The city has had a test going since last September with 2,000 houses to see how residents respond to having their regular garbage reduced to once every two weeks and being encouraged to recycle all their food scraps into their yard trimmings bin.

I’ve been wondering how it’s going and yesterday, I got a chance to get some answers, which ran along the lines of: Pretty darn good.

But I also got a better understanding of why it takes so long to roll out recycling. I’ve been waiting for food-scraps recycling forever, it seems like, and couldn’t understand the city’s go-slow approach.

But, as head engineer Peter Judd said in my story and here, recycling programs don’t inspire an instant embrace from everyone. I hadn’t really clued into that, being a dutiful recycler (daughter of Prairie farmers who just couldn’t bear to throw anything in the garbage) who actually feels pain at seeing a tin can thrown into the regular trash can.

However, it takes a lot of people a lot of prompting to get with the program. And food-scraps-recycling is difficult, remembering what can and can’t go in. When I went down to the 311 centre a couple of months ago, the director there told me that the pilot produced a spike of calls and he expected even more if/when it was introduced city-wide.

Judd also said they’re expecting a lot of people will order larger regular-trash carts to cope with having to hold that garbage for two weeks between pick-ups (though the pilot showed there wasn’t as much cart expansion as had been expected). That will cost millions of dollars if a lot of the 100,000 households in the city decided to move up a cart size.

Once this goes through (and it’s also happening in Surrey and the three North Shore municipalities), it’s expected to produce the biggest jump in recycling since blue boxes went in and transform the region’s garbage diversion from 55 per cent to 80 per cent.

I’m hanging on to my chicken carcass here, just waiting.

Marine Gateway at the foot of Cambie. Sold out in a day. Telus Gardens in downtown Vancouver. Sold out before the public launch. Silver in Metrotown. More than 3,000 people signed up waiting to buy.

That makes it seem as though it’s all boom times in the condo/real-estate world again. Not so, my friends, as my recent story noted in our coverage of the Telus Garden sell-out. (Real estate figures that came out after I wrote this story Sunday make that even more clear.)

People are flocking to projects close to transit in areas that promise them access to lots of services. Not so much elsewhere.

Another week, another glorious trumpeting of the success of Vancouver’s food carts!

Yes, I know some of you are getting tired of the way Vision is riding this golden goose. But don’t be cynical. Think about the days of only hot dogs.

Anyway, I did do a story for the Globe here on the latest round of 12 lucky winners, but also took a look at the future. Cart operators have really only been going for a year to 18 months, for the most part, so we don’t know how this is all going to work out. But it is a tough business.

As one owner pointed out, the old hot-dog carts were one-person operations with high volume. These new carts, which are serving the equivalent of very nice restaurant food but at street prices, often require two, three or even four people.

At some point, the people who have figured out how to do it the best are going to survive and others are going to have to pack it in. Or there will have to be some new developments to keep everyone going: more food-cart festivals and dine-out-type events, the creation of food-cart pods to attract critical masses of people, and the like.

As usual, we in Vancouver are taking this explosion of amazing food for granted. Enjoy it while it lasts, that’s all I have to say.

Transit funding: the most boring topic on the face of the earth, right? Until its problems happen in your backyard.

Here’s a story I contributed to in the Globe about the long struggle of this unique transportation authority to find ways to pay for its system.

While there are undoubtedly things to criticize about the way TransLink spends money and makes decisions, one of the agency’s core problems is what it’s trying to do with the money it is.

The Toronto Transit Commission spends about the same amount TransLink does — $1.5 billion to TL’s projected $1.4 for this year. But its system is paid for 70 per cent by fares and only 30 per cent by property taxes. And there are no gas taxes, no carbon taxes, no vehicle levies, and so on, at least for the moment.

What’s the difference? One is that the TTC serves about 460 million riders a year in a territory of 622 square kilometres. TransLink’s 2011 ridership, not quite tallied yet, looked like it was heading for a record … 220 million riders. In a territory of just over 2,800 square kilometres.

TransLink is also a still-growing system. So you end up with an agency getting fares from half as many riders across four times the space and with big capital projects to build yet, as it tries to capture more riders. (To be scrupulously fair, I don’t think the TTC’s budget numbers cover capital costs. Nor does the TTC have to deal with building roads or bikeways, as TL does.)

All of that means riders pay less than half the bill and the rest of it gets covered through the array of property taxes, parking taxes, tolls, and gas taxes. I don’t see that, by the way, as drivers subsidizing riders. I see it as drivers helping to pay for a complete system that helps remove some of their competition from the roads by converting some drivers to transit users, which helps reduce congestion. Transit doesn’t benefit only the people who are on it.

As you can see from the handy chart, mayors are trying to find a different mix of taxes and fees to cover the hundreds of millions needed beyond fares. That will be needed until the city and system is built up enough to the point where fares cover a bigger part of the bill.

Until then, it looks as though everyone else will have to pay more, one way or another. As Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart said to me this week, it’s not as though taxes will go down if the region stops building transit projects. There are more people and more commuters being added to the region all the time. So if there are no transit projects, there will have to be new roads — and that will cost tax dollars too.

As many of you will recall, the city has been working to adjust its building standards near the Fraser River, False Creek and Burrard Inlet to adapt to new projected sea-level increases over the next 100 years. Many of you weighed in on that.

One of the solutions that has been discussed was a flood-control barrier in False Creek. I hadn’t heard much more about that but there’s an interesting blog post here from someone in a position to know more about this. A provocative response incorporating links for other options like SkyTrain downtown and yonder. Your thoughts?

I did a profile of Christy Clark shortly after she was chosen leader of the B.C. Liberals, a year ago. One of my big takeaways then: This is a woman who loves the political battle and is a master of strategy. (So strategic that she declined to talk to me for the profile, giving me the chance to talk to many others around her.) But it wasn’t clear how she would perform in a non-war situation.

A year later, I spent two days with her as she waded through a schedule of premier’ing, mom’ing, and campaigning. Here’s the result, which represents a fraction of what she had to say and what I got to observe, but captures the feeling of what it’s like to live in her shoes (which are sometimes runners and sometimes high heels).

My takeaway: Her ability to morph into whatever will appeal to the audience in front of her is still obscuring a clear view of her style as a leader and long-term vision setter.

I know her critics will say she has no style in either of those categories. And yet she’s chosen to pin her hopes on one of the toughest long-term strategies of all — creating jobs. That’s something any economist will tell you is extremely difficult for an individual government to have a large or quick effect on, given the way the world economy works. And she’s pushing and pulling various ministries into line to try to achieve that, which takes a commitment to a faraway goal.

Oddly, she sees herself as steadier than her “predecessor,” as she often refers to Gordon Campbell. She said one of the key difference she sees between the two of them is that she doesn’t develop a new interest every six months.

Until this week, she was also been successful, or someone has been, at keeping many Conservatives and conservatives in her camp. I realize the news of the last week is about John van Dongen bailing and others, like Kevin Falcon and George Abbott, appearing to waver.

What I was struck by when I was out in Chilliwack was the number of long-time federal Conservatives who were pulling for her. Some were lesser known party operatives, people whom I’d heard in the past would have nothing to do with Clark because of their bad treatment at the hands of the Liberal Party when Clark’s former husband, Mark Marissen, was in charge.

Others were people like former federal MP Chuck Strahl, who was unequivocal when he told me that the B.C. Conservatives can’t win in B.C. and that if conservatives want a conservative government, they should stick with the Liberals.

“It’s too narrow cast here,” he told me in early February. “They’ll never be able to form the government. I tell people to wrestle with the political reality before us. The only way it will work is to coalesce around one party.”

Strahl, who described John Cummins’ role during his time with the Conservatives federally as a “loner,” said the B.C. Conservatives under here will only attract a limited group of voters who think exactly like them.

Although he didn’t say it, it’s clear that that small group is enough to help the Liberals lose and the NDP win. The NDP doesn’t have any greater a share of support than it has at other times. But it’s in the lead, in polling, because the group that used to support the Liberals is now fractured, with a third of them claiming they’ll vote B.C. Conservative.

Obviously, the ground is shifting under everyone’s feet in the last few days. If long-time ministers like Kevin Falcon and George Abbott start hinting at bailing, if polls continue to show the Conservatives creeping up, if there are more public-relations disasters … well, who knows.

But I’m always disinclined to write people off too quickly as lost causes, especially when it’s a case of the public being in full lynch-mob mode, which seems to happen so easily these days. Especially for someone who’s such a relentless war campaigner.

Catching up on last week’s events, the story of the week was the confusion after Premier Christy Clark didn’t just announce an audit of TransLink — that was welcomed by mayors — but went on to say that she would no way allow a vehicle levy or other “new tax” to pay for transit projects.

(Realize this is all seems ancient as we now are witnessing the John van Dongen defection unroll, but for the record, I’m posting this anyway.)

The most recent fallout ash that has rained down is the news that mayors will take a look at whether they can cancel all transit expansions in the current “Moving Forward” plan if they are forced to pay for it through a property tax.

I started asking about this Friday because I remembered that mayors had asked staff to lay out for them, at a TransLink mayors’ council meeting last fall, what would happen if some part of the money for Moving Forward didn’t come through. They wanted to be assured that they wouldn’t be stuck with projects half-completed. Staff at the time reassured them that projects would be structured in a way that they could be cancelled if expected waves of new money didn’t appear.

Although they’re checking into the legalities, my memory of that meeting makes me think it must be possible to cancel some of the projects.

And, just to catch up, here are the two previous stories I wrote prior to today’s, as the TransLink-audit-vehicle levy weirdness unfolded.

Saturday’s story here and Friday’s story here. (Don’t be put off by the similar headlines on the two stories. They really are very different.)

With the Marine Gateway project hitting the headlines after it sold out in four hours, you can bet developers will be encouraged to get moving on their projects in the area.

First up are the two towers planned for the corner of Gateway, by architect James Cheng for Intracorp. Details are here for the project, which will have 551 units, 110 of them guaranteed rentals under the STIR program

The very thoughtful and active residents in the area, who helped shape the planning for this corner — even giving it the name Marine Landing that the city has now adopted — aren’t going to get the little commercial hub they had hoped for.

A report says commercial activity wouldn’t be viable. Which seems odd to me, as there is commercial stuff there now. The report claims that being blocked by the Canada Line makes retail problematic, which I have to believe is Vancouver-centric thinking. I’ve seen many other businesses in other cities that exist in and around metro lines and seem to do fine.

At any rate, the city has negotiated to get two artist spaces on the ground floor, along with a series of live-work units, which may make that tiny strip a little more lively than if it were straight residential.

Project hearing is Monday night, the night before the Rize revolt continues for what I believe might be the final night of speakers.

Like Surrey, Prince George and Toronto, Vancouver is about to start a small rent bank, kicking in $150,000 of the total cost, with $350,000 coming from Streetohome, the private-sector group working on homelessness, and others.

The bank is aimed at helping prevent homelessness by providing small loans to people to help them get or retain housing.

I’m attaching the report below so those of you unfamiliar with the concept can take a look at how it works, which does NOT include just handing out money to anyone who phones saying “I can’t pay my rent.”

As you’ll see in the report, applicants are assessed and people who’ve been in place a long time and have mostly paid their rent regularly but have run into a crisis are the likely recipients. No one can get more than $1,000 every two years — it’s not a monthly rent supplement.

I discovered this concept when I researched and wrote a series on homelessness and housing for the Toronto Star 12 years ago, as a result of winning an Atkinson Fellowship. Toronto was just starting its rent bank, which helped prevent a young single mother with two kids, who worked as an administrative assistant at a local university, from being evicted.

My research then showed that loan repayment wasn’t always the highest. On the other hand, the $500-$1,000 that was “lost” to clients who didn’t pay back was still considerably cheaper than having the whole family end up in the street.

At that time, Toronto was housing hundreds of homeless families in suburban motels after they’d been evicted or couldn’t find housing after leaving abusive homes or something equally catastrophic.

A lot of agencies have refined this concept over the years, to improve their chances of lending to the people most likely to benefit from one-time help over a bad hump. We’ll see how it goes here.

rent bank report-1

Tolls spread through the region instead of just the Port Mann, as Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts suggests?

More thoughts on how to create lower-cost housing?

How to preserve some of our beloved places — the Ridge, the Hollywood — from a city and developers whose attitude seems to be, “Sorry, I know you have some weird attachment to these dilapidated old buildings, but it’s  just too expensive and complicated to save them, you know.”

I am away for a short time, but I invite you to keep the conversation going in your inimitable way.