Quirky George Chow has finally made his decision, it appears. He never did phone or email me back to say officially that he’s not running, but the news release about Tony Tang stepping up to take his spot on the Vision slate for the fall election makes it clear.

With Tang, Vision seems to have managed to achieve the goal of finding almost an exact substitute: like George, Tony is an engineer; also like George, he’s been active in the Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners Association; and finally, like George, he’s got a low-key, friendly style, though I’m not sure he can ever match the positive references George got in local media to his Dadaist poems, speeches and jokes.

Below, the news release on Tony’s run:

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We love to think homelessness only exists in Vancouver because people read about our gold-plated services, great weather, and free drugs. However, a recent twitter flurry prompted me to look up stats from a couple of other cities.

For those who are curious, below is an excerpt from a recent fact sheet on homelessness and housing in Toronto. As you see, there were 5,086 homeless people counted during their single-night count (with 22,000+ different people experiencing homelessness over the course of the year) compared to the Metro Vancouver count of 2,623.

Metro Vancouver’s population is about 2.3 million. Toronto’s — assuming that the City of Toronto count extended only to the current boundaries of the mega-city and not to the Greater Toronto Area overall — is about 2.6 million.

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Hard to mourn the American Hotel and its bar that died in 2006, unless you were into super-cheap blocks of stolen cheese, cocaine, motorcycle gangs, grunge or all of the above.

Its replacement — a cleaned-up hotel with a new izakaya-themed bar below, the Electric Owl — is definitely a step up without going all the way to hyper-gentrification in this rapidly changing Chinatown/Downtown Eastside corridor. Some will still see it as the thin edge, I’m sure.

The Owl opens this week. Not sure when the hotel’s 49 rooms will be rented out. But definitely a big change for this spot on Main, opposite the Cobalt that used to be the epicentre of punk and leather.

The NPA is undoubtedly going to get some new people onto Vancouver city council this November, as Vancouver voters swing away from the big Vision sweep of 2008. But which ones? While some voters will likely vote a straight NPA ticket, others I know will be looking for a mix of councillors who they judge will do the best job.

So which of the NPA candidates to pick? That will be the question. There will likely be a little more MSM information forthcoming as the campaign progresses on all of them, but, in the meantime, one energetic reporter went down to the NPA’s pub night this week and actually interviewed some of them about their burning issues. You can start gathering your information for voting here.

Since the basic numbers of the homeless count came out yesterday, homelessness workers have been ecstatic about the progress made in the last three years. But various critics and observers have focused on the fact that the homeless numbers are almost the same as three years ago. Their conclusion: No progress.

Some of this is pure (and tiresome) politics, of course. Vision and the NPA are battling it out over whether Vision’s efforts have been successful or a sham. (I’ll let you figure out who is saying which.) Apparently no comment on whether Dianne Watts and Rich Coleman are also pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.

But some of it is people who are genuinely worried about future efforts at combatting homelessness. Like my Sun buddy Jeff Lee, they look at the enormous effort the province and various municipalities made over the past three years — millions of dollars, hundreds of units — and think, “If all this results in no reduction in homelessness, it must be a failure.”

That kind of conclusion worries me, has worried me all along, because it’s clear to me people often have this unrealistic idea about who homeless people are and what the dynamics are. I fear that too many people think there’s some finite group of 1,500 or 2,000 or 838 homeless people and, if they can just all be put into apartments, the problem will be solved and no one will ever have to worry about it again. So they’re bound to be disappointed when homeless people keep on appearing, after the 1,500 or 2,000 or 838 apartments have been filled.

The reality, of course, is that people move constantly in and out of homelessness. The foster-care system is practically a homelessness factory. As I said in a previous post, usually about four to six times as many people will be homeless in a given year as the number indicated from a point-in-time count.

As well, and here’s the basis for me saying there are signs of success, when the region grows, all other things being equal, so do the numbers of homeless people.

All kinds of people — about 40,000 a year — move here for all kinds of reasons. Some of them start out homeless, sleeping in shelters til they get some work. Others move out for work, lose their jobs, and end up homeless. Some were homeless where they came from and are homeless here and stay homeless.

But the reality is that the number of people likely to be homeless increases at the same rate as the rest of the population, unless some change in social policy makes the numbers swing up or down radically.

Between 2002 and 2005, the number of homeless people in Metro Vancouver went from 1,121 to 2,174. Is that because the size of the region doubled in three years? No. It’s because welfare policy changed, excluding many more people. Welfare rates didn’t go up, leaving those still getting welfare less able to compete in what was an increasing housing market. And the province stopped building social housing outright in 2001.

Between 2007 and 2010, the region grew from 2,199,124 people to 2,374,628 people. (My stats are from the BC Stats website, population estimates 2006-2010) That’s eight per cent. If homelessness had grown by the same amount — something that could reasonably have been expected if nothing changed — there would have been eight per cent more than the 2,660 homeless people enumerated in the 2008 count.

That’s 213 people. If homelessness grew by the same amount it did between 2005 and 2008 — 20 per cent — there would have been another 530 people. But there weren’t. Instead, there were 37 fewer people in shelters (mostly) and on the streets (much fewer than before) in 2011 than in 2008.

That’s a lot of people, considering that much of the new social housing that Rich Coleman got started three years ago is mostly not open yet. And remember, four to six times as many people are homeless in a year as in a given point-in-time count.

That means somewhere between 800 and 3,000 are out of the shelter system and off the streets. They got into one of the new shelters opened in Vancouver or Surrey or Langley. Someone at the shelter got them a line on a cheap apartment. They stayed iin that apartment, perhaps because they got some kind of help from a visiting nurse or social worker, if they needed it.

That’s a lot of lives affected. It might look like nothing much has happened, just from the count. But it doesn’t feel that way to people out there.

Trying to get people to take a closer look at conventional wisdom is one of the hardest jobs around. One of the unshakeable beliefs Vancouverites have these days is that housing prices here are more disconnected from local incomes than almost any other city. I have to say, I’m prone to that thinking myself.

That’s why my ears went up when marketer Bob Rennie made it a central theme in his talk to the Urban Development Institute last week that the city is not as unaffordable as it’s often made to appear in headlines. He had his research consultants break out the numbers to look at the average price of housing when the top 20 per cent of sales — the outliers who are paying millions for houses on the west side of Vancouver or expensive condos in Coal Harbour — are excluded.

His numbers are in my story here. I’m still inclined to think that Vancouver housing prices are skewed high, for very particular reasons, but I’m putting this out here as a thinking point. I’m sure many of you will disagree for various reasons. (I see Judy Rudin is already packing counter-arguments into 140 characters on Twitter.) Perhaps some of you may find some merit in Rennie’s analysis.

I’d like to hear what you have to say, because this is an issue that I keep circling around with no satisfying answer. There are days when I think there’s something seriously wrong with the city and its housing prices. And other days where I think that we’re a city of people who want to have a big city but pay Saskatoon housing prices.

The reality is that, as cities grow, housing prices close to the centre or close to the most attractive areas get bid up. There’s a larger pool of people with money who will do what it takes to get those prime spots. And the rest of us have to go to other parts of the city. Those of us with okay but not spectacular incomes have to live in smaller places or put in a basement suite or otherwise compromise if we want to be close to the central city. If we insist on having the full house and yard, we have to move further out. (And, ironically, people who campaign to keep new housing out of their neighbourhoods in an effort to keep them as they are ultimately end up spurring their transformation — because those neighbourhoods then get bought up by the small pool of wealthy people able to afford them.)

But is there a large, economically prosperous city that doesn’t work this way? I’m actually working on a bigger journalism piece on this, so pile on.

As the counting of homeless people ends, the politicking begins. I see that the province and the city and homeless advocates are trumpeting the lower homeless numbers, while the Non-Partisan Association has sent out a news release saying that homeless numbers are actually up in Vancouver.

For those who’d prefer just to go to the numbers and see for themselves, reports are below. A short summary, though. Metro Vancouver has done homeless counts in 2002, 2005, 2008 and 2011. The city did its own homeless count in 2010, using the same methodology and many of the same staff as Metro Vancouver uses.

In 2005, there were 1,264 homeless people counted in Vancouver, 591 of them on the streets, the rest in shelters.

in 2008, 1,576 homeless people counted, 811 of them on the streets.

In the city’s own 2010 count, there were 1,715 counted, 421 on the streets

In the most recent count, 1,605 counted, 145 on the streets.

The Metro Vancouver reports are here.

The Vancouver report is here.

Just a final reminder: people who do research into homelessness say that the number of people who experience homelessness is four to six times the count on an individual night. Many people cycle in and out of homeless, sometimes just staying in a shelter for a night, sometimes for a week. Metro Vancouver has been unusual is having a very high number of people who are long-term homeless. I’ll be waiting for the full report to see if there’s any change to that.

Still waiting the full numbers from Metro Vancouver, but in the meantime, I’m hearing that regional homeless count showed the number of homeless people was down by one per cent from 2008 to 2011 — an accomplishment considering the region adds 40,000 new people every year — and down six per cent in Vancouver. In addition, street homelessness in Vancouver down 65 per cent.

All that’s available officially so far is this news release from the province:

http://www2.news.gov.bc.ca/news_releases_2009-2013/2011ENER0033-000592.htm

Kind of a shocker when the NPA list of candidates was released yesterday.

Unless I’m really missing something, they’ve essentially handed control of the school board to Vision/COPE for the next election, since they’re only running four candidates for the nine-member board. At park board, they’re field four candidates for seven positions. And at council, they’ll have 10 people running for 10 spots, but there won’t be any vote-off in June since there’s no competition.

I have to say, I’m surprised by this. I would have thought potential NPA candidates would be thinking, “Okay, we’re not going to win a majority this time, but by 2014, a lot more people may be getting tired of Gregor and his team. So I’ll run and get a minority spot in this election, but then in 2014, I’ll be an experienced hand and potentially part of a majority government.”

So either an awful lot of people are thinking that there’s no chance even in 2014 or they don’t see the NPA as being a vehicle that represents them or … I don’t know what. Some part of this may be the provincial/federal election fatigue that’s afflicting both parties.

Even Vision Vancouver, apparently, (they haven’t released THEIR list of candidates yet) isn’t seeing a huge amount of competition for its open spots, whatever those open spots are. (We don’t know exactly what’s open yet. There’s been a lot of speculation about whether George Chow is running again. Every time I ask someone in Vision what’s happening with him, they get a funny look on their faces and tell me I have to ask George. George hasn’t responded to my phone calls or emails. Yoohoo, George, can you let us know? Deadline is past.)

But even so, it’s quite amazing to see the once-powerhouse NPA not be able to fill its roster.

The NPA list/news release below

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That’s the main news I saw from the latest receiver’s report issued yesterday. The news about the sales we’ve heard before. Apparently some new numbers will be out at Bob Rennie’s speech to the UDI today.

Other fun highlights I noticed:

– All of the subsidized units of social housing have been rented out

– 148 of 252 of the city units have been rented out in total

– The receiver has now received $1.3 million in fees, though the report stresses that a lot of that money is the result of having to deal with the deficiencies issues

– 33 more units have been released for sale from the block of condos that the receiver originally thought about renting out. But the sales of anything below $500,000 has been going really well, so more units in that price range have been released. More evidence that if developers had built something more modestly scaled, they might have sold the units faster. Sounds like the $1 million places still moving slowly.

– Almost 2,000 deficiencies were reported AFTER the receiver took over, compared to about 250 before

– A really fun read is the correspondence from a disgruntled resident in one of the appendices, with repeated threats to go to the media and ruin their sales launch. Too bad the name is blacked out.