As attractive metro downtowns have resortified and the economy slowed, office building was sluggish in many places. But apparently now starting to pick up there … and here.

I note that a new office building — on the site of the University Club, which will have its facade preserved — is going to Development Permit Board today, the first one actually at DP board in a while.

Here’s the description from the agenda.

To construct a 35 storey mixed use office/retail tower on the existing University Club (formerly ‘Quadra Club’) site at 1021 West Hastings Street, this site to be consolidated with the westerly existing Guinness Tower.  The ‘University Club’ facade to be retained with retail spaces constructed on the ground floor.  New construction will integrate the parking and services of the existing Guinness parking with the structures below grade.

Provincial and federal politics have been casting big shadows lately, but life is still burbling along on the municipal scene. Some of the news this week.

– The NPA says it has people panting to run for a nomination when the party chooses its candidates June 4.

– The city is planning an underwater bike tunnel.

– Port Moody plans to add a referendum on a casino to its November ballot

– Another round of food-cart mania hits the media, as Vancouver works on selecting 20 new candidates for 20 new spots.

Only one of these is an April Fool’s joke.

Investigative reporting it ain’t, but we in the paid media like to alert you tax-paying peons to the report on council expenses every year so that you can be duly outraged that someone somewhere in government  is spending money.

Reporting for duty on this story, here is the link to this year’s Vancouver council expenses report. The highlights:

Mayor Gregor spent $2,258 on Mandarin lessons before he went to China in September. It’s $2,258 more than previous mayor Sam Sullivan paid to learn Chinese, as far as I know. Sam taught himself all of his languages. But the current mayor’s lessons lessons paid off. He spoke some Mandarin at council recently and I, a temporary resident of China for three months at one time, was impressed with his accent;

*** CORRECTION. I’ve now been told that actually Sam Sullivan spent $3,125 on his Chinese lessons. No bills forwarded to me yet for Punjabi, Tagalog or Italian.

The mayor also got a $7,000 transportation allowance — a surprise to those who thought he’d only need about $150 a year for spare pedals on his bike. Apparently he does get in a car from time to time. The last mayor to get a travel allowance was Philip Owen. Both Larry Campbell and Sam Sullivan used vehicles supplied by the city; Sullivan’s van had quite an expensive upgrade to make it easier for him to get in and out.

Tim Stevenson got the most in travel money — about $13,000

Raymond Louie got the next most, around $10,000, with more than $4,000 for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities trip to Iqaluit

David Cadman, a favoured punching bag for various critics, spent only $484.

Some people think CityCaucus (which consists of the two people who used to work the most closely with former mayor Sam Sullivan: Daniel Fontaine, chief of staff, and Mike Klassen, web designer) IS the Non-Partisan Association, since it has led the charge in generating critical media and talking points about the failures of Vision Vancouver.

However, both CC and the NPA keep insisting that that’s not the case. Even so, CC does have insider access to the thinking and doings of the NPA that regular media types just don’t, so it’s always instructive to hear their analysis of the state of the party. The latest is here. Not sure how accurate every detail is. Adrian Dix going to win the NDP leadership? Not what I’m hearing. And Rob Macdonald has bowed out of running for the mayor’s office? Not sure that’s definitive yet.

But it is true that all the provincial and federal politics have sucked the life out of any momentum the party was starting to develop last summer and early fall as a result of CC’s heavy shelling of the Vision fortress. I’ve talked to more than one person who used to be active in the NPA who is now saying they’ve got no energy left for any more politics, after the provincial Liberal leadership race. Some don’t even have any energy left for the federal election underway.

So where does this leave the NPA?

Housing groups used to get the money for building social housing by applying to the government for a giant grant, waiting for it to arrive, and then going to work. That’s less and less likely these days, so some of those housing non-profits have gotten much more creative over time. Some use the assets they built up over the last 40 years to leverage redevelopments; others are putting together interesting new projects using creative ways of combining public and private support.

The new project planned for 39 East Hastings — the site of the current United We Can recycling depot — is the first I’ve seen of its kind, though. A building with social housing, built without any government support except for a BC Housing guarantee on the mortgage. Plus a new space for United We Can, plus some units for sale to people who work in local agencies, plus a few market condos thrown in at the back where the views are. This is different. (More in my story here.)

This project will be going through a rezoning sometime this spring, and many are hoping this shows the way for a new kind of housing development for the Downtown Eastside that’s not social housing, not gentrification, but a new kind of project that works for this area that doesn’t take enormous government dollars or simply pave the way for market condos that don’t fit into the neighbourhood.

We haven’t been able to see detailed marketing projections for the Paragon/Edgewater casino until now because the company has kept its own reports on this confidential. But the B.C. Lottery Corporation report commissioned to check out Paragon’s revenue projections, put in as part of their bid, is (sort of) available to the public. (And the corp kindly didn’t make me go through a full FOI request to get it, just excised some stuff according to FOI rules, which is as good as you can hope for from a government body these days.)

As I noted in my Globe story, it appears that Vancouver gamblers are already spending lots of money (I got this by looking at the 2009 projections which, as the report was being compiled in mid-2009 using the lottery corp’s own data, would be pretty close to what’s going on) in casinos around the Lower Mainland — almost three times as much as what Edgewater made last year.

But the report is filled with all kinds of interesting other details on how casino analysts calculate market share and market potential, along with their projections on what kind of cash could be pulled out of each “zone” in the Lower Mainland by 2014. I’m sure there are interesting bits and pieces I missed, so please do get out your magnifying glasses and let me know what you think I skipped over too fast.

CASINO.HLTReport

After years where Vancouver seemed to be behind other cities I visited, where you could pay for your street parking with a credit card while locally you still had to dig out coins (what’s that?), the city started to catch up a couple of years ago by implementing a cellphone-pay parking system. Ooh, modern.

In the last few months, I’ve noticed several new technology gadgets on the streets. Along Granville, thanks to some kind of new gizmo attached to the top of the meters, you can now stick in a credit card to pay. I saw for the first time this week that the city appears to be getting its first Seattle-type parking meters, where instead of individual meters for each spot, there’s just a ticket machine on the sidewalk where you buy your parking and then stick the ticket in your car.

And I’m seeing an increasing number of streetlights that now have a countdown function on them, letting everyone know exactly how many seconds until the light turns. Very helpful, especially for those intersections that are pedestrian- or cyclist-controlled and people crossing, including the car drivers, have always had to guess how much time they had left to sprint across because there’s no traffic light for them. (Only a traffic light for the stopped cars on the main street, plus a flashing pedestrian signal that prompted many people to make a dash across the intersection at the last minute.)

I’m sure this is going to prevent some accidents. As I mentioned in the story I wrote last year about pedestrian accidents, San Francisco experimented with a number of ways to try to reduce pedestrian-car collisions and found this was one of the best.

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.

A proposed tower at Kingsway and Broadway is the latest of many struggles going on in the city over new density in established neighbourhoods (West End, Marpole, Arbutus, Shannon Mews).

Fights about density are often portrayed in simplistic terms: NIMBY residents who won’t accept the city is growing or evil planners colluding with developers to wreck the city.

So it was pleasant to see a workshop where people had a chance to have non-confrontational conversations that weren’t just about wanting everything to stay unchanged. The workshop pulled out about 180 people, who sat at tables discussing what they liked, didn’t like and wanted changed about the proposal.

It looked to me as though there were a lot of common themes on the flipcharts where group recorders were writing.

Under what everyone appreciated about the development: “Correct location for increasing density,” “need more density,” “mix of housing choices,” “city has to grow,” “cleaned up and safer feel on East 10th” “appreciate continued revitalization” were some of the comments. 

But what they bothered them: “The visual/look/design does NOT reflect the character of the neighbourhood,” “Does not have the look/feel of Mount Pleasant,” “Doesn’t reflect the character of the community in scale/aesthetics” was one theme. Another: “LESS HEIGHT,” ‘high-rise tower is too high” “this is not a consumer destination.”

In other words, we welcome density but we want it to mesh with the neighbourhood we know, not turn it into some generic downtown development.

As I’ve said a couple of times on the CKNW civic issues program, I feel as though I’m hearing these themes over and over. As developers, having built out the industrial or formerly commercial parts of downtown, move to established neighbourhoods, they don’t always seem to be getting that what worked downtown is not going to work elsewhere.

Glass and more glass, towers and podiums, buildings that are designed more with an eye (pun intended) to views than anything else — fine for one area of the city; not fine for all of them.

I actually think people are getting sick of the glass-tower look downtown as well, but where there’s huge resistance is the neighbourhoods beyond. Not just in Vancouver, but in suburbs as well.

In a world that feels like it’s accelerating all the time, I believe that people are going to demand more and more that their neighbourhoods aren’t built like malls — generic places with no local identity. The developers who succeed will be those who figure out how to build new while enhancing the sense of place.

The Rize’s William Lin, working with well-respected architects Acton Ostry, obviously hoped they were doing that, by providing artist spaces on the 10th Avenue side, rental housing, and a very visually innovative facade. But it’s clearly not enough for the local residents (many of whom came from newer apartments quite close to the planned project).

This project has a long way to go. It’ll be interesting to see if the different parties here can come up with a solution to creating the new in an old neighbourhood that might be a model for others.

Everything ground to a confused halt in the Downtown Eastside last month, after city council — apparently bowing to pressure from a Mike Harcourt-led community group plus others — delayed voting on a public hearing to increase allowable building heights in DTES.

Since then, city manager Penny Ballem has been working with the two main community groups interested in this issue, the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council and Harcourt’s Building Community Society, about how to have a neighbourhood planning process.

The  theoretical idea behind all this is to come up with a long-term, overall goal for the area in terms of what the mix of housing should be (right now, it’s about 10,000 low-income units and 3,000 private-market condos), along with other uses.

In the short term, many people — planners at the city and owners or developers in the area — are flummoxed about what is actually going on, with some perceiving that the neighbourhood groups are now in control.

So Ballem has been sending out the message, loud and clear, that the city is not going to stall everything down there. As my story says, 150-foot towers of condos are not on, but other projects are, including one or more housing projects that will require rezonings.

Interesting to see the city manager get so directly involved in this area and the community negotiations, something that I can’t imagine Ken Dobell or Judy Rogers ever doing.

(P.S. Sorry for the paucity of blog posts lately. I’ve been working on some big projects, which see the light of day soon.)

Buyers of pre-sale condos frequently have complaints when they move into the suites that they had only seen on paper when purchasing.

From parking-garage leaks to countertops that stain to units whose views are not what was expected, I’ve heard all many stories over the years. Buyers at the Olympic village, though, are claiming that deficiencies in their units are beyond the norm.

Another hit for the village, whether you think these complaints are serious or not.

On this note, I’d be interested in hearing your stories about your own condos (or those of your friends and acquaintances) and what experiences you’ve had.