Vancouver is the best of cities for artists, with a thriving arts scene that combines the world-famous (Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham, Stan Douglas), the new-pop (New Pornographers, Destroyer, and Said the Whale), the experimental (Boca del Lupo, Ballet BC recently).

And it’s the worst of cities for artists trying to find spaces to actually live, work, rehearse and perform. Artists, pushed here and there starting in the post-Expo years, have been dickering with the city ever since, trying to find nooks and crannies where they can hang on.

City planners played with the idea of allowing artist live/work spaces to be built on the edges of industrial land near Main and Great Northern Way in the late 80s. The result was 1,900 units, but with no guarantee that actual artists are living in them.

City staff have come out with a report that will be debated Thursday, which includes a suggestion that artists be allowed to operate studios on industrial land. (Though no detailed strategies on how to get builders to add that kind of studio space to new buildings.)

Other efforts are in there, though I, like artists who’ve looked at the report, had a hard time figuring out what might actually get done and produce spaces within the next three years. Esther Rausenberg noted that the city, as usual, has declined to define who is an artist, meaning that whatever is done for artists will be hard to enforce.

In the meantime, as I researched this story, I tracked down a rumour I’d heard that a rather well-known building in the block opposite Woodward’s — a place that had provided space for about 20 artists — had been shut down by the city.

My story on all this is in the Globe tomorrow. You can read more here from the man who was renting the building and then sub-leasing it to various artists, Jim Carrico.

In the meantime, Councillor Heather Deal checked on this after my deadline and said the city, which has been pushing the owner to do basic improvements for months, is planning to go in and do them itself and bill the owner. According to her, city inspectors had been doing everything they could to try to keep artists in the building, without utterly ignoring the safety issues.

However, it’s hard for me to understand what was achieved by issuing an order to vacate, since that prompted anyone with valuable equipment in the building to leave immediately. It appears to have had no impact on the owner.

The latest update I had from Jim Carrico was that the owner was going to change locks today and that he was showing the building to Steven Lippman, who has been renovating/gentrifying other buildings on the same block, as well as the American Hotel.

All in all, a rather discouraging situation. Interestingly, I talked to one person who is developing artists spaces elsewhere in the Downtown Eastside and someone who bought a space. Neither wanted to talk on the record about it. Why? Because they aren’t sure that they are legally allowed to have artists’ spaces where they are, according to city bylaws, and so they don’t want to go public. That’s how uncertain the situation is.

Full disclosure: My son did live in the Red Gate building for about a year, though hasn’t for two years, and I don’t know anyone who currently does. I do like the New Pornographers and have been to several of their concerts.

There hasn’t been an independent candidate elected to city hall since Carole Taylor in 1986, but that doesn’t ever seem to stop a few brave souls from trying to beat the considerable odds.

First up in the independent category this time is Sandy Garossino, who led the Vancouver Not Vegas coalition. I haven’t been able to schedule an interview yet (sorry, Sandy) so I’m unclear as to how Sandy’s position would be different from Vision Vancouver’s on the casino, which did reject the expansion.

I’m guessing that she would like to see the casino eliminated entirely from the Vancouver landscape and would not be open to any creeping amendments in future years to add a few tables here, a few slot machines there, at the existing casino.

Sandy Garossino declares candidacy as independent candidate for city council in Vancouver municipal election

Vancouver businesswoman and community organizer wants to return transparency to City Hall and help build an economically sustainable city.

Vancouver, Oct. 3, 2011 – Sandy Garossino, who co-founded and successfully led a campaign against the proposed expansion of a downtown Vancouver mega casino earlier this year, announced today she is running as an independent candidate for Vancouver City Council in the November 19 civic election.

Garossino, a former Crown prosecutor and businesswoman, said she is running because it is time to put the “Public” back into public service at Vancouver City Hall.

“The casino experience taught me how City Hall works, how citizens can make a difference in how their city is run and how there are too many barriers between elected officials and everyday Vancouverites,” said Garossino.

As an independent candidate, Garossino wants to make sure that the public’s voices continue to be heard, so that Vancouverites and future generations are partners in the evolution of the city. “I am running to help make sure the public has a real voice in civic government,” she said.

Garossino said Vancouver residents are also more interested in having their elected officials get things done, rather than have them fight battles around political agendas.

“As an independent councillor, I can serve as an impartial, fair councillor who will listen without an agenda, ideology or party interest to protect. I can speak my mind on issues without fear of being silenced. We need to bring everyone to the table to make this city work the way it should.”

Sandy’s priorities:

• Ensure Vancouver City Hall once again becomes a servant of the people where transparency, access to information, and public consultation are priorities.

• Develop sound fiscal discipline in a way that protects the city’s long-range interests and demonstrates value for tax dollars spent, while caring for its most vulnerable citizens.

• Help create conditions where the local economy can flourish and benefit all citizens.

About Sandra Garossino

Born in Vancouver, Sandra Garossino was raised in a small Alberta town before returning to Vancouver to attend university.  She obtained a BA from Simon Fraser University in 1980 and an LLB from the University of British Columbia in 1983. She practiced law as a Crown prosecutor until 1988, working on cases such as gang activity.  When her father died, she and her brother assumed the ownership and management of the family business, operating three Metro Vancouver taxi companies.  As one of the largest privately held taxi fleets in Canada at the time, the operation employed some 250 people.

Since then, she has been active in several businesses, including the development of a firm aimed at making legal services more affordable to all.

She also took time to raise her now-grown children.

Garossino sits on the SFU India Advisory Council and has ties to UBC’s Asia strategy through her support for the Institute for Asian Research.  The objective of both bodies is to develop closer business and cultural links with Asia. Sandra sits on the Advisory Council of the Indian Summer Festival of Arts and Ideas and the Vancouver International Bhangra Celebration.

Past board memberships include the Vancouver International Writers Festival, the Public Dreams Society (which produces Illuminares and the Parade of Lost Souls), the Alliance for Arts and Culture, and the Vancouver Biennale, which Garossino co-chaired.  She also chaired the Alliance for Arts’ Advocacy Task Force, and served as a volunteer consultant for the BC Association for Charitable Gaming, which represents the interests of thousands of BC charities affected by provincial gaming grant policy.

These relationships ultimately led her to co-found the Vancouver Not Vegas Coalition, successfully opposing the casino expansion.

Sandra is married to Ravi Sidhoo, who runs the 62-year-old family enterprise, East India Carpets in Vancouver.  Sandra and Ravi, who have 5 grown children, support a local school near Varanasi, India, offering education in grades 1 to 9 for the children of local carpet weavers.  They maintain a strong focus on girls’ education.

The civic election campaign is now officially underway, with Vision rolling out its radio ads, paid staffers like Mike Magee and Kevin Quinlan now out of the mayor’s office and into the campaign office, COPE opening up its office, fundraising dinners set and more.

My story here looks at part of the pitch going out to Vision supporters (if you don’t vote for us, the evil other side will wipe out everything we did) and the latest move from the Non-Partisan Association in its attempt to bring VV down somehow. Bike lanes — you knew that one was coming, but, as I note in the story, it’s a hard one for them. The NPA’s committed base mostly hates the bike lanes, but the general public isn’t as worked up about them. So the party has to be against them, but not too against them.

I didn’t have room for everything that’s happening as everyone rolls their cannons on to the field. (Sorry, I just read a book about the Battle of Waterloo, so my mind is filled with 19th-century war metaphors.)

COPE opened its offices today on 500-block East Broadway. I await fun, Monty Pythonesque videos from them, as per the 2008 campaign. Vision is not really operating a streetfront office, but is running its campaign out of the office over the dollar store at Broadway and Yukon. (Don’t hold back on the bad jokes, friends.) As mentioned, Magee and Quinlan are now on leave and working on the campaign, leaving the mayor all by himself up at city hall. Aaaieeeee.

The NPA (offices in concourse at Granville SkyTrain) has had to set back its fundraising dinner. Originally scheduled for last week, they’ve now moved it to early November, just a day away from Vision’s fundraising dinner. NPA president John Moonen said the party had sold a couple hundred tickets, but candidates were resisting selling more, saying it was competing with their own fundraisers at the same time. As well, it turned out there was another big charity dinner the same night, so the party moved it.

Unusual to see parties holding their fundraising dinners so close to the election and a bit risky. As one poster noted recently here, the winning party always tends to have the biggest campaign donations because people start giving more money as they get a sense of who’s going to win. So there’s a possibility that, as the momentum starts to accelerate for one party, the other one will be left in the dust. And that sense of who’s winning is likely to be more pronounced as the election date — and the dinners — get closer.

Vision Vancouver has posted its pitch from Gregor for money and support to keep the revolution going on YouTube. Your thoughts?

Just had to mark this important day, when the Supreme Court ruled that Vancouver’s supervised-injection site will stay open and the federal government should be prepared to issue permits in other cities. (Stories here, here and here, from across the land.)

What a long road it’s been for those fighting for this. (And those fighting against it.)

This was the biggest story I covered for years in the early 2000s. It started when Mayor Philip Owen’s office started planning a new kind of policy to deal with drug addiction in the Downtown Eastside, in the late 1990s. It continued when I travelled to Frankfurt with a group of Canadian researchers and medical types to look at the supervised-injection sites there, spent hours visiting with people at the illegal injection site that operated temporarily, and was the first reporter into the legal one when it opened in September 2003.

It’s a testament to what it takes to accomplish something like this: Unswerving advocates who made it their priority for over a decade. Political administrations that backed in through subsequent electoral upheavals, starting with Mayor Philip Owen, who didn’t start out advocating for injection sites but ended up being a diehard supporter.

People with the political savvy to get police, the province, medical health officers, and more onside. Hours of meetings. Rallies and demonstrations and political actions to mobilize people along the way as the Conservative government emitted negative noises about it. And a public that, locally at least, continued to support it in opinion poll after opinion poll.

It’s actually exhausting to think of the effort that went into this. Some would say much of that was a tragic waste, that people shouldn’t have had to fight so hard to preserve InSite. Their energy could have gone into more useful projects. So could the money that went to federal-government lawyers.

In the end, though, it’s resulted in a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that makes the project invincible and paves the way for those who feel they need a site in their cities. And, I’d argue, it did the job that good debates do — drew people into the public discussion and ensured that a new piece of public policy had been soundly tested and withstood everything that was thrown at it.

It’s an emotional day for me to watch this conclusion. I am in awe of the people who were so dedicated to their causes.

A Gordon Campbell lovefest — that’s what the annual convention of civic politicians often was. The former premier had been a councillor, a mayor, the head of Metro Vancouver, and the president of the Union of B.C. Municipalities, so people knew he understood what the job was like.

Thankless, gruelling hours, by and large crummy pay, and on the front lines of public sniper fire, unlike cushy provincial and federal jobs, where a phalanx of aides usually protect politicians from too much contact with the restless masses.

When Christy Clark said she’d bring in a municipal auditor-general and commented, as one senior civic politician recounted to me vividly, that “municipal spending is out of control,” that did not go over well with that group.

As my story in today’s Globe makes clear, Clark and her minister and her minister’s staff have been dedicating an unusual amount of time the last two weeks to trying to get back on good terms with that group. These 2,000-some politicians, after all, are out in the community every day telling their residents what they think of this or that provincial initiative.

The voters this morning grudgingly okay the UBCM to work with the province on figuring out how the office should work and what kinds of things it should do. But they also delivered the message loud and clear that they still didn’t think much of it.

Campbell’s speech at the end of the convention was often a platform for bringing presents to this group. Now civic politicians, feeling stung but hoping that the premier is genuine in wanting to improve her relationship to them, are waiting to see what she’ll do for their communities tomorrow.

Latest announcement from the NPA didn’t get much media play Tuesday because media were running around dealing with BC Ferries CEO resignation, shooting near a school, and the Municipal Convention That Ate Vancouver (UBCM).

So I’ve attached the news release in full, plus my thoughts here, which are: Sigh.

I don’t like being the wet blanket all the time. Or, let’s say, I’d rather be an equal-opportunity wet blanket, but only the NPA are making announcements so they are the ones getting all the criticism for the moent.

But really. How dumb do they think voters are?

The NPA used to promise all the time to keep taxes to the rate of inflation but somehow that didn’t always quite happen.

A million dollars in savings in a billion-dollar budget? Please. That’s no Ford Nation gravy train announcement. It’s like saying you’re going on a diet so you’ll only have one dessert instead of two, after your five-course meal.

And giving surpluses back to taxpayers? Oh, I don’t care what the Visionistas say about her having voted against giving back the surplus from the city strike. That was a one-time unique situation, different from trying to establish a permanent policy.

But saying you’ll give back surpluses is just bogus. There are all kinds of ways to juggle the books so that you don’t have a surplus. Or so that you do (like raising taxes more than you actually need to) so you can have something to give back and look like you’re accomplishing something when you’re not.

And, btw, the shift of taxes from business to residential has been happening steadily for the past three years.

Oh my gosh, can the NPA not do better than this? I was hoping for more.

[Read more →]

The news exploded late Tuesday afternoon as AG Shirley Bond announced to a crowd of civic politicians at the Union of BC Municipalities that contract talks have stalled and that the feds are saying, “Sign the deal as is or we pull officers out.”

(Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts was probably first with the news. She tweeted about it and I re-tweeted that and then the snowballs started rolling from other directions as well.)

We haven’t heard the federal government side on this, so I’ll be waiting to see if there’s anything they can say to redeem their case. Certainly mayors I talked to were persuasive in how hard it is on them to try to run their cities when they can never be quite sure what kind of bill they’ll get for the RCMP or whether the officers that they raised taxes to pay for will be in the city when needed.

So many things happening in the farmers market world these days as they go beyond just trying to convince people to do their grocery shopping in parking lots and move on to the next phase of growth.

They’re booming everywhere, but that’s produced a new set of problems. I’ve been reading for a while that cities from Seattle to Portland to San Fran to New York to wherever have experienced the issue of too many farmers markets. (Farmers markets MUST be hip because the cheesy romcom No Strings Attached had one scene set at the Los Angeles farmers market downtown)

I wrote about that here, looking at what’s happening in Vancouver and Toronto.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the changes markets are going through, as they look for permanent homes, expand to new sites, experiment with pocket markets, try to gain a foothold in unlikely suburban spots, sweet-talk municipalities into adjusting their bylaws to make them more than temporary events, and move from being strictly volunteer organizations.

New towers don’t fill up with new clients. They fill up with existing big players who are looking to move up a notch. That’s why all these new towers are competing to be green, to be beautiful, to be close to what downtown has to offer.

Here’s my appendix story about all of this, to complement the news story about the Credit Suisse tower that’s arriving on the Vancouver scene.

Much buzz among the commercial-building crowd about the entry of Credit Suisse/Swissreal Investments into Vancouver’s downtown office scene with a proposal for the 800 West Pender block. (My Globe story here.) The proposal gets its public launch tomorrow.

With three towers already approaching construction (University Club site on Hastings by Oxford, 745 Thurlow at Thurlow and Alberni by Bentall, and Telus Gardens on Georgia), and a few more hovering (Pattison’s mixed use project on Burrard, Aquilini’s tower by Rogers Arena), it really feels as though Vancouver is on the move.

This has to make the Visionistas happy, though the tower boom doesn’t have that much to do with any policies they’ve instituted. Possibly Telus was helped along by being able to work out a deal to buy the city parking lot on the block, but other towers appear to me to be the result of  pent-up demand in an unusually long cycle between building.

As Brent Toderian explained when I was researching this story (and another one that will appear in Tuesday’s Globe), commercial building doesn’t work the way residential does. Condos get built at a steady pace all the time. Offices get built in cycles, with a bunch coming on at once and then nothing for several years while tenants resort and absorb all the new space. That’s why it’s dangerous to assume that just because no offices get built for five or six years that it’s okay to release space for other uses.

Vancouver’s cycle this time was exceptionally long. The last tower to go up was the PriceWaterhouseCoopers one on Cordova, which opened in 2003. The only other big chunk of space after that was the top half of Bentall V, which opened in 2007. People blamce city policy, which allowed a couple of office sites (Shangri-La, Hudson) to become condos, wreaking havoc with land prices throughout the CBD.

That wasn’t the only factor, though, as I’ll explain in Tuesday’s story.

On a final note, I know it’s utterly childish, but I love hearing about new buildings going up that aren’t condos. Libraries, office towers,concert halls, community centres, you name it. That’s because they are usually so much more interesting. Condo developers often build buildings the way realtors prep houses — bland, nothing too offbeat that might put off a potential buyer.

Office towers, on the other hand, are often built to convey a distinctive corporate image. The towers being planned in this cycle are aiming for super-green and they’ve all got architectural flair, from the look of renderings so far.

None of us can bring a single New York condo building to the mind’s eye, I’m sure. But we do remember their great commercial towers, those present and those that have been erased.