For those of you who are wondering why I haven’t been posting as furiously in this post-Christmas period, I have to mention that I have, without making a formal resolution, seemed to have slipped into a slower, more gracious life for the year 2010.

I am knitting, as previously mentioned, and am now on my fourth scarf. I’m sending out hand-written thank-you notes for dinner parties (though it was such an unusual occurrence that it alarmed my reporter pal, Kim Bolan, who thought it must be a threatening letter from a gang when she got one in the mail). I have returned to writing in a journal as part of my impulse to form a new “slow writing” movement. (I should actually say “slow and long,” as opposed to fast and twitter.)

I think it might be a way of life we all want to take up as the Olympics descend upon us. After all, if there’s no parking anywhere, if a simple trip to Costco entails having to drive by military vehicles and miles of chain-link fencing, if the bridges are closed and the streets are filled with mobs of aimless revellers — doesn’t it sound like a great idea to just shut yourself up in your house and do some needlepoint? Read the collected works of St. Thomas Aquinas? Put all of your pictures from years 1997 through to the present in photo albums? I think so.

All right, I know this will pass. I’ll get swept up in the frenzy of life and the Olympics soon enough. (I feel as though it’s practically a civic duty to go to at least two cultural events a week throughout February, just so all those ballet dancers and singers stampeding into town for the Cultural Olympiad aren’t lonely.)

But it’s a lovely few moments of quiet.

Everyone is passing this story around, the LA Times’ take on Vancouver.

It seems to be a grab bag of the standard themes, occasional small mistakes (a Safeway in with the Home Depot on Cambie? I think not), and the usual critics saying that it might look to the easily dazzled as though Vancouver did everything right but, underneath, there are all these problems. Yes, Detroit can only hope for such problems.

A sinking feeling as I read it. How many more of these stories will we have to endure in the next year.

The region’s business groups have been out in force the past week, protesting TransLink’s parking-stall tax, complete with all the doodads of a contemporary marketing campaign (social media, instant ways to blast your local politician) and their research that proves, as it always does, that businesses are being done in by evil cash-grabbing governments.

Business groups have been wildly successful in recent years getting governments to scale back on their taxes, using those arguments. But they might want to consider ensuring that their campaign also includes thank-you notes after the fact.

It was noted with some resentment around Vancouver city hall, as budget mayhem was swirling before Christmas, that business groups were noticeable by their absence over the several nights of public speakers on the budget.

That left politicians, who were giving them a tax break of millions of dollars through the shift of business taxes to residential, to take a few tonnes of steaming flak from the public while those benefiting — with the exception of the indefatigable Bob Laurie — didn’t bother to show up and make their traditional argument about why this tax shift was so necessary.

Vancouver businesses can expect that they may not get such an automatic pass from council next time around.

The saga of the Streetohome Foundation, a group set up in 2008 as part of Vancouver’s drive under then-city manager Judy Rogers to get other partners helping solve the homelessness problem, has been an interesting one to follow.

It’s got two-dozen high-powered business leaders on its board, but it’s been a bit stymied from the beginning about what to do. Its role seemed clear when it first started because there was a huge problem and huge gap. But then the province jacked up to high warp speed as the Olympics approached, and it became less clear what this group could do that was unique and strategic.

Adding to the barriers, the city’s plan to convince the federal government to give special tax breaks for people donating to homelessness projects went nowhere.

From everything I’ve heard, people on the board are still panting to tackle the region’s homelessness problem with chequebooks open, but nothing is finalized yet. They’ve come up with their 10-year business plan and what they’re going to focus on, as I wrote in today’s Globe. Now everyone, include many board members, is waiting to see what they actually do with it.

The crew that run the Cascadia Scorecard love to compare these three cities and here are their latest numbers.

To their own surprise, they’ve ranked Portland as the laggard. But I’d love to study these numbers more, as I have to wonder if they are pulling stats from just Vancouver proper or the whole region, which could change the picture significantly.

Interesting, too, that they have named the Canada Line as one of the reasons Vancouver is so green. I loooove taking the Canada Line — it has become our family’s public limo — but I hear much chatter from those in the know that it took so much bad, unenvironmental concrete to build that line that the GHG deficit won’t be paid off for decades to come.

I await all your brilliant analysis on Alan’s article.

It’s been almost a year since city staff came to council with the final estimated bill for the social housing at the Olympic village — $110 million instead of the original $65 million it was supposed to cost — and some options with what to do about it.

There’s still no decision as staff wrestle behind the scenes with all kinds of scenarios, none of them particularly palatable. My story in today’s Globe looks at some of the arguments going back and forth.

While there was a great public call to just sell it off, pocket the money and build social housing elsewhere, what I’m getting from city hall these days is that that’s not the slam-dunk it might look. Everything that made the social housing more expensive — all the sustainability features, the high cost of labour at the time, the added cost of building low-rise buildings that were too tall for wood construction but without enough floors to make the cost of concrete construction pay off — is features that house-buyers aren’t going to be prepared to shell out extra for. Capillary heating mats just don’t have the same punch as granite counter-tops.

Then there’s the delicate issue of the buyer, Millennium, potentially having a good legal case against the city, whose original RFP to bidders did not make any mention of the city competing with them by selling off 250 units of additional housing at the site.

There are still many interesting solutions being floated behind the scenes, which may come to fruition or not sometime after the Olympics. Can’t wait to read the end of this novel.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, this cartoon from the latest New Yorker captures current planning at its best, don’t you think?

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Several sources have notified me that Melina Scholefield, the one-time manager of the city’s sustainability group, is packing it in at city hall.

(Here’s the official blurb on her job:

Melina Scholefield
Manager of Sustainability
Melina manages the Sustainability Group, a branch of the City dedicated to climate protection, green architecture, active transportation, sustainable systems and bringing sustainability to all aspects of running and building the city.)

For those who don’t recall, Melina was given the job of managing after former sustainability leader Tom Osdoba, in some kind of weird, never-completely-explained contretemps with the city, left in 2006 and went back to Portland from when he had come. Osdoba, in the previous administration, pushed hard to have the Olympic village be a model of green, which led to some famous tussles at the hall between him and the Village People.

I’ll be surprised if they replace Melina, given that the new deputy city manager, Sadhu Johnston, was hired for his super-green credentials and will be leading the move post-Olympics to put some flesh on the abstract bones of the city’s green plans.

The news that Ryan Merkley had been hired as a temporary communications director came in a week in December when I was swamped with other things, so I didn’t note his impending arrival.

However, here is my post noting that Ryan, a prolific Twitterer by the way (see evidence at Tab 1, his photo of city hall as he arrived at work Monday), started this week.

Merkley, a young, energetic guy with an interest in new ideas, was working with Toronto Mayor David Miller and was a big advocate of that city’s move to open government, i.e. making city data available to those who want to reconfigure it for various apps. As I’ve noted in previous posts, there are a lot of links between the Miller people and the Robertson people. Ryan has been one of those links.

But he’s no stranger to Vancouver. He was part of the crew that came in to work on the Vision Vancouver campaign in the fall of 2008. I’ll be interested to see whether this “temporary” job gets extended at the end of six months.

As indicated by media reports earlier this year (Mike Howell in the Courier, I think), the city is re-opening one of the two shelters under the Granville Bridge.

This time, it will be open 24 hours, which is intended to prevent the line-ups and crowd mayhem that nearby condo residents objected to last time. Presumably there will be more monitoring of problems. They’re also saying it will only be open during the winter, not the warmer months when more problems with dealers and others hovering around the building started to emerge. But I’m wondering, given how warm it is out now, whether that might not make even the winter months more challenging.

Anyway, here’s the news release from the city on the opening.

Second emergency winter shelter to open in Vancouver

A second new emergency shelter for the homeless will open on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 1435 Granville Street with 40 sleeping spaces available.

The temporary shelter is the second low-barrier facility to open this year as part of the City’s 2010 Winter Response Program.

The Granville Street shelter will be operated by RainCity Housing, who have operated housing and shelter for people throughout the Lower Mainland since 1982. The low-barrier shelter will allow shelter users to bring shopping carts and pets with them. The shelter will have rules posted such as no violence tolerated in the shelter.

An emergency shelter was operated at the same location in 2009. A community open house will be held on January 20, 2010 to provide information on shelter operations and agency contacts for neighbours. A bed reservation system will reduce line-ups and access to adequate washroom facilities will be ensured. The shelter will remain open 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week. The shelter will close by April 30, 2010.

Emergency winter shelters are funded in 2010 through a $1.2 million contribution from the Government of British Columbia and $500,000 from the City. Shelter locations are chosen based on need and the number of homeless in the area.

A temporary shelter operating 24-hours-a-day at 677 East Broadway with the same fixed closing date opened on December 22, 2009, providing 40 homeless people with a place to stay and two meals a day.