There’s been a lot written about the Woodward’s project in the last few months and much more to come as the complex opens fully over the next few months.

Here’s my take on it for the Globe’s ROB section, focusing on the gamble different groups had to make to go in. The city’s director of real-estate services, Michael Flanigan, noted that it took over $10 million in tax breaks from the city, money he considers mostly well spent, though he did observe to me that the $2 million in tax breaks for the condo owners probably could have been better invested somewhere else. The tax break per condo likely wasn’t enough to make a difference to anyone, but the $2 million could have helped out with other amenities in the project.

I’ll be looking forward to when it’s all totally open, especially being able to walk through the big central plaza. I’m going to the opening night of The Blue Dragon on Feb. 5 at the new SFU theatre there and really looking forward to seeing what the SFU spaces look like then. The last time I was through, on a tour with developer Ian Gillespie, it was all pretty unfinished — I got a sense of lots of big rooms but not much more.

I’m curious as to what other people are experiencing as the project gets close to finished — are you shopping there? is it making a difference? is it changing the feel of the area?

Amid the gloom and doom of the budget, the cutting, the slashing, the tax increases and fee increases, I have found one tiny bit of brightness.

The city’s website highlights a piece of information previously unknown to the paying public — people who pay their parking by phone will no longer be charged the obnoxious 30-cent fee to do so.

As someone who always pays by phone, the fee bugged me a lot. I’m actually SAVING them money by not wearing out their machine with coins. And it’s something I’ve never seen in other cities that have non-coin-payment methods.

I checked out why the sudden generosity ,and communications officer Wendy Stewart said it was just a break the city decided to give parkers since they’re jacking up the parking rates skyhigh and extending the hours to the ridiculous time of 10 p.m. (Okay, she didn’t say that last part but I know she was thinking it.)

I’ve been writing about Chinatown for 15 years and it never fails to fascinate me, the way it resists what is happening anywhere else in the city and the way I learn something new, peel away another layer, every time I look at it again closely.

Last year, Chinatown went through a huge upheaval as talk of building towers in the historic neighbourhood brought various camps to the brink of war. The towers talk is receding — the last time I spoke with city planner Brent Toderian, he was talking about no buildings higher than 100 feet — but the angst remains and there’s a whole new layer of Chinatown fans who have entered the fray.

My story on this in Vancouver magazine this month.

By the way, the Bao Bei restaurant I refer to in here hasn’t opened yet, but I drove past it today and it looks very cool. “A Chinese bistro” is what the sign in the window said, I believe. It’s right across Keefer Street from the Floata Restaurant mall. The operator, Tannis Ling, has been until now working with Chambar, I discovered while snorkelling the Internet recently.

And one more upbeat post for the new year: my story on a guy whom many hope is showing the way to the urban-agriculture future. Thanks to Peter Ladner for bringing Ward Teulon and his urban farming to my attention.

And here we are, made it through another year and we’re heading into the new one. The days are getting longer; in only about eight or nine weeks, I can hope for a few bulbs and buds — the biggest thrill; and we have That Event to get through yet.

I’m sure that many of you, like me, are contemplating the year past and the year to come as you perform the annual ritual of hunkering down in the house to sort through papers, clear out closets, and generally try to bring some small attempt at order into your domestic lives before the whirlwind hits again next week.

Looking back to when I was clearing out closets last year, it’s hard to believe how 2009 began.

We were still skating through icefields on the sidewalks and Russian mounds of snow on the sidestreets.

January was a non-stop Olympics village show, with multiple stories every week about how disastrous it all was.

Senior staff were beginning their exodus at Vancouver city hall.

And, on the bright side, new homeless shelters and new housing projects were opening, including the historic Pennsylvania Hotel.

How far we’ve come in a year. Who would have believed the Malek brothers would survive the Olympic-village mess? Not only that, they now are moving ahead on their West Vancouver Evelyn Drive project and the rental-tower on Bidwell that’s been causing such an uproar. Now that’s what I call persistence.

Other hard-to-predict developments of 2009: The Burrard Bridge bike-lane trial turned into a non-story. The TransLink CEO, after a valiant effort to get the province to buy into a big expansion plan for TransLink and failing, decamped back to New York. Surrey launched a design competition for its new central city that has drawn scads of international applications. The Olympic village got turned over on time. The Canada Line became hugely popular on the first day it opened. The provincial election was boring and didn’t change anything. And we lost some precious people: Arthur Erickson, Abraham Rogatnick, Wendy Ladner-Beaudry, Art Cowie, Floyd St. Clair.

It makes me wonder what the year coming up will hold, besides enough Olympics coverage to cover Planet Earth to a depth of six inches.

The wonderful, scary thing about life is that we don’t really know. By this time next year, I’ll be thinking (and perhaps writing) again — Wow, didn’t see that one coming. That was amazing — about some event none of us can imagine right now.

I do know what I’ll be looking at over the next year, the more predicatable mysteries that I’ll be waiting for the next chapter to. Among them:

1. What will happen with the 250 planned units of social housing at the Olympic village? Will it get sold, leased out to middle-income workers, or kept as social housing. The debate continues to rage. Latest opinion I heard over the holidays: Even if the city sells it, they’ll do so at a loss, because who will pay $600,000 for a unit with linoleum on the floor, arborite counters and other lower-end finishes.

2. How will Dianne Watts’ image continue to evolve? The mayor of Surrey has had to tackle some tough issues this year where there were no easy answers — monster houses, casinos, and more. The citizens were not always happy with what they saw going on. And at some point, people are going to want to know whether their faith in her ability to solve social problems and crime is paying off. Those are tough, tough problems that have done in more than one civic administration.

3. What will happen with TransLink? It continues to seem like it’s stuck in the mud, always struggling to get provincial government support and failing. Everyone has advice, no one has a solution. The agency needs to pick a new CEO this year and, more important, figure out what it’s going to do to grapple with growth in the region.

4. Will Vancouver’s massive re-organization of services, as planned by city manager Penny Ballem, pay off? She’s promised there will be $10 million in savings this year and more in the future from this re-organization and new efficiency at city hall. Will Penny really transform this bureaucracy, with her ability to understand and re-work complex systems? Or it is just going to be another case of doing more with less, leaving a trail of resentful, demoralized employees?

5. Finally, will the Little Mountain project — the first of the real-estate developments that Housing Minister Rich Coleman is gambling on to bring him more money for social housing — finally get going? And what will be in it? The developer here have dawdled forever, not even holding so much as a coffee klatch with the local community to start talking about what this neighbourhood might become.

In the meantime, on a cheery note, I want to mention how great it is to finally have seen finished this year some of the projects that we’ve waited for a long time and are part of what makes me feel like Vancouver is getting more better and more interesting: Bob Rennie’s art museum; the Carrall Street Greenway, the newly spiffied up Pigeon Park (open just in time to provide a hanging-out spot for people from the Downtown Eastside during the Olympics), the Mount Pleasant community centre (I haven’t been yet but here it’s wonderful); and Woodward’s.

Feel free to add your own thoughts to these lists. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot — but have to toddle off now to provide a stomach-soothing dinner for a few survivors of last night’s festivities.

P.S. Thanks to those of you who wrote me lovely end-of-the-year notes expressing your appreciation for the blog and the forum it provides. It’s all of you who keep me going and clearly there’s a lot of you. I clocked in somewhere around 800,000 page views for the year, with October and November at over 100,000 each. And I especially appreciate your patience in the last month when I switched to a new host and blog-maintenace group, which resulted in several glitches in December that tried all of your patience. Hopefully that’s all behind me now and full speed ahead for 2010.

A lovely Christmas weekend drawing to a close, the kind that makes easterners grind their teeth. People were out running in shorts in today’s sunshine, mixing with those toting their snowboards or skis to the bus stop as they headed to the slopes. We can only hope the weather is not like this in February, or the entire world will decide to move here and we will all have to move to trailers in Chilliwack.

And then the thick fog of the previous two days helped create that sense that normality was suspended — kind of like having a heavy snowfall, but without all the inconvenience. A nice restful few days that helped a lot of us recover from the pre-Christmas craziness. Me especially.

Every Christmas turns into a mission for me, as my family has frequently noted. I can’t think of a Christmas that hasn’t turned into a high-stakes quest for something. One year, I decided to write and bind books for my nieces, with my son providing the drawings. I think we finished around 3 a.m. Christmas morning. Another year, I had to find a certain set of poker chips for my son, which led me to a weird warehouse in deepest Burnaby late on Christmas Eve.

Besides the adrenaline rush of setting a weird challenge for myself and then meeting it, one of the most pleasurable parts of my Christmas quests is the way I get to explore my city all over again. This year, I was hunting for an antique sewing box for my step-daughter and mounted, formerly live animals for my son, who can always be counted on for quirky passions.

I didn’t find either one, or not at a price I was prepared to pay, but I had the greatest time prowling through dozens of stores, from dumpy thrift stores on Kingsway to high-end antiques shops on Dunbar. I ended up with vintage suitcases, a silver coffeepot and (almost) a small mink neck warmer.

In my travels, I also found myself at Steve Kulash’s taxidermy store opposite Central Park in Burnaby, a little slice of 100 Mile House or something like it in the heart of the city, complete with rusting truck in the back. Surrounded by pictures of, I presume, Steve skinning various wild animals in the forest, Steve showed me around his amazing stores, where I was surrounded by pelts, skulls, life-size bears on their hind legs, someone’s dear departed golden retriever, looking like he was waiting for his master to arrive any moment, a bobcat pawing at a bird flying by, many animals with antlers and much more.

Not surprisingly, Steve has a bear at the current Museum of Vancouver show on mounted animals (Ravishing Beasts, only $11 for adults! — the make-do present I had to settle for later).  Alas, at $300-400 for the lowliest rodent and $150 for a chicken, it was all a bit beyond my budget. (So was the $175 duckling in the window of a store on Main.) But the experience was all worth it.

Well, I was going to do a heart-warming Christmas post first thing, but I just got a call from someone letting me know that another fire has hit at the Main and Broadway area — this time, it’s the little block between Main and Kingsway on the south side. (A pic already in the Vancouver Sun here.)That means no more fabulous prawns and broccoli for us from the New Maple restaurant and a lot of grief for all of those small businesses along there.

This is definitely weird. This makes the third fire in this area in the last couple of years: Habit and the grocery store next door were hit two years ago and Habit had just re-opened in the last few months. Then there was Slickety Jim’s a couple months ago on the west side of Main, south of Broadway, and now this. Very creepy feeling.

(Heart-warming post to come later, after I clear some of the rubble from our Christmas celebrations last night.)

The new round of shelter openings began yesterday, starting with the first one in my neighbourhood. I hope this will mean that people no longer have to sleep on the strip of grass behind my back fence — and according to Councillor Kerry Jang, that’s the response from local business people he talked to, as per my story in the Globe today.

I’m expecting there to be community opposition to this, as I’ve been getting copious emails from the local neighbourhood group that is unhappy about the planned 100-bed social-housing project in the same block.

I’ve been hearing for weeks about the negotiations for these shelter spaces and couldn’t understand why it was taking so long. Kerry explained to me yesterday that it’s because the new shelters are not on city property, but are all being leased from private landowners and so there are more issues to resolve. The other three shelters are expected early to mid January.

Being a media person, it only takes two instances of something happening for me to spot a trend. In this case, it’s activist architectural firms. Earlier this year, Bing Thom moved into the arena of hiring researcher Andy Yan to do research on city planning issues. So far, the firm has produced two interesting reports: one on the reality of “empty condos” downtown, the other on neighbourhoods that are losing children in census stats.

Now I see that Peter Busby’s firm is getting involved in the kind of work that used to be the preserve of Vancouver city planners. Here is their survey that they’ve initiated and are encouraging people to respond to. Being you are all the kind who love to respond, I’m posting it here for your Christmas downtime pleasure. (As for me, I don’t have any. I’ve taken up knitting, which is occupying most of my intellectual reserves at the moment. Who knew it would be so difficult to figure out how to knit beads into a scarf??)

The Busby survey:

Vancouver is growing, and we feel strongly that environmental issues should be one of the factors at the forefront of the discussion around the future of growth and density in the City. Over the last 2 years we have developed public discussion pieces on EcoDensity, our national sustainable Cities Initiative, and our recent 10 Big Ideas to Make Vancouver the Greenest City in the World that was shared with the Mayor’s  Green Team.  On the same theme, we have researched and developed a website called Shape Vancouver 2050, link attached.

Shape Vancouver is  an online poll that allows individuals to have their say on the future shaping of Vancouver’s downtown peninsula and see how their manipulation of the City’s skyline and density affects  energy consumption, infrastructure costs, automobile use, and  carbon savings. The objective is to show how powerful densification is an environmental tool.

We are interested in what the public has to say about Vancouver’s skyline and density and the effects on the environment, and we hope that this website can contribute to the discussion. We have begun collecting data and plan on releasing initial findings the week of January 11th. Please go to www.shapevancouver.com and have your say.

I had a story in today’s Globe in advance of the final budget decision this morning, with Raymond Louie hinting that council would move a little on some of the budget numbers but not on the big-ticket item — the tax shift from business to residential. And that’s exactly what happened.

The Vision councillors ended up coming in with a motion to kick in a little extra money for libraries so that Riley Park doesn’t have to close, the main branch is protected and the hours of libraries in “vulnerable neighbourhoods” are not cut. That worked out to a .26 per cent addition to the two-per-cent tax increase the council had said it would hold to.

Street banners and the anti-graffiti program were not spared, and there was no mention of saving the Bloedel conservatory or the petting zoo.

As for community-centre hours, I understand that the park people are reassuring city hall that things can be moved around and arranged so that there’s minimal reduction in services there. We’ll see.