There has been a lot of news lately about the sense of loneliness and isolation that many people experience in Vancouver, as a result of Vancouver Foundation research into that subject.

Even though I was one of those interviewed by the foundation and even though I listed that as my number one concern, I was surprised to find out it was shared by so many others. I thought my sense of disconnection was mostly my fault — my life was too busy for hanging around and connecting with neighbours; I had always chosen very heterogenous neighbourhoods to live in, where it was sometimes hard to connect because of language barriers; etc.

But it turns out it was not just me.

There is a lot of thinking to do about how to overcome some of the barriers that Vancouver has to connecting, but, since I was interviewed, I have been privileged to witness little explosions of community in my vicinity.

Quite independently of each other, several little groups of people have done things to help foster conversations and a sense of neighbourliness in the blocks near my house.

One group of young people constructed a small set of shelves with an overhang to create a little free-store library, where people drop off or pick up books. It has become one of the pleasurable aspects of the neighbourhood. Almost every time we walk by, there are people pondering the books, often murmuring to each other about interesting finds. (The idea has been such a hit that Global TV did a little segment on it last week and people as random as a contractor visiting my house wanted to offer to build similar small libraries for anyone who wanted them around the city, for groups that provided the materials.)

Another household a block away has put out a coffee machine on its boulevard, offering free coffee to the thousands of cyclists that pass by on the bike route.

Still another group has turned the roundabout into a tea-party site (of the old-fashioned kind, not the anti-tax, anti-Obama kind) where there is often a small cluster of people sitting at a small table talking over cups of whatever. The group has also replanted the circle. Up the street, another family has taken over and is maintaining another circle a block away.

They are such small projects but have generated huge interest and a sense of warmth in the neighbourhood. It makes me wonder what else is going on in other neighbourhoods — I am sure more than we realize — and what could happen.

I would love to hear other ideas about small ways to create community in Vancouver.

Two of my own: Bring back dumpsters to the city Keep Vancouver Spectacular days. I know that in my neighbourhood, that was an extremely popular event that managed to transcend the language barriers and brought everyone together to clean junk out of the alleys, as well as share cakes donated by the local bakery.

Another: Communal dinners. I wrote a magazine article in Western Living last year about the communal dinners that many Seattle restaurants offer, where once a month or so, the restaurant offers a set menu and family-style seating with groups of six to 12 people seated together. I have been to several and it has been a great way to meet people — in Seattle. Now if I could only find the same in Vancouver.

For Vancouverites, coming to Minneapolis is like radio nerds going to Signal Hill in St. John’s where Marconi sent the first wireless message or food crazies visiting Warwick, Quebec, where poutine was allegedly invented in 1957.

Because it was here in Minneapolis that the transit mall was created, in 1968, as part of the effort to bring life back into downtowns that were being sucked dry by suburbanization. It spawned a host of imitators, one of which was, in 1972, dear old Vancouver and which people  fought over for decades after.

I just finished walking down the Nicollet Mall, after an exciting bus trip to St. Paul and back, and it is eerily still like the Granville Mall, with its wide sidewalks, curving look, and buses roaring down the middle. (Makes trips on the bikeshare bikes, which are allowed on the mall, feel somewhat death-defying.)

But it has some crucial differences.

For one, no entertainment district quite like what the city has created on Granville, which has driven out many other businesses and tended to attract those that can co-exist with a nightly crowd of hard partiers at the south end. Instead, it’s pretty quiet at night, with just a light sprinkling of wanderers in the shopping section and a kind of hang-out for younger black folks (but not teens — more like 20-somethings, a couple with babies) at the north end.

Nicollet was one of the city’s primary business and shopping streets before and it remains that way. It has the major department stores, as Granville does, but also two of its tallest office towers — as though the Bentall buildings were moved over to Granville.

It also appears to have moved along faster to capitalize on the attractions of the street’s wide sidewalks.

There are several blocks just south of the department stores with a lot of pubs. But those pubs are extended onto the sidewalks quite a long way, with rows of tables and chairs that are more like what Paris does with its wide sidewalks on streets like the Champs Elysees. (Not that I am FOR ONE MOMENT asserting that Minneapolis is Paris.)

As well, there’s a several-blocks-long farmers’ market that runs from 9 to 6 every Thursday. It gave the whole street a different feel today to see people coming out of the office towers to buy strawberries or fresh peas or a bunch of daisies. That, combined with food trucks both on the mall and lined up one block over from the mall, give the whole street a festive atmosphere.

But a funny thing I’ve noticed about these lively places Minneapolis has created in various spots — walk away from those clusters and the streets are dead. (We saw the same in St. Paul tonight, where there was a salsa band playing in one square, a jazz festival in another park nearby. Both places attracted a few hundred people. But the streets in between were as empty as if they’d been evacuated.)

We’re so used to our downtown streets filled with a constant trickles of people everywhere. It’s strange to walk so many of the streets downtown here and, except for the fair-like atmosphere on the mall, they’re as empty as Winnipeg’s in a snowstorm.

I’ve never been to this city much beloved of urbanists, ranking right up there with Portland as the coolest place that is so much better than whatever city we are currently living in.

So I’m waiting to be blown away. So far, wafting along pleasantly.

We took light rail in from the airport to our hotel: an easy walk from baggage claim, not too much of a Mensa test to buy tickets (something that I find often happens in other cities, where you can’t use cash on the bus or tram but you can’t figure out where to buy the tickets or tokens), tickets only $1.75, a 22-minute ride to our stop where I got to overhear three Somali/Ethiopean/? teens in traditional dress using the f-bomb and talking about their messed-up love lives at one end of the car and a bunch of very Norwegian-ancestry Minnesotans talking about their Harold Stassen campaign-button collections at the other end. Cool intro to the demographics.

After hiding out from the 100-degree heat for the afternoon, walked two blocks to the NiceBike station and, again, managed to rent two bikes without needing a computer-science degree. It was $6 for a daypass, with lots of warnings that the price escalates steeply with each half hour and, if we wanted bikes for longer, we should go to a rental shop. (Plus our hotel had given us the NikeBike map of bike streets, trails and lanes around the city.)

And off we went through downtown and then onto the Cedar Creek trail, yes, helmetless, as were most of the people we saw on the NiceBikes, though the many many commuters and racing-jersey cyclists were not. We wound our way through an industrial area and alongside several highways and eventually to a more forested areas down to one of the lakes for a swim, then hopped back onto the trail and then the Midtown Greenway — an AMAZING route that is separated completely from the regular street system and takes you all the way through town.

Finding a place to park the bikes at the end proved to be beyond our map-reading skills, though. The little dot was deceiving and we ended up circling around quite a bit.

However, thanks to getting lost in that part of Uptown, we discovered a gem of a small Italian restaurant where we sat outside (no railings to separate us drinkers from the regular folks! just a table and chairs and the sidewalk! and a bench along the side of the building where people could just drink if they wanted!) and had a beer and lobster risotto and roasted fresh radishes in the warm warm late-evening air. Not in Fargo any more, folks, no sir.

The first stage of the Little Mountain project — the huge remake of the city’s oldest public-housing site, our Regent Park — got approval at council today after five painful years since the province first announced it wanted to sell the land and use the profits to replace the existing social housing on the site and build more elsewhere.

As people said in my Globe story today, it was a deal that set the stage for a poor negotiation from the beginning and it continues to permeate any discussions with bad feelings.

Why?

1. No one knows what the purchase price was or the agreement with the successful developer, Holborn. Even city councillors and staff don’t know. Why the big mystery? When the city sold its land to Millennium for the Olympic Village, as sidways as that went, at least everyone knew what Millennium paid and what the conditions were.

2. Existing residents were all “strongly encouraged” to move offsite to other BC Housing units, which was widely perceived as unnecessary and destructive for what had been a strong community.

3. All discussions have been overshadowed by the sense that the community needs to agree to a density that will work for the developer’s pro forma.

All of which has led many observers to say that, if and when the province moves on to re-developing other social-housing sites, as it inevitably will,

1. The city and community planning and agreements at least about height and density should come first, before any sale.

2. Re-development on large sites should be phased

3. The public should know what the financial arrangements are

and, many would add

4. The province shouldn’t be selling the land at all, but leasing it, the way that other public bodies with a valuable land resources, like the local universities, are doing.

I first realized things were going to get awkward for the new Swiss Real tower back on Nov. 30, when I went to an urban design panel hearing for the tower.

Although comments were generally favourable, something that several panel members worried about was the impact of the 420-foot tower on the Jameson House condo tower across the alley. They asked what could be done to protect the privacy of those condo owners, who faced the prospect of staring across the way at office workers at the same level.

As most of us know who have worked downtown at one point or another, staring at other office smurfs is a fine way to pass the time of day. Most people having office sex know to use the stairwells, or a room without windows, so the views are mostly of photocopiers and people hunched over desks.

When people’s living rooms have the same view, it’s a whole nother story, as I wrote in the Globe on Saturday.

Predictably, many Jameson House residents are unhappy about the situation. They say the Swiss Real tower is getting an unwarranted increased in density, from 9 to 22 FSR with no compensating community amenities.

City planners say that the city’s increased focus on finding places for job space led to the Swiss Real tower site becoming one of 25 identified for higher density and no community amenities are required, because providing square footage for the city’s economy IS the amenity.

This is a warning sign about one of the downsides of mixing residential into a central business district.

The city’s housing report is up here. Working on my overnight story. Your thoughts?

Peter Ladner, many moons ago, suggested that Vancouver set a target of 2010 garden plots by the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver when he was on council.

The city reached that goal, without fanfare, at some point.

Now others are emulating the idea. London is setting a goal of 2012 plots for this summer and Toronto, 2015 plots for the Pam Games in 2015.

I say yahoo. I looooove community gardens.

They make the city look gorgeous and human and taken care of. (Who ever thought the former gas station at Burrard and Davie could be such a thing of beauty? And the gardens along the rail tracks near Fourth are stunning.)

They bring people together with their neighbours.

And the arugula I had from Danielle’s Mount Pleasant community-garden plot recently was scrumptious.

Gentle reader Frank Ducote pointed out that I’m creating havoc (just like mixing pedestrians and cyclists on the same path!) in a previous post by mixing discussions of the Granville Bridge greenway and the mandatory-helmet law together.

Therefore, I declare this post to be open for helmet discussions only, where people can continue to tell me how clueless I am not to have realized years ago that some in the cycling lobby were pushing for getting rid of mandatory helmets. I dunno, guess I don’t read the news enough but I truly did not pick up on that part of the cyclist bible.

For those wanting a sampling of the debate out there, here’s a link to Peter Ladner re why mandatory helmets are a problem (look a little way down the list) and Daniel Fontaine in 24 Hours with a good summary on the various sides of the argument.

Following up from yesterday, I did do a story on the Granville Bridge greenway, which doesn’t actually appear in any text of the city’s draft Transportation 2040 plan, but does appear in the “maps and graphics” section attached to it as one of the illustrations to suggest how future policies might look when carried out.

People I talked to were relatively positive, as you can see, though surprised by the last-minute appearance of this idea in the transportation plan talks.

Many (not all of them quoted) pointed out that, as difficult as it might seem to move walkers and cyclists from the side of the road over to the middle to use the greenway, it wouldn’t be any more difficult than the current situation, where those groups now have to negotiate the scary loops of the on and off ramps to use the bridge’s sidewalks.

Transit, transit, transit. It’s the story every day, as the region tries to figure out how to keep its veins and arteries unclogged while continuing to add 40,000 people a year.

Today’s story: The tussle over park-and-rides, a part of the transit system that some of us don’t think about much. As Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart pointed out, they’re essential for suburbs like his where bus service isn’t that great and keeps getting cut through a series of “service optimization” decisions, i.e. putting more buses on the routes that generate lots of passengers and revenue and fewer in the suburbs.