The affordable-housing task force, after five quick weeks of meetings, has come up with a very preliminary to-do list to try to create lower-cost housing for working people.

Here are some of their ideas.

Check the twittersphere for more news.

The announcement by Coma Food Truck operator Jay Cho that he is winding up operations tomorrow provoked an outpouring of eating and grief this week by his many fans.

Cho is giving up because he didn’t get selected for a permanent spot for the second year in a row. Although he seems to be successful with his mobile permit and would have been automatically renewed for that this year, he says it’s too hard. And, I get the sense, he’s also feeling really rejected.

I wasn’t part of the taste-testing prior to the selection of 12 lucky operators for permanent spots out of the 59 applicants, so I don’t know how his food ranked against them. But I can say that his Korean barbecue tacos were WAY better than what I had at LA food trucks — less salty, with moister meat, and with the spiciness cut by a nice heaping of some kind of Korean cole slaw on top.

My first-ever foray into bibimbap at his truck was also an above average meal. Burp.

Sorry to see you go, Jay. (He’s at 8th and Ash today, according to tweets. If you read this in time, hustle down. And somewhere in Kits tomorrow.) But I’ll be looking for Alessandro Vianello’s new food truck, which he describes in my story.

The region’s mayors continue to struggle to find the formula for paying for transit and roads in the region long-term.

Reporters tackled them yesterday at the end of their three-hour meeting, which Transportation Minister Blair Lekstrom attended part of,  and we all tried to pull something out of them about what’s coming up next.

Weirdly, many people focused on asking Lekstrom whether the province would ever allow a plan to put tolls on all the roads and bridges “as mayors have requested.” Of course, he said no. Duh. But the strange thing was, mayors have never requested this. That was one item on a long, long list of options compiled by staff of all the different ways that cities around the world have come up with to pay for their transit/road systems.

Unless I’m living in an alternative universe, mayors never said that was the option they would be pushing. In fact, TransLink chair Richard Walton (District of North Van) and Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore (also chair of the Metro Van board) said that there would have to be a mix of strategies in any long-term funding plan and that, whatever mix it was, it had to be fair for everyone in the region. In other words, no plan that would penalize someone just because they happen to cross a bridge on their route.

What I found interesting from my talk with Walton and mayors’ council vice-chair Peter Fassbender (City of Langley) after the meeting was the news that they have zeroed in on one source of revenue they want to put in place for next year, but they aren’t saying what it is yet.

And, when they look at the long-term funding formula they want to put in place, some of the existing revenue sources, like the gas tax, may drop off.

My story here gives more details.

Sounds like cities have been listening to the grumbling they hear around them.

As I note here, most municipalities have kept their tax increases low. (I hear West Van is pushing for zero)

They know they need to, because they bear the brunt of complaint for the whole tax bill, of which city taxes are usually only a half. But when school taxes, Metro Vancouver taxes and TransLink taxes go up as well, it’s councils that usually get blamed.

It was exciting for me to get to work this year on a story I’ve wanted to do for more than a decade: What is going to happen to Vancouver’s condo buildings at the end of their lives?

I thought that perhaps I might be only imagining there could be problems when 150 people and five retail owners have to decide what to do about a $20-million building. But, when I started making calls, not only did people confirm that there were lots of potential problems, but they told me about unpleasant scenarios that were beyond my wildest speculation.

My story is here and I won’t recapitulate all the points, but I’ll just highlight the fact that we all seemed to have rushed into this new form of ownership on the assumption that everything would just work itself out down the road.

The condo boom changed Vancouver, though it’s not the only city where it happened. As I discovered in Honolulu when I was there in December, condos flourished there starting in the late 1950s. We stole/copied our condo legislation from Australia. And the mainland U.S. was, of course, in on the wave early.

It was a new form of ownership that helped reverse the decline of central cities. When apartment owners could only rent, then the dense inner cities were the dominion only of renters. People who wanted to own, as so many did in the post-war years, HAD to move to the suburbs. The possibility of condo ownership brought some of them back.

(Some might argue it’s also what is destroying affordability in the city, as renters are constantly threatened by the possibility that their building could be stratified or sold and redeveloped. Vancouver’s put a moratorium on that kind of activity for the hundreds of 1970s four-storey walk-ups in the city, but that can’t last forever.)

But to imagine that condo ownership is just like single-family or even duplex home-ownership is to be blind. There are complications that are only beginning to surface. The province moved last year to fix at least one of them. By the end of this year, strata councils will be required to provide statements outlining the condition of the building and future maintenance that will need to be done, along with a clear statement about what reserves are in place to do that.

At least, then, when people buy, they’ll have a better idea of the condition of the whole building. But it’s still not going to solve the problems of many of the people I encountered when I was researching this story. That’s going to take a whole lot more work.

When the Vancouver Fair Tax Coalition took out ads last week lobbying for no new property taxes in Vancouver, it might have sounded like the usual rhetoric from business groups about municipal spending: councillors don’t understand the impact of new taxes, municipal spending is out of control, yada yada

But that message stung at Vancouver city hall, where the carefully-steering-the middle-road Vision Vancouver has been taking a lot of flak from the left for shifting business taxes to homeowners and its general pro-business approaches.

Some of that seeped out from councillors, especially Raymond Louie, in interviews and public meetings last week, where there was a sense that, after giving tens of millions in tax breaks to city businesses, all council got was a slap in the face.

But the mayor’s chief of staff, Mike Magee, was particularly strong in criticizing the coalition’s publicity campaign, as I write today. Now we’ll see what happens next.

In spite of the fireworks, the city is still working to try to alleviate the problem of skyrocketing property taxes for business operators. Council voted to re-look at land averaging, a mechanism that was brought in during the 90s to alleviate spikes in property assessments, which would then produce spikes in tax increases.

But Councillor Louie said the city is now going to start encouraging businesses not just to lean on the city all the time to solve the problem. Part of the issue locally is that landlords and tenants have unquestioningly conformed to a system where tenants pay the property-tax increase, even though it’s the landlords who cash in if and when they sell their land later on for some crazy price.

Louie said to me last week that business associations need to start helping their members possibly work out a fairer system.

In the meantime, a rocky road ahead for the coalition members as they negotiate with the city, especially when you recognize that what Mike Magee says is often in synch with what Mayor Gregor Robertson is thinking on an issue. So if Magee is expressing strong disappointment, you can safely bet the mayor is not too happy about the coalition’s campaign either.

The Twittersphere already bubbling with ideas for what to do with our “iconic” bathtub building at one of the city’s key intersections, which started life as Eaton’s, continued for a while as eaton’s, became Sears and will now be ???

Picking out a couple of commentaries from the posts in another thread on the Rize, which is generating the most interesting conversation I’ve seen about development and planning in this city than I’ve seen in a long time.

The first from Cameron Gray, the former director of the city’s housing centre. The second from historian and city-history documentarian Michael Kluckner.

Cameron Gray

A central problem with the current community planning process is that it doesn’t go beyond good intentions and get to the nuts and bolts of future development. The Mt. Pleasant Community Plan reads like motherhood and apple pie. Unless the City and community develop a plan that actually spells out maximum densities, building heights, set backs, etc. and defines the massing and land use for the whole community, we will continue to see these battles fought site by site. The Mt. Pleasant Plan should have provided enough clarity e.g. the max height and density for the 3 sites identified for higher densities and taller buildings to avoid this kind of confrontation. To just identify the 3 sites as potential high rise sites is not good enough. What does that mean? Higher than 10 storeys or over 20? The City, and the community, effectively left the hard work to be done site by site; short term pain was avoided for long term agony. Council should send the planners and community back to the table to come up with a plan that provides everyone with clear direction for development that may take place anywhere in the neighbourhood. Ideally the City would prezone Mt. Pleasant; that would provide the maximum certainty for all involved, but that may be too much to hope for.

Michael Kluckner: