Since the first day that Vision Vancouver came into power, Mayor Gregor Robertson has turned up the flame on efforts to create new shelter spaces, interim housing, and permanent housing in the city.

But this week, as the election and a Dec. 31 deadline for “solving street homelessness” approaches, the city has started doing something I’ve never seen before: pay entirely for the cost of new interim housing without getting any provincial input or agreement on sharing the costs.

As my story here details, the city has unilaterally decided to lease the Quality Inn on Howe Street and turn it into interim housing for the homeless while that building is awaiting redevelopment. That is not cheap. $1.5 million for the 23 months of the lease, likely at least $2 million a year in staffing costs, and I don’t know how much for improvements, equipment, supplies, and so on.

It’s also single-handedly covering the costs of a new shelter on 900 Pacific, again, without any prior agreement with BC Housing on whether those costs will be shared.

(I said in my story that this was the first time the city had done this. Councillor Kerry Jang contacted me this morning, after he missed a call from me yesterday on this, to say the city did fund one HEAT shelter at the beginning of Vision’s first term, as a way of bringing other partners on board.)

Robertson said this is just an advance opening of a winter shelter, so the costs will be covered by the province, at least at some point. But seems to me the province has been sticky in recent years about which locations it’s willing to fund as shelters.

This is all on top of the announcement that Vision will put $400,000 of city money into school food programs. Again, an unprecedented move for a city to start taking on this kind of social-service spending.

While it would take a pretty hard-hearted person to gripe about feeding hungry children or housing the homeless, some people inside and outside the city have to be wondering what the limits are going to be when it comes to using the city budget to patch the provincial social-safety net.

So Kirk and Jenables and a few others set a date for a gathering of the blog commenters recently (that week my blog was actually malfunctioning, as it turned out).

Kirk has now found a spot for us to gather and reserved a table.

See you all there to talk about who is going to win the election and other fun topics.

That was the provocative question last night from writer, university lecturer and activist Matt Hern last night as he responded to Andy Yan’s big-data presentation on trends that have influenced Vancouver in the past and will in the future.

Hern, reflecting on Yan’s data about foreign ownership, speculation, the city’s low incomes and high house prices, came in with a big meta-point.

Essentially (I was moderating this SFU-sponsored talk on Vancouver in the 21st Century, so don’t have exact quotes), he said that people are moving here because of the quality of life in the city: the roads, the parks, the schools, the community centres, the good planning of urban life. In other words, they’re not paying $5 million for a house here because the chunk of land and the house sitting on it are worth that. (If so, I’d add, they’d go to a different city where they could get a palace on a few acres for the same price.) They’re willing to pay that price to be in a city where all of the citizens have created, with their dollars and their energy and their community contributions, the Vancouver that exists now.

Yet the people who are making the money from this are only those who happen to own certain pieces of property and are able to sell them at vastly inflated prices. (Yan’s talk demonstrated, as did a recent Globe and Mail story, that it’s mainly single-family housing that is skyrocketing in price and mainly the houses at the high end of the scale.)

I got the sense from the audience at the talk that a whole other two-hour debate session could have evolved from this. There wasn’t time for that, but here’s a place to carry on the conversation.

And, before any of you dismiss it as ranting from the left, I have heard big-time real-estate consultant Richard Wozny make a related point on several occasions. Wozny’s point has been that the real-estate development and property speculation here is over-loading infrastructure that local residents paid for in order to create a functional, good-quality city. Now, others are jumping on and stressing it without making the same kind of contribution.

This letter from Mayor Gregor Robertson’s people, saying he won’t participate in the Oct. 7 UDI breakfast debate,  is going around in various circles.

They say the Urban Development Institute, which represents the region’s builders and developers, gave his office only two days to answer an invitation before putting out publicity suggesting the mayor hadn’t accepted, and they questioned having the debate sponsored by someone who has been out slagging the mayor.

I haven’t heard from the UDI their version on how this came about or whether they think their debate notice was offensive.

NOTE: I should add that the mayor’s people and the UDI have been on the outs for several years. The mayor’s office basically doesn’t respond to any invitations from the UDI and I know for a fact the mayor’s staff a long time ago decided they weren’t going to do the UDI any favours. I understand the UDI started inviting the mayor as of July 10 to come and, not debate, but present his main message along with other mayoral candidates. The only response came when the UDI put out preliminary information for a lunch meeting Sept. 18, at which point the mayor’s staff said it was his birthday. Then nothing more after that except for this letter when a new Oct. 7 date was announced.

By the way, as far as I’ve heard, Robertson has so far committed to three other debates and is in talks about dates/timing with three others at least. Many debate organizers seem to be including COPE’s Meena Wong in their line-up, judging from those she’s accepted so far. No word on whether organizers will now include Bob Kasting, the candidate of the very loosely affiliated parties and independents running as a kind of anti-developer-money-and-influence coalition.

The letter: RobertsonUDI

The UDI’s original info about the debate sent to members

Dear UDI Members:

With municipal elections approaching in mid-November, join us to hear from the candidates running for the top job in the City of Vancouver.

UDI recently invited the mayoral candidates for the three major parties (Vision Vancouver, NPA and COPE) to speak and so far, two have accepted.

UDI President Anne McMullin will moderate the discussion, posing relevant industry-related questions to NPA Candidate Kirk LaPointe and COPE Candidate Meena Wong.

What are their thoughts on affordability, transit, CACs and density? Take this opportunity to ask your questions as well!

The UDI’s debate info that’s on their website: http://udi.memberzone.com/events/details/udi-vancouver-breakfast-meet-the-candidates-94

I was very happy to see the city start an urban-design awards program, though I, like the city, mistakenly understood it to mean architectural awards.

The city announced the winners last week and, to judge from public and private comments I’m hearing, the process could do with some, shall we say, improvement.

Lance Berelowitz weighs in here and I expect you all will have something to say as well.

Feels like the municipal campaign in Vancouver finally started to pick up some speed today, as the Greens launched their platform and Vision Vancouver had the first news conference with real news, announcing more money for school lunches for poor kids. (And the NPA sniping away at that.)

I mostly covered the Green announcement, as I think they’re interesting to watch. They’re clearly fighting hard to become the third party of choice for Vancouver voters and, from what I hear from people more expert than me, they have a chance because of their ability to attract votes from different parts of the political spectrum.

My story is up just now and in the dead-tree edition tomorrow.

I try not to fall in sentimental rhapsodizing about mid-rise European cities, as some of my fellow urbanists do. I know that for every chic French or Spanish historic town, there’s a ring of appalling towers on the outskirts that the immigrants and poor have been relegated to.

But it is puzzling to me that Vancouver, a new city, an innovative city, seems to have invented only two distinctive types of housing: the podium-and-point-tower high-rise and the Vancouver Special single-family house in all its increasingly awful permutations. (The older ones are actually starting to look like Greek temples, with their clean and simple lines.)

As a result, they proliferate: cheap and easy and we think there must be a market for them because the dummies keep on buying them.

And we have a strange gap in our architectural ecology: the small mid-rise. There are the artifacts around, those three- and four-storey buildings that multiplied like rabbits when the federal government gave tax breaks to apartment investors in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s. (Discontinued because the housing activists of the day complained that rich investors were getting undeserved breaks to build housing that wasn’t even affordable — sound familiar?)

But there are few new versions of those being built. Some of you might remember that there was a time when Vancouver’s planning department and the odd councillor talked about how, when new development started moving out from downtown and into the traditional single-family neighbourhoods, the city would work with developers to come up with a new form. Not just a replica of the Yaletown podium and tower, but something that was both dense yet complemented the existing neighbourhood.

Somehow that initial idea disappeared. (I distinctly remember it being talked about in the first plan for a new building at Kingsway and Victoria on the El Dorado Hotel site.) Instead, now we have a city where weird rocket ships emerge here and there from a mostly two-storey landscape, buildings that won’t be fitting into their neighbourhoods any time soon — not until the entire neighbourhood has been rebuilt.

This story I did for Vancouver magazine took a look at what it might mean to have a city where mid-rise buildings had more of a place — and why they don’t right now.

• I was just fooling around on Twitter last night to wind down from a long day and then this erupted.

  22h

  Duncan McCue and Wise Monkeys favorited your Tweet

  22h:

  @kirklapointe Aren’t you supposed to be writing a speech or speaking with a large group of people about fiscal responsibility or something?

  1. 
  2. 

• Kirk LaPointe ‏@kirklapointe 21h

  @fabulavancouver I have an early start tomorrow, and mostly Twitter seems politically to only offer an early ending.

• Ian Baillie ‏@BaillieIan 21h

  @fabulavancouver @kirklapointe maybe prepare for the debate you know is scheduled.

  Brenton Walters ‏@brentonwalters 21h

  @BaillieIan @fabulavancouver @kirklapointe There’s a scheduled debate?

  Ian Baillie ‏@BaillieIan 21h

  @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver @kirklapointe Oh indeed there has been for sometime.

  Brenton Walters ‏@brentonwalters 21h

  @BaillieIan @fabulavancouver Really? Seems odd. @kirklapointe, I thought you were claiming that Gregor was avoiding you.

  Ian Baillie ‏@BaillieIan 21h

  @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver @kirklapointe I guess never let the truth come in the way of your message.

  Ian Baillie ‏@BaillieIan 21h

  @fabulavancouver @kirklapointe let’s coordinate our message but let’s make sure we tell the truth- folks it was agreed a few days ago!

• Kirk LaPointe ‏@kirklapointe 20h

  @BaillieIan @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver I guess this is what you consider to be the clean Vision campaign.

  Kirk LaPointe ‏@kirklapointe 20h

  @BaillieIan @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver “Some time” = today, after news stories, our video, press release, and two months of asking.

  Ian Baillie ‏@BaillieIan 20h

  @kirklapointe @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver just stop it Mr Lapointe. You know full well debates were agreed to. Spin somewhere else.

  Pete Quily ‏@petequily 20h

  @BaillieIan Toronto will have 52 mayoral debates http://on.thestar.com/1rXxO1E  how many will vision have? #vanpoli @fabulavancouver @kirklapointe

  Kirk LaPointe ‏@kirklapointe 20h

  @BaillieIan @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver We heard today. If you agreed earlier, why didn’t your rep tell The Province so on Sunday?

  Kirk LaPointe ‏@kirklapointe 20h

  @BaillieIan @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver And while we’re on the topic, which other “debates” are confirmed?

• Matthew Lazin-Ryder ‏@Lazin_Ryder 20h

  @kirklapointe @BaillieIan @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver This conversation escalated quickly.

• Ian Baillie ‏@BaillieIan 20h

  @kirklapointe @brentonwalters @fabulavancouver let’s meet! Happy to take you through them.

[Read more →]

Because I have thousands of words to write in the next few days, this instead.

There are 10 weeks left in the campaign. At the moment, this is how the various parties and their mayoral candidates rank on the social-media counters.

Facebook:

Gregor Robertson, by himself: 7,560

“Gregor Robertson and the Vision team”” 4,559

Vision Vancouver: 15 (I’m guessing they realized it’s Gregor all the way, so they switched over early from this to the header above)

Kirk LaPointe (on his new politician, not personal, page): 455

Non-Partisan Association: 1,228

Meena Wong. Only has a personal page with no stats

COPE: 1,077

Glen Chernen. Personal page indicates 8 followers

Vancouver Cedar Party: 374

Adriane Carr. Personal page indicates 309 followers

Green Party of Vancouver: 436

Vancouver First: Couldn’t find anything

Twitter

@MayorGregor: 44,500

@VisionVancouver: 6,649

@kirklapointe: 7,081

@NPAVancouver: 1,839

@COPEVancouver: 2,316

@meenawong1: 383

@CedarParty: 260

@glenchernen: 258

@VancouverFirst: 2 (no tweets since 2012)

@VanGreens: 559

Which was started in response to my story last week in the Globe