I got sent this internal Penhy Ballem memo Friday night, one that many city staffers themselves missed, as they downed tools early Friday afternoon in preparation for the annual two-week shutdown at the hall.

(Rather an odd time for such an announcement, really — the ultimate “we don’t want people to see this” timing.)

As you can see below, it announces the unsurprising retirement of Ken Bayne, the head of Business Planning and Services at the city.

More interestingly, it pushes two key people up the ladder at city hall: Dave McLellan, who seems to be en route to being a deputy city manager (if that’s what “moving into the city manager’s office” means), is now going to be pushing Vision’s big file on affordable housing, while Bill Aujla, whom Ballem relied on to oversee the Olympic Village, takes over the city’s big fat real-estate portfolio.

I’m not sure I understand everything that these moves mean, but I suspect it’s all in the service of carrying out Vision’s major priorities on using city land to maximize possibilities for creating lower-cost housing.

Perhaps you all can read the memo and deconstruct for me

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For the last several years, Vancouver businesses have seen their taxes significantly lowered and even, in some years, frozen, as a result of the city’s policy of shifting the proportion of taxes between businesses and residents.

It appears that’s going to change significantly this year. Many people understood during the election that a new Vision council would do one final year of shifting a full one per cent, as it has the past couple of years. Certainly that was what I thought was being talked about. The difference between the two parties, as I comprehended it, was that Vision would only do one more year of the one-per-cent shift, whereas the NPA was promising to continue shifting for all three years.

As it turns out, Vision’s new budget is planning for only a .25 shift, because that, according to the financial wizards, is all that it will take to get the tax ratio in Vancouver to 48 per cent for commercial, 52 per cent for residential.

Last year, because the tax increase was so low, the one-per-cent shift meant that businesses saw essentially no tax increase. The year before that, it was extremely small.

This year, in contrast, they’ll see almost the same increase as the rest of the city, since the shift will be so low.

Be prepared for a lot of sturm and drang over this. The Fair Tax Coalition and business owners say that Vision Vancouver has misunderstood what was originally recommended by UBC professor Stan Hamilton five years ago — that he only said to stick with the 48-52 target and stop tax shifting if there was no longer a wide disparity between Vancouver and other municipalities.

Raymond Louie and others Visioners say that’s not true and they’re leaning heavily towards giving residential taxpayers a break for once.

The two sides will be battling it out as budget talks proceed apace for the next three months.

I’m just reading an interesting paper published this year by UBC law professor Douglas Harris about the rise of the condo in North American and particularly Vancouver.

As of the 2006 census, he noted, 37 per cent of all residents of Vancouver lived in a strata condo. I can only imagine what the percentage will be when the 2011 census numbers come out.

As Professor Harris points out, this new form of property ownership essentially altered the landscape of Vancouver irrevocably.

I noticed some of you talking about the inherent flaws of condo ownership and alternatives that might provide more (and better) choices.

Love to hear more on that. I’m also curious about whether anyone has had an experience with a condo building that’s come to the end of its life and where all the owners have had to agree on what to do next. (Seems like IanS might know something about this.)

In case anyone feels they haven’t had a chance to fully express themselves yet about the story of the bear that road into town on a garbage truck and popped into the media eye someone around the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

I see one of our regular bloggers here got the first, best pix.

For those who missed it in the paper, here in my late link to the story in last Friday’s paper, detailing concerns from the within the board of First United and the executive of the Vancouver-Burrard presbytery about the shelter at First United.

Rev. Ric Matthews did not return a couple of calls I made to him during the week for some reason, but he did call me the next day and issue this statement.

It’s not clear what the outcome of all of this is, except to say that the situation at First United is a reminder of how careful people need to be as they try to do good work.

If anyone has any more information to shed on this unfortunate situation, I’d be happy to hear it.

The election season was so much fun that now I need to sleep somewhere for a solid week.

So here I am, living in a campsite yurt on the beach in north Oahu, surrounded by feral chickens and a limited selection of local surfers who have hunted out this little gem, a perfect, building-free cove that feels like the Hawaii of a century ago. (I’m sure sharp-eyed Bill Lee will remember my previous trip here and even knows my GPS location.)

I have to note that, passing through Honolulu, I was startled by the numbers of homeless people, sleeping on the sidewalk next to my hotel, all along the beach at Waikiki, and elsewhere.

It reminds me again that cities with warmer weather don’t so much attract homeless people as render them extremely visible because they can sleep outside (instead of in parking garages or in sheds or on someone’s floor) more comfortably.

Oh, and for transportation buffs, you’ll be thrilled to hear the whole city is embroiled in a fight over heavy rail vs. light rail for the new, much needed transit system in this sprawling city.

So, as usual, feel free to post here on interesting city topics that come up until I return.

One of the priorities that Mayor Gregor Robertson set out for this term is to explore new ways to create affordable housing in Vancouver.

That will be one of this administration’s toughest challenges. The other goals he has — promoting a Vancouver economy, pushing to become “the greenest city,” and more — are relatively easy in comparison.

But trying to create affordable housing in a city this size requires huge dollars or sweeping changes in land-use policy in order to do more than a few token units. And whenever cities try to do this, they also raise the question of who benefits. When developers get incentives to build lower-cost housing, do they benefit unduly? And who gets to live in the new lower-cost units? Does that small group get a benefit that others resent?

Those are the real questions that the mayor’s blue-ribbon task force on affordable housing has to answer. Last time, as the Vision council rushed in to creating its Short Term Incentives for Rental program, it didn’t.

The council pulled together a similar group of developers, housing advocates, architects, planners and more to come up with that plan. It swept aside the concerns of advocates like Brent Granby that the STIR program didn’t really provide low-cost rental, only market rental, and that would make people doubt it. As it turned out, he was very right, at least when it came to the West End.

Other smaller towns around North America have successfully created local worker housing — typically in small resort towns like Whistler or Aspen where there’s an easily understood problem of needing to provide affordable housing for the people who work in the resorts. The city’s two major universities have done something similar on their campuses in order to be able to attract and retain faculty.

But those small towns and universities operate in a simpler world.

Creating the kinds of affordable housing the Simon Fraser University or Whistler have is harder is a big, complex city: more dollars required, more possibilities for public misunderstanding, harder to draw the line around who the housing should be for.

So this time, besides just the mechanisms for creating low-cost housing, the panel has to address some much more basic questions if a new program is going to be accepted.

Among them:

1. How can you demonstrate to the public exactly what incentives developers get, in dollar terms, and what the public gets back for that? If there isn’t some extremely transparent format for doing this, there will be another WEN-style backlash where those who don’t understand the housing market will spread the word that developers are getting freebies.

As tedious as it is, the public needs to have the chance to go through the numbers and to have conversations with planners and politicians, in advance of any policy, to talk about the pros and cons.

As we saw in the past three years, most of the public doesn’t get how the rental market works, why it’s important to have buildings with permanent rentals in them (as opposed to a shifting stock of condo units that investors may or may not rent out), and why builders have not been building purpose-built rentals.

2. How can you demonstrate to the public that, if the city comes up with some way of producing lower-cost housing, it is allocated fairly?

Should “key workers” — police, firefighters, teachers, health workers — get first access, the way London does it? Should it be on an income basis? What happens when a family’s income changes? How do you keep speculators out?

And how does the city ensure that the stock of lower-cost housing it creates doesn’t just disappear after the first generation buys in? At SFU, buyers get to buy housing in the Verdant project at 20 per cent below market. But then they have to sell to the next buyer at 20 per cent below market, so that the university can keep those units in a special pool forever. Is it possible for the city to set up something similar?

All those questions, and more, are the real dilemma.

Talk of rising sea levels always sounds so far away, Al Gore-ishly distant.

But in the last few months, it’s come right to home for people all around the province as they’re coming to terms with new provincial guidelines that now set projected future levels significantly higher than past projections did.

My story on what the City of Vancouver, City of Richmond, Concord Pacific, and ParkLane Homes are doing about this, among others.

This is what some might call abusing your role as a public commentator and others might say is courageous investigative reporting, but I just have to gripe momentarily about annoying policies — some new, some old — in the city’s money-making parking department.

One is: Have you noticed that the city has shortened up its time to pay tickets without having the fine doubled from what used to be over 30 days to 14 days? And it no longer sends notices in the mail to let you know you have a parking ticket until after that 14-day period has passed.

So it’s taken me a few $100 parking tickets to catch on. Sneaky. Plus some poor sucker soon, if it hasn’t happened already, is going to have to fight a tedious fight to prove that s/he never saw the original ticket and therefore didn’t have a chance to pay by the 14-day deadline because no city notice arrived before then.

Second gripe: You get ticketed EVEN IF YOU HAVE PAID THE FULL AMOUNT if you’re driving a car that is different from the one you normally drive and you forget to change the licence number when you phone in your payment on your cell.

I’ve done it three times now, twice in a rental car, once in a friend’s car, because I pay by phone for parking dozens of times a month and do it so automatically that I don’t even listen to the voice telling me what licence plate it’s for.

The city will forgive one parking ticket a year if you can come up with a reasonable excuse. But it won’t forgive the ticket, even though you may have pay their extortionate fees in full but for the wrong car. Can’t figure out why they would be so piggy about it — it’s not as though there’s some sneaky way I could also park my own car at the same time at another meter and somehow get away with something.

Go ahead, let the floodgates open for the griping. Let’s get it out of our systems before Christmas and then we’ll all be nice and jolly after.

(I realize this post betrays my hopeless addiction to the car. I admit it and am grateful for the city’s harm-reduction program that allows me to keep using until I’m ready to quit.)

It’s painful to watch the strange argument that erupts every fall as the city and ministry can’t seem to agree on funding new winter shelter beds.

It ended Friday, with Housing Minister Rich Coleman’s announcement that he’s funding two new shelters (as well as announcing the eventual phasing out of the sometimes controversial First United Church shelter) that will be run the new way that the city introduced three years ago.

It’s painful to watch because Rich Coleman has brought more social housing and housing assistance to B.C. in five years than any province has ever seen. And Vancouver’s Vision party has made tackling homelessness a priority and has put more money into it than any previous administration.

Given the priority both have given this file and their sincere efforts to find solutions, it’s a shame to see the squabbling that breaks out over a program that costs $1.5 million — an amount that could probably be taken from the petty-cash drawer of the health ministry and never be missed.

In spite of the small amount of money, it’s incredibly valuable, getting people out of the alleys, the doorways, the parking lots and various other places where those who are homeless typically sleep during the winter.

Both politicians involved have happy to take credit for what the other has helped initiate or fund. Coleman, while slagging the mayor at his news conference Friday for harping on his “pet projects” that the city is “never” willing to contribute to, was happy to talk about the way street homelessness has fallen from 800 to 145 last winter.

That only happened because the city under Vision insisted on opening a new kind of winter shelter and enticed the province into paying operating costs by offering to put up the buildings and the cost of any renovations needed to them the last three years.

The mayor, for his part, campaigned this fall (and presumably won the election in part because of it) on the statement that his party had reduced street homelessness. Of course, he was only able to do that because the province had poured tens of millions into new social housing, as well as paying for the operation of 1,600 shelter beds, 1,100 of them year-round, 500 extra during the winter.

Given all that, it would be nice for us (the public) and for the homeless themselves if we didn’t have to go through that again. The ministry seems to have moved to adopt the city’s approach this year, by incorporating the winter shelters into its own buildings.

That’s a far better approach than what happened as homelessness tripled between 2001 and 2008, when the province provided only X number of shelter beds, no matter how many people were sleeping on the street.

Maybe next fall, that can unroll smoothly, with the minister announcing the plan early in the fall and the mayor thanking him — something the minister claims Robertson never does, which is untrue — publicly and profusely before the shelters open, expressing the gratitude we all feel that we’re treating people humanely.