I had such great response to my previous post (thanks all urban planners out there, Lance, Michael and others) on the success of the Granville Mall during the Olympics that I wrote a story for the Globe too on it, which you can read here. As you’ll see in the story, downtown businesses, the mayor and police are all enchanted with how the street has become much more than just the under-40 club stroll the past week and a half.

I should also give credit to the team of Pechet + Robb, who also worked on the Granville Street redesign, which actually covered both the five blocks of the mall and another four blocks south of that. You can’t see a lot of their work on the street these days — the bendy metal street furniture and the basalt strips and glass embedded in the pavement — because of the crush of people on the street, but when everyone leaves Monday, take a look.

Oh, surely with all these wonderful pictures of Vancouver being beamed around the world 24/7, we can rest assured that those Olympic village condos will sell for top prices and ensure that the Malek brothers/Millennium Developments will pay back all the money the city loaned them.

Don’t be celebrating too quickly. Even the city’s chief real-estate optimist is not willing to say anything of the sort, as I document in my latest story on the always-interesting village finances in today’s Globe. It’s going to be close call, according to Bob Rennie and many others. Likely the Maleks will have to sell off the retail components of the village, plus the 110 units that were supposed to be rental apartments to make the numbers come out even at the end of the balance sheet.

Others I’ve talked to said that the developers will likely make a very small profit or take a small loss. But before you start saving your pennies to pay for the shortfall, one interesting thing to remember — even if there is a small loss, the city of Vancouver is still making money on the loan since it’s charging the Maleks more interest than what it’s paying out to its lender.

One of the many interesting phenomena that have emerged during the Games (which is actually turning into a giant social experiment in our city) is the way the massive crowds are redefining public space in Vancouver.

They’re congregating in places no one quite expected and voting with their feet on what space they think is the most amenable.

So far, the winner in that competition is the new fixed-up Granville Street. Somehow it just feels much more like a pedestrian party space that even Robson. While there are lots of pedestrians on Robson, it still feels mostly like a street temporarily closed to traffic.

But Granville feels like the urban place. That’s partly because of the remake, with the cool vertical light poles that give the street a special feel. It’s partly because of the Lunar festival artwork that got set up near Georgia and Granville. And it’s partly because the street doesn’t feel like just a regular street, with its wide sidewalks and not-quite-a-road road.

So when I went walking down there yesterday, it had all the most interesting activity. The pin-sellers were there up and down the street. The buskers were setting up their music spots (the business association organized for 120 of them to be down there for the Games). Kids were stamping happily on the wooden stands for the lantern trees, part of the Lunar Festival art.

The homelessness activists, showing some creative savvy, had three people “sleeping” on the street with sleeping bags thrown over them and crudely lettered cardboard signs at their feet giving some of the details about homelessness, lack of a federal housing strategy, and more. (And people were snapping pictures and gathering around like crazy.)

This is the street where impromptu hockey games have been staged. It’s also the street that has a rise in it at Georgia, so that you can get a sense of the river of people on it by looking down the slope.

All of that is making everyone along the street — and beyond — rethink how it might be used.

Charles Gauthier is the director of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, a group that fought for well over a decade to try to get cars back on the street. Now, seeing how successful it is, they have not just stopped talking about cars. They’re even interested in getting the buses off from time to time.

“People are asking us, ‘How often can we close Granville down?'” he said. Not every day, but maybe Saturdays and Sundays, if the crowds continue to appear. No one wants a dead street. But if it can be like this, where people are using it as kind of their back yard, the businesses there would love to see more of that.

This story was in Saturday’s Globe but for some reason isn’t on the website, so I’m posting it here, rather than linking it for now.

2010 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Free tickets are nice, but neighbourhood hopes attention will lead to increased funding from province

Rick Russell and Bill Lucas normally wouldn’t spend a sunny afternoon indoors, glued to a television set.

But the Olympics are here. Specifically, the U.S.-Norway hockey game is on, so they’ve ditched their small Downtown Eastside rooms and have come down to the nearby Salvation Army homeless shelter and drop-in centre complex to follow it on a big screen.

The day before, Mr. Lucas also watched American Lindsay Vonn ski to victory.

“I like downhill. But that course is scary,” he said, with an impish grin and a shiver as he sipped coffee in the Canadian-flag-bedecked shelter on Cordova Street.

They’re far from the only ones in the Downtown Eastside following the Games. Almost every shelter and drop-in centre has a television tuned to the Games for the mostly hockey fans. As well, hundreds of local residents are going to curling and hockey events and medal ceremonies, thanks to tickets the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee or developer Concord Pacific distributed to neighbourhood social agencies.

“The best part for me was the medal ceremonies,” said Bill Parman, a bushy-bearded 51-year-old former carpenter who went through drug rehab recently and is trying to stay clean. “It was really good that the Canadian got a silver” – referring to snowboarder Mike Robertson. “The whole place went nuts. That was awesome, the patriotism and so forth.”

Mr. Parman, who is living in a residence run by the Portland Hotel Society, also spends his days walking around enjoying the crowds on the streets, especially at Robson Square.

None of them thinks the Games are an unmixed blessing. They don’t go to the protests – in fact, they’re critical of the “hooligans” who do damage or whom they have heard are getting paid to attend rallies – but they share some of the sentiments expressed by the more moderate members.

“I don’t know how the Games are supposed to help the people down here. And everyone says we’re going to have a big bill to pay,” said Mr. Russell, a 53-year-old former labourer from Chilliwack who is now on disability because of the arthritis in his legs. He spent three months sleeping on the streets last year before he got into a small room in the Downtown Eastside. It’s small and dirty and he doesn’t get along well with other people in the building. But it’s his only choice for now.

Like almost everyone in the Downtown Eastside, he’s holding out hope that, just the way the Olympics pushed the province into creating more low-cost housing in the past couple of years, the spotlight on the neighbourhood during the Games will keep the provincial money flowing afterward.

“I think because of all the attention we got, they’re going to put in more housing. They have to have more here for people to go to. The hostels are pretty well full,” Mr. Lucas said.

But in the meantime, they and many others are prepared to enjoy the Games while they’re here. VANOC did not provide information on how many tickets were supplied overall to neighbourhood groups, but the Salvation Army got 44, the Lookout Emergency Aid Society got 140 and the Portland Hotel Society got a total of about 600 from VANOC and development company Concord Pacific.

“We went and saw the medal ceremonies with Nelly Furtado with some of our people,” said Karen O’Shannacery, the director at Lookout, where the agency asked how many people were interested in going to events and then requested that many tickets. “They came back and you could have scraped them off the ceiling.”

The Portland, with hundreds of tickets to give away, has posted sign-up sheets for the tickets at the supervised-injection site it runs, at the needle exchange in the alley next to Main and Hastings, and at its Lifeskills Centre on Cordova.

None of the tickets are for the highest-cost events, but that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

What will likely bother them more is what’s coming next. Downtown Eastside groups funded by Vancouver Coastal Health got a call last Friday, the day of the Games’ opening ceremonies, to warn them that a new round of budget trimming is on the horizon. There was one already last year as health regions around the province were forced to cut costs because of lower than expected provincial funding. This time, all groups were told they’ll be asked to find 5-per-cent savings in their budgets.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do,” Ms. O’Shannacery said. “My verbal response at the time was, ‘There’s no fat here.’ “

Big feature today in the Globe by Lisa Rochon on Surrey and its big plans for the future, after her visit out here for the TownShift competition.

TransLink officials have been hoping that the Games would let them show off what they could do with a healthy budget and a million riders. That hope is being realized. The system is actually hitting 1.5 million riders — almost double the normal 800,000. (My Globe story here.)

I know (thanks to gmgw) that not everyone is thrilled about having almost the entire city hop on the transit system every day. And I’m sure there have been some glitches out there. But it largely seems to be a success story (unless you tell me otherwise).

I’m having a little trouble getting reliable stats on other systems, but it looks like Toronto gets 1.5 million on average every day and New York (the third largest system in the world) gets either 5.2 million or 7 million, depending on which place you look.

BTW, here are some estimates of the volumes that TransLink cobbled together for me yesterday. (Sorry if your bus was late — it was because someone was stuck helping me out with this.)

Most of the flag-bedecked partiers here don’t have a clue that we’re being trashed in the international media and, even if they did, they probably wouldn’t care.

But it’s a big topic among the inner circle of Olympics diehards, reporters and news junkies. I got invited to give a local perspective on the Games and our image to the Guardian, which has been running articles so far saying the city is “filled with dread” and shipping homeless people out to clean things up.

Here’s the link to my piece, which has already kicked off several dozen comments since it was posted this morning London time.

1. It was a beautiful day, with crocuses blooming and people shedding too-warm jackets everywhere as they buzzed through the city.

2. It’s nice to see the city hasn’t cleaned up the Downtown Eastside. It’s there in all its usual glory: drug dealers around the Carnegie, people smoking crack in the alleys, more people selling stolen stuff on the sidewalk next to United We Can and, newly arrived, the tent city set up in the vacant lot across from Save-On Meats.

3. The number of twitter posts saying that Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson is “hot” has died off in recent days — a sign that all those young ladies writing about him must really be paying attention to the sports events.

4. It’s so great taking transit these days because there are buses and SkyTrains EVERYWHERE. I’ve been told that SkyTrain is running at 108 seconds in between trains. The Fraser bus, that I used to wait for downtown for sometimes as long as half an hour, seems to be running as often as the 99-B. If only it could stay like this — please someone give us $17 million extra every two months, like VANOC did for these two months.

5. Apparently many German media outlets, convinced that Councillor Andrea Reimer is One of Them, have been bombarding city hall with lengthy messages, all in German, addressed to “Frau Reimer.” We’ll never find out what they want. She doesn’t speak German.

6. There must be something wrong with me, because I completely don’t get why anyone would line up at a Coca-Cola or Acer or Samsung pavilion as I saw people doing yesterday at LiveCity Yaletown. Isn’t seeing hundreds of their ads plastered everywhere in the city enough?

7. Sadly, the few pavilions and country houses I have visited so far are equally puzzling. The Italians are usually masters of design and display, but Casa Italia at the Roundhouse is a sad shrivelled little collection of a few Italian things. And Vancouver House — can you tell me why anyone from the general public would want to visit a place that is essentially a very large business brochure explaining how great it would be to invest in this city?

8. The West House, the sustainably designed laneway-size house sitting next to Vancouver House, is, however, kind of cool. Makes you realize what you can do with that kind of space when it is well designed. Too bad they didn’t put it in the middle of Granville Mall where someone could see it.

9. Why did the men’s short program have such good music (Jimi Hendrix, in one case!) while the pairs’ skating the previous two nights was a Top 100 Cheesy and Overdone Songs. Geez, the only thing I didn’t hear was “Fever.”

10. Sorry I didn’t write more today, but I was busy with several other pieces, including one on our new label of “Worst Olympics Ever,” which I’ll post when it gets published.

Oh, you may all be thinking you’re having a great time out there in your Canadian-flag capes, having a great time crying when our medal-winners make their charming, modest speeches  and then partying your hearts out at various live sites, bars, and overcrowded buses.

But, didn’t you know, things are not really so great. We’re actually having a terrible time, plus we’re losers, as various media around the world have decided to report. Exhibit A, from Utah, is here. (Utah, huh. Don’t throw stones, etc.) And the latest in a string of nasty articles in the British press here.

I can’t imagine who is likely more annoyed about this: all the people who love the Games and are having a great time or all the people who hate the Games, but, if there was going to be media coverage, wanted to it about homelessness, the corporatization of the Game, and the bill taxpayers will have for this party for the elites.

This just in from the Vancouver police. I’m not sure this is going to make Quebec, currently fulminating over the lack of a French presence at the opening ceremonies, feel any better.

Vancouver – Vancouver Police with support of the V2010 Joint Intelligence Group are announcing more arrests in connection with the protests last weekend.

Police have arrested a man they suspect was the ringleader of the criminal element that vandalized cars and stores in downtown Vancouver this weekend.

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