled down to the essentials, TransLink has promised to do a “multipe account evaluation,” which means they’ll score each possibility in several different categories: environmental, financial, social/community, deliverability, transportation goals (i.e. which would catch the most riders), and urban-development matching (which would mesh with existing development nodes).

Now, drum rolllllll, here they are:

1. A bus rapid transit route (BRT) that would essentially follow the existing 99-B route, though with many more mechanisms (priority lights and so on) to make it a real rapid bus

2. Light rapid transit 1, which would also essentially follow the existing 99-B route, though there are two options to consider at the eastern end when it comes to how to hook into the existing system (go along Broadway or dip down to Great Northern Way to meet that orphaned VCC station just west of Clark, built back when city council was convinced the flats were going to explode into a high-tech cauldron of invention)

3. Light rapid transit 2. Same thing, but with a branch that would use the Arbutus tracks from Broadway over to Science World

4. Rail transit. Something like SkyTrain. I presume. Also on the B-line route, but would have to be fenced or separated in some way from the street in the way that LRT doesn’t.

5. Rail transit on Broadway, with the LRT branch on the Arbutus line, same as #3.

6. And finally, last but not least, the “best bus alternative” — a look at what TransLink could do to provide the best possible transit service using only buses (but which is somehow different from bus rapid transit in #1). This will give everyone the lowest-cost comparator to measure all the other options against.

I didn’t get to stay and hear how the different stakeholder groups (city staff, business groups and resident groups were thee, from what I could see) reacted to all of these, so I’m dying to hear what the preliminary reaction is.

By the way, in case you’re wondering when this will all come about, don’t hold your breath. TransLink planner Mike Shiffer wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to a date for me, since, as he rightly pointed out, it’s hard to set dates when you don’t have any kind of funding mechanism defined yet.

As Joyce Kilmer didn’t put it, I think that I shall never see, A condo lovely as a tree.

And that’s how city staff seem to feel too, as you’ll see if you carefully read this report where they decline to provide a would-be developer with six additional floors of density in order to preserve a “heritage” tulip tree in the West End.

But note that they would have been willing to give the six extra floors in exchange for the tree except for one glitch — the owner of the neighbouring property, where half the tree’s root bulb exists, declined to provide a guarantee to protect the tree. So staff, feeling that there were no guarantees that the tree would stay and the community could end up with a taller tower in exchange for nothing, declined to go for this deal.

An eye-opener for me. I had no idea the city traded density for trees. This ought to get people in the West End, currently in an uproar about trading density for permanent market rental apartments, into even more of a tizzy.

Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll see that as a good deal, in a way that density-for-rentals isn’t, and totally wrong. After all, blogs are made by fools like me.

I was at a leadership prayer breakfast this morning when this news popped up on the net.

Mayor Gregor Robertson, Housing Minister Rich Coleman and First United Church minister Ric Matthews, whose church has been turned into one of the shelters, were all looking very happy and cordial as they discussed the news announcement afterwards.

Here’s the government news release

SHELTERS

Great media frenzy yesterday, as people rushed to put out the news about the city’s report on its Olympic costs. My version here, including former mayor Philip Owen’s assessment. Those in the know will remember he and his council insisted the city shouldn’t have to pay for anything.

But some wildly varying numbers were used (along with wildly varying analysis on whether it was all worth it or not), depending on what you decided to count as the total Olympic expense.

Some people used $729 — that was the total bill, according to the report, for everything the city did, but it got $175 million back in federal and provincial grants, plus private-sector payments (e.g. to put up pavilions at the live sites). The report put the final bill at $554 million. But that was counting in all kinds of things that the city was planning to do anyway, like fix up Granville Street and put in the public stuff in Southeast False Creek (seawall, bridges, manmade islands, district energy utility, etc.)

And the $554 didn’t include, strangely to my eye, the $24 million that Annette Klein in the budget office estimated was the staff time that went into planning the games for the past five years or into “volunteering” during the actual Games experience (a tab that is estimated at $2.5 million, not surprising when you have highly paid engineers and planners doing crowd control of pimply teenagers and crazed pin collectors at the live sites).

So what were the real Olympic costs, money that was spent that didn’t result in a new community centre or upgraded street or ice rink or all the other things that we will get to enjoy for the better part of a century.

I’d say all the operating costs — $30 million — plus the staff time — another $24 million, for sure. That’s $54 million. And then there’s an unquantifiable amount, the money that could have been saved if these new facilities weren’t being built for the Olympics. Vancouver did pay a premium to build at a time when construction costs were at an all-time high. And I’d be willing to bet money that there was a little bit of a premium paid because people wanted to make all the projects the best possible to show off for the Olympics.

On the other hand, the city also got a big chunk of money from the federal and provincial governments for several of the facilities plus $30 million for the social housing at the village. If you calculated the premium that the city paid for building in a frenzied period and deducted the contributions from other partners, would we come out about even? Hard to say.

As for $54 million in operating costs, was that a good expenditure to put on an event that made Vancouver look utterly fabulous to the rest of the world? I don’t have to tell you that opinion is divided out there.

But it seems like not a bad investment in comparison with some I’ve heard of. Did you hear that the B.C. government spent $17 million on an advertising deal with NBC during the Olympics that included getting the writers on the TV series The Office to put in a mention of Vancouver in one of the scripts? (Great find by Bob Mackin at 24 Hours on this.)

Okay, enough from me. Have at ‘er.

This just got posted on the city’s internal wire, news that Sue Harvey, who was the city’s cultural services director for years and recently ran the city’s live sites during the Olympics, is not going to go back to that director post. She doesn’t seem to be quite retiring, as she talks about doing other projects for the city. Readers of this blog will recall that there were some rumblings of dissatisfaction with Harvey’s reign over cultural services and, when the Vision team was first elected, there was much talk that she would be removed. But there seems to have been a more cordial working out of whatever is happening.

Sue Harvey, Executive Producer of LiveCity Vancouver is stepping down from her regular position as Managing Director of Cultural Services. LiveCity Vancouver was an unprecedented success, attracting more than 650,000 visitors to the two City celebration sites during the 2010 Winter Games. LiveCity Vancouver also demonstrated that with good planning and excellent programming, Vancouverites can have fun! Sue joined the City in 1992 to undertake an 18-month project and stayed for 18 years serving as a Cultural Planner, Social Planner, Project Manager for Hastings Park and the PNE, Managing Director of Cultural Services and finally Executive Producer of LiveCity Vancouver. Under Sue’s leadership as Managing Director of Cultural Services, the City adopted a new Culture Plan, initiated peer review juries, increased the cultural grants budget by $3 million, reinvested in the Civic Theatres, and secured a wide range of cultural amenities through development incentives including the new VSO Music School, Offsite, the Vancouver Art Gallery sculpture garden at the Shangri-la, the Vancouver International Film Centre and the Contemporary Art Gallery. Sue will continue to work with the City on projects and special events after a well-earned vacation.

For those not following me on Twitter, where I re-tweeted this, here’s the latest from the mayor’s trip to New York, which he posted at 1 a.m. NY time as far as I can tell.

“toured brooklyn navy yard. leading edge industrial zone creating green jobs. false creek flats? south van?