I have seen some strange media circuses in my life, but the one that happened the last two weeks — as people attempted to report on the final report from the housing affordability task force — was one of the weirder ones in the annals of communications.

I will attribute some of this fiasco to the city. The 15-point priority action plan in Appendix A was just too big a wad of policy to swallow for many people. Yes, I know all of you at the city have been working on this forever and it’s crystal clear to you what’s going to happen. But there were too many nuances and technical terms for reporters, even some hard-working ones, to get everything that was in there.

As a result, I hear people — calling in to the NW show that I’m on, talking about this in general conversations, writing letters to various editors and blogs — who are so mixed up that it’s kind of sad to listen to. At this point, as far as I can tell, there are an awful lot of people who think:

1. The whole city has been rezoned without public consultation to allow towers on main streets and a bunch of apartment buildings on the streets next to main streets

2. The city is looking for 20 streets that can be reduced by half, with the other half going to social housing, apartments and other kinds of housing — the so-called “thin streets” projects.

3. The city was going to do that, but there was such an uproar from the gentle citizens that the city totally backed off on that part of the plan.

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Another scintillating question and even more scintillating answer on City Plumber re the ever-troublesome question of traffic and the city.

My story today about the Canada Post building at Georgia and Hamilton/Homer now being on the market.

Besides the issues identified in the story, this also has implications for the Vancouver Art Gallery. The gallery had been asked to explore other options for a new site, besides the Larwill Park site two blocks away that VAG director Kathleen Bartels has been pursuing for over five years.

I’m told by various sources that architect Peter Busby had been asked to come up with a design showing how it could all work. (There could be towers at the back end, for example, to help finance the building’s repurposing into a gallery.) But the relocation committee was told recently that there were too many seismic issues — odd for a building constructed to have trucks drive into it. Some people say that’s hooey and just part of Bartels’ unwillingness to look at any other options than the Larwill Park site. Whatever the case, the building now being put out for sale would make it that much more difficult for the VAG to get the dibs on it.

Former senator Michael Kirby managed to get $110 million through the Mental Health Commission of Canada to put into studying the best strategies for getting homeless people back into housing and a stabilized life. It’s a project that could potentially point the way to answers for many countries.

Five cities participated in that study, Vancouver among them. As part of the research, 300 people got guaranteed housing (including specialized teams who would negotiate with landlords to make sure they could stay, even if there was some disruptive behaviour) and super-intensive support teams to make sure that their mental and physical health was well taken care, as well as provide coaching in how to get along with other people and even, maybe, how to get work.

That research project is due to end March 31, as I outline in detail here, and no one has heard boo so far about whether the federal government would consider extending it. That has everyone — the people who have been housed as part of the project, most of all — on edge. For Vancouver, it would be a minor disaster, if those 300 people, who were often people who’d been out on the street for years, were to flood into the already over-stretched low-cost housing available or to go back to the streets again.

The lawsuit that has been filed by former Vancity senior vice-president David Berge against his ex-employer is hard to fathom, pitting, as it does, people who have normally been part of a small world unified in their aim to approach business, development and the environment in a different way from the usual corporate capitalist model.

Now Berge, who is renowned in certain circles for his pioneering work on social-venture funds, is suing Vancity to get it to live up to a commitment he says they made when they hired him: investing $10-million in another social-venture fund they were going to be jointly involved in.

My story in the Globe provides only the most basic elements of the suit, which I’m attaching in full below. It also doesn’t begin to explain the close relationships among many of the parties involved.

One that I omitted: both David Berge and his former boss, Tamara Vrooman, were both advisors to Joel Solomon’s Renewal2 operation. Another that I couldn’t squeeze in: Berge, at Vancity, helped the City of Vancouver, aka Vision Vancouver, with financing for a couple of projects dear to their civic hearts, the Olympic Village co-op and a energy-retrofit program.

I know that those who delight in the whole Tides Canada Foundation conspiracy story will make hay of this (although the Tides connection arose in a strange way in the lawsuit).

But it seems to me that there’s a deeper story at play here, one that this lawsuit doesn’t really get at — one that’s more about the difference in culture between Vancity and the American social-venture movement possibly? Or something else beyond that?

BTW, I made a couple of errors in describing some of the many links in the story: Berge’s Underdog did not invest in Ben & Jerry’s; ice-cream maker Ben Cohen, of B & J’s, invested in Underdog. As well, although Joel Solomon’s Renewal did invest in Underdog, Underdog did not invest in Renewal 1 or 2. Instead, Berge was an adviser to Renewal 2.

BERGEVSVANCITY

There’s been a lot of talk over the years about a bike route along Cornwall and Point Grey Road.

Former NPA councillor Peter Ladner was an early proponent. The city’s current map of future bike-route plans identifies it as a key connecting route from the already bike-ified Burrard Bridge out to the west side.

Now, for once, locals are getting solidly behind the idea. Or, well, maybe not quite, but in their quest to reduce the 13,000-strong daily car volume on that stretch of road, that might be the solution.

Mayor Gregor Robertson made an announcement this morning at council about Dave’s retirement (and the whole room stood up to applaud Dave in the middle of the meeting) and the following note also went out from city manager Penny Ballem.

(As an aside, I think there’s a sense that it’s safe for Dave to retire now that Brian Jackson is running the planning department. As Vision Vancouver was preparing the ground for terminating former city planner Brent Toderian, some of the key decisions were shifted over to Dave. Dave, who is a tirelessly nice person, will say I am just being mean to write that, but it’s unfortunately true.)

Anyway, here’s Penny’s note and, with it, may I also express my own regret at seeing Dave go. He takes enormous pleasure in crafting some piece of policy that he thinks will make the city better. It’s fun to see his delight when he talks about it.

Nearly a year ago, I announced that David McLellan had agreed to come
and work as the Deputy City Manager with responsibility for Housing
and Strategic Public Amenities.  Over this last year, Dave has done a
remarkable job working across the organization and with many external

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I’m fascinated by farms and farmers, maybe because I come from farmers on both sides on my family — French-Canadian and Ukrainian from different parts of Saskatchewan. (I’ve always treasured the story about how my Uncle Peter (Ukrainian side) made my cousin’s future wife come and pick rocks out of the field in Dysart, so he could see if she met the family standards.)

So this time, I followed back to the land a couple of people who run stands that I’ve bought at in various farmers’ market forays to try to figure out if this urban-farming stuff is some passing yuppie trend or what.

My story in Vancouver magazine is here, where my journeys led me to not just farms, but various people studying B.C. agriculture. The picture I came away with was very different than the one I’d had before, thanks to all these people who love and study farming.

B.C., this incredibly rich growing province, actually exports a huge amount of what it grows and then imports back a whole bunch of other things from various parts of the globe. The diversity of our crops is narrowing, not growing. And it has whacks of unused farmland. I didn’t get to include it in the story, but a recent study of Surrey showed that there is huge potential there for more farming because about a third of its considerable farmland isn’t being used for agriculture.

Mostly what I discovered is that no one has the complete answer yet how to balance growing food locally and taking advantage of the wealth of food available around the globe. But at least there’s a discussion going on, although what impact that discussion will have on corporate food-production systems is still not clear. For all the talk about people wanting local and organic, there’s still an awful lot in distribution centres and supermarkets that isn’t — because shoppers are still buying it.

Time for a change of pace here, kids.

So this is the result of a trip to Los Angeles in the spring, where I had possibly the best journalism assignment OF MY LIFE. Eat Mexican food til it comes out your ears and write about it.

(For those who care, I paid my own way and all my own restaurant bills.)

I may have gone a little overboard the day I had three lunches, but otherwise it was bliss. I got to see parts of Los Angeles that I might have thought of driving into. Not Boyle Heights or commercial East L.A. That was fine.

But some of the more desolate parts of Olympic Boulevard, hmm. However, there I discovered the Mariscos Jalisco truck, which I still dream about. A simple truck, across the street from a social housing complex and surrounded by light industrial elsewhere, it had the most unusual tacos I’ve ever tasted. Filled with shrimp and a touch of octopus, crimped on the edges and lightly fried, then covered with a tomato-y sauce.

Plus the fun of eating on the planter in front of some warehouse with a bunch of other foodie nutters who have driven out to eat and moan over their food, plus a young Hispanic couple with a mattress in the back of a truck who drove up — not, I imagine, because they had seen a glowing reference to the truck in LA Weekly but because the truck is just, well, a shrine.

Oh dear, I’m getting sad and hungry just writing this. And there is nothing like this in Vancouver. I don’t care what all of you have written in the past when I have whined on about the lack of Mexican food here. We are a wasteland.

La Taqueria has great flavour combinations, but the menu is limited. And I like Sal Y Limon on Fraser, but it should be one of about 100 places like this in Vancouver that are all up and down the spectrum of cheap/fancy, regional/general, traditional/fusion.

So please, we are begging all of you — leave Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Republicans will never let many of your people become citizens anyway, and come here.

This came in through today’s whitewater rafting on the information rapids: the Toronto Transit Commission’s report to council on why it should get a five-cent fare increase.

On page 8, the report writers include a comparison chart of the subsidies provided to various transit systems in various cities. (My attentive readers will remember that my post a few days ago noted that ALL transit routes in Vancouver require a subsidy of one sort or another. Fares simply do not cover the cost. That’s true for transit systems as a whole, everywhere.)

Before anyone jumps to conclusions of incompetence, btw, I’d make the point that transit systems that have to serve newer large sprawling cities as opposed to transit systems that get to serve older, denser cities seem to require more subsidies.

Los Angeles, currently revered by transit nerds because of the money its mayor is spending to build new rapid-transit lines, is close to $5 per rider subsidy. Vancouver is almost at $3. Toronto is around 80 cents.