We all trekked out to Surrey (sign of where the next major rapid-transit project will go?) yesterday to hear TransLink officials talk about the annual general report on the agency.

These TransLink events are always kind of sad experience. To the rest of the world, TransLink is a roaring success — about to have more miles of subway track than anywhere else in North America, 234 million trips a year, ridership growth of 80 per cent over the last 15 years.

But there’s a sense of desperation about where it’s all going to go next, given that the agency is facing the prospect of tens of thousands more people coming into the region every year and no sense of where the money will come from to expand the system.

My brief story from the Globe here and their annual report here. BTW, I notice that, yes, the ridership numbers are down slightly, but that was also the case for Victoria, the next biggest transit system in the province. Numbers elsewhere in the province were also flat, according to BC Transit’s annual report. (That’s the agency that oversees transit for the rest of the province — remember them?) Seems to be about more than just TransLink funding or whatever — possibly fewer trips because of economic conditions or other factors.

So I’m back in the city and not a moment too soon, I see. (Lord of the Flies in the blog commenting, which I did not moderate for the last three weeks.)

While I was gone, the debate erupted again, with somewhat more force, over how Vancouver is being shaped or not by the forces of global capitalism. On the one hand, Bob Rennie in his UDI speech  in mid-May made the case that 1. The affordability problem is not as bad as everyone thinks 2. The foreign investment and students are actually helping us out, with the money coming to pay for our universities and community amenities through their tuition fees and contributions through developer fees 3. Much more, which I will enumerate in point form in the next post, as I have the text of the whole speech.

On the other hand, the New Yorker  last week ignited a new round of uproar because Jamie Surowiecki’s column validated all of the current fears about the way this city is changing and why: global capital is being parked here as a hedge in this nice, safe-investment city. (Sadly, in a kind of “Oh my gosh, New York people noticed us and, if they say it’s true, it must be true” kind of way.)

Interestingly, I was following all of this while I was in Naples, a city where gentrification is not currently a major issue. In fact, Naples seems to be almost frozen in time around the 1950s, a time when good middle-class people fled to the suburbs while the poor huddled in cramped rooms in the central city. It was startling to be in a central city that is still so unreconstructed.

Yes, there were definitely tourist-oriented streets in part of the centro storico, where you couldn’t turn around without hitting a papier-mache creche or fridge magnet of the Pope. But outside the couple of area of dense tourist activity, this was unmistakably still a place where a lot of low-income people were living in tiny rooms.

As we got lost various times, we ended up on streets that were so narrow that the sun never shone, where laundry was hanging in five and six tiers, where you could see through the half-doors open to the street that whole families were living in apartments that were essentially one common room (the one facing the street) along with a couple of bedrooms. They weren’t crummy. They’d been fixed up, had modern cupboards and shiny furniture, but they were still small and clearly not where any person with a reasonable middle-class income would choose to stay. And you could tell by the businesses in the area who was living there — outside the small tourist zone, it was vegetable shops and dollar-type stores selling a lot of plastic junk, cheapo underwear stores, and car-repair places.

That was in the central area. A little way east of the centre, under the freeway (where we got lost again), it was even more ungentrified. In fact, it looked in places like the site of a post-war documentary about extreme urban poverty.

In contrast, if you took the funicular just a little way up the hills, you emerged into a very different city: clean and orderly, free of desperate guys trying to pretend you had to pay them to park on the street or attempting to sell you lighters and socks.

The question for a lot of cities around the world, looking at Naples and Vancouver, is how to find something in between, how to prevent the worst excesses of global gentrification without creating slums that have such a strong centre of gravity that they become unlivable to anyone not completely desperate. (That used to be what protected the Downtown Eastside — it was SO bad, so scary even to hipsters, that its housing was safe from incursions. And it seems that, in Naples, the current forces keeping the central city affordable are still pretty strong, as you can see from one article I found about a couple attempting to gentrify an apartment in the very low-rent Quartieri Spagnolo.)

Vancouver is likely, at some point, to be one of the cities that experiments boldly with solutions. The cities feeling the most extreme pressures are the ones the most motivated to try something, anything new. That’s what prompted Vancouver to be a pioneer with its supervised-injection site. It wasn’t that we were so liberal. It’s that we had such a terrible problem being a port city with huge access to drug-market pipelines.

That same kind of desperation is likely to push us, at some point, to look for ways to moderate the impacts of big money (whether foreign or local) on people with a whole lot less who are also trying to live in the city.

It’s going to take some kind of political intervention, because it’s not going to happen just through social or moral pressure. One of the parts of the phenomenon of this unaffordable city that seems to be escaping the notice of many critics is that, for every critic of gentrification or heritage-home destruction, there is at least one person pretty happy to sell out at the high prices being offered. There’s a lot of concern and upset about heritage homes being demolished for much bigger and more lavish new homes, or about already lavish homes being bought and left empty, but those situations involve two parties: A buyer. And a seller.

I had a student at UBC who tried to find someone willing to sell their house at a lower price in order to ensure that it was preserved and not torn down. In spite of considerable efforts, he couldn’t find one.

So solutions are going to have to come at the political level, by a party or group that feels like it has enough goodwill and public momentum to push it into action. I’m sort of doubting that will be Vision, at least in the Robertson regnum. No party in its third term, when the critics have piled on, is likely to tackle something as difficult as telling individual property owners that they can’t demolish, can’t sell to certain kinds of buyers, can’t leave their housing empty, or will have to pay some kind of extreme penalty for doing any of the above.

I’m on vacation for the next two weeks — eavesdropping as usual on life in the city, but here’s your open forum, as usual, for when I’m gone. Can we match the 350-something comments on a recent post that turned into a brawl over, what else, the Kits bike lanes? Hope so. There’s so much to discuss:

– Mayor Gregor Robertson calling the NPA a party of “angry old white men.”

– The arrival of a new party by ex-COPEsters, called OneCity

– The NPA’s recent fundraiser (any news from there, anyone? Anyone there call Visionites a party of “overly cheerful know-nothing youngsters”?)

– The apparent threat by CP to start using the Arbutus tracks again to run trains. (Sounds like a warning shot over the head to me.)

If I see someone start an interesting new topic that’s buried in this thread, I’ll pull it up into its own blog post.

The recent news that much of the traffic congestion in Vancouver is caused by people circling the streets for a parking spot is a familiar story. Searching for a home for one’s car several times a day is more of a fraught experience in many people’s minds than searching for a home for oneself.

In my latest column for Vancouver magazine, I took a closer look at the parking dynamics of this city, discovering, along the way, which areas have the most complaints about parking issues (not downtown or the West End, in case you were wondering) and whether people in the city are REALLY giving up their cars. (Turns out they’re not.)

For those following this drama, the latest:

1. Park board launches a lawsuit again Riley Park-Hillcrest community centre to get them to turn over financial information

2. At last report, board member Ken Charko said he has been unable to get president Jesse Johl to communicate with him or organize a meeting

3. Irate resident Art Bomke sends in this report

The story around the RPHCA seems to be dormant at the moment, but  I thought I would update you on the activities of our members group.

1. We have sent a letter  to the BC Registry asking for help under the Society Act.

2. Following the Association by-laws, we held an AGM which none of the current directors attended and at which the quorum of attending RPCHA members approved the following directive: “This meeting instructs the Directors to properly perform and complete their duties under by-law 47 and include all usual reports in a notice of meeting to be issued byJune 9 by mail to all members in good standing at that date. M(Carol), S(Terri), Carried unanimously.”

We then adjourned the meeting until 7 pm on June 26th at the Hillcrest Centre at which time an “open” AGM will be reconvened, the normal business items of an AGM discussed and new directors elected. This date was selected as the earliest time that directors can be nominated and be allowed to stand under the current by-laws that require the prospective directors inform the RPHCA Board 45 days ahead of the AGM.

3. At this time the members of the RPHCA still have no access to financial statements and AGM minutes since 2011.

Art

The Non-Partisan Association, in an appreciated act of transparency, passed on the list of people/companies who bought tables at its upcoming gala. My story on that here and the complete list of supporters for the NPA follows here.

Gold table buyers –

– Vancouver Taxi Association

– Concord

– Rocky Mountaineer

– O’Neil Hotels & Resorts

– Mansa Holdings Ltd.

– Rob MacDonald

Corporate table buyers –

– The Boardwalk
– Allan De Genova
– Anthony Santo
– Impark
– Rising Tide
– Hotel Five540Forty – Kamloops
– Seaspan/Southern Rail
– PC Galore
– Serracan
– Gary Pooni
– George Seslija
– ZLC Financial
– Baker & Baker
– Johnny Cheung
– Holburn Group
– Lorne Segal
– Mark Angus
– Mark James
– Michael Lowe
– Nicola Wealth Management
– Armstrong Group
– Manhasset Investments
– Madison Pacific Properties Inc.
– Sunstone Advisors
– Sam Hanson

And, in one new little bit of news, Vision decided on how many candidates it will run in the  election, now that it is no longer partnering with COPE. This is the message I got in their email newsletter. (Strangely, even though I have signed up for NPA newsletters as well, I don’t get nearly as many emails telling me all about the party’s great plans as I do from Vision. What’s with that?) For those not good with the math, that means they will run one more candidate than the number of council members they now have and one more school board candidate than their current complement. The number of candidates for park board will remain the same, but this level is generating the most interest because four of the current park-board commissioners for Vision are not running again, which leaves a lot of openings.

Frances —

Last night, the Vision Vancouver executive decided how many candidates we will run in November’s election.

I want you to be the first to know. In November, Vision will run:

8 candidates for City Council.
7 candidates for School Board.
5 candidates for Park Board.

This will ensure we’re putting forward an energetic and experienced slate of candidates at all three levels, in what will be a tough election campaign against the NPA this year.

We need to keep moving Vancouver forward and re-elect progressive majorities for City Council, Park Board and School Board. We can’t risk going backwards with the NPA – a party that opposes the Greenest City Action Plan, voted against new housing for the homeless, and won’t stand up against a massive expansion of oil tankers in our harbour.

The first step towards determining our candidates is this Sunday’s Leadership Review at our AGM, where you will have your say on the Vision incumbents who are seeking re-election. We’ll also be updating members on our preparations for the November election, and offer new ways to get involved.

Will I see you on Sunday?

 

As those of you who were on Twitter yesterday know, there was a lot of uproar at Vancouver city hall yesterday as journalists tried to make sense of the numbers swirling around like a meteor shower as the mayor and city manager attempted to make the case that the city had turned the Olympic village lead into gold.

My basic story is here, but many of us are still trying to sort out the numbers. You can see from the variety of ways that reporters tackled the story yesterday/today how tough it was.

The document I relied on was the most recent report from the receiver, Ernst & Young, which laid out all the money that has been brought in since the receivership started and what all the costs were, from the strata fees the city had to cover for empty condos to remediation of suites to marketing. (Weirdly, people from the city didn’t seem to know how to reconcile their own numbers with what was in the receiver’s report, which made it hard for all of us to figure it out.)

But that report doesn’t explain many of the other murky aspects of the Olympic Village financial situation.

As I’ve been noting on Twitter, I still have a lot of questions that I’m not sure I know the answers to.

For example:

– City manager Penny Ballem said that, besides the $411 million the city netted from all of its sales, the $68 million it got from seizing the properties of the developer Millennium, and the most recent $91 million from Aquilini, it also got $200 million in pre-sales before the receivership started. So that all added up to $770 million.

So what’s the financial story for the other $330 million that is supposedly part of what has always been called a $1.1-billion project. Presumably $100 million is what was lost from the original promise of a $200-million purchase price for the land. That leaves $230-million to try to understand. The social housing cost $110 million. So then there’s $120 million left. What’s that about?

– Understanding the amenities part. We’ve been told it cost the city $200 million to build all the amenities for Southeast False Creek — presumably the community centre, the plaza, the public art, the two small parks and the walkways. I’m still not clear on whether only $75 million of that was directly for the Olympic Village (as city manager Penny Ballem tossed in on the whiteboard numbers, somewhere near the end of our little group shouting match yesterday at the hall) and whether the $200 million has all been spent or that’s the total bill for all amenities, present and future, for the entire area.

I’m sure all of you have a dozen questions apiece as well. Let the amateur forensic accounting begin.

As we all know, Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts announced Saturday, while she was opening the new city hall, that she won’t be running again in November. Not a huge surprise, as there had been rumours for weeks and lots of hints about the event Saturday.

But now it brings out into the open the jostling, as the inevitable hole appears in the space-time continuum.

For the last year, every time I’ve gone to a public hearing or meeting about development, I’ve heard people fret about how there’s not enough capacity to absorb the new people who will be coming with the developments. Not enough schools, hospital space, parks, libraries, you name it.

And it used to be that, along with all that, people complained about the inevitable increase in traffic and decrease in parking space. But there’s a new twist on that in Vancouver. Now people say there’s not enough room on the transit lines, especially if anything is planned along the Canada Line or (less frequently) the SkyTrain line.

In the spirit of public inquiry, I called TransLink to get the numbers on the current state of use and what the future holds. (My Globe story here.) Jeff Busby, who does the agency’s infrastructure planning, kindly answered me in two separate interviews. What it made clear to me is that the Canada Line and SkyTrain do have the physical capacity to absorb a lot more people.

What was clear from speaking with mayors, councillors and engineers who are involved with this issue is that there’s no guarantee that, as lines reach their capacity, TransLink will have the money to do the upgrades needed to increase it.

“I suppose that’s a risk,” Busby said cautiously when I asked him whether there isn’t a danger that, even when the people come, no one will want to fund an increase in capacity.

[Read more →]

This just out from Mayor Dianne Watts’ office

SURREY, BC – “I am saddened and disappointed that Councillor Rasode feels she is unable to work within the team environment to bring issues forward to council and our committees.

Myself and council will continue to support Councillor Rasode in her role as the Chair of Community Safety. As she has held the Public Safety portfolio for the past two years we will continue to encourage her to bring issues forward to council chambers for discussion.

There is a significant amount of work we are undertaking to move the City of Surrey forward and this continues to remain my top priority. At this point in time, I will remain focused on that task and will not engage in electioneering.”