An interesting new piece of research from BTAworks, a foundation connected with Bing Thom’s architecture firm, has finally got hold of the famous BC Hydro data on electrical use to find out how many apartments downtown show signs of no habitation. That has been seen as the smoking gun to prove the truth of Vancouver’s […]

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Influential city shaper Bob Rennie, who masquerades as a condo marketer, will be giving his annual address to the Urban Development Institute today where he analyzes the market and sales based on statistical research that he gets done for this talk every year. The speech will have lots of facts and figures, along with Bob’s […]

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I hadn’t been paying that much attention to Metro Vancouver’s growth plan for the next 30 years. That’s partly because it’s been in the works for eight years and it’s hard to feel like it’s going anywhere. And also because there’s a temptation to believe that it will have the same impact as the livable […]

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A recent city report (and subsequent media stories) made it sound like the financing was all settled for the Olympic village, after a lot of confusion for a while. But buried in the report was a line indicating that one important part hasn’t been settled — the interest rate that Millennium will pay on the […]

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Unbeknownst to most of you, there have been a number of workshops and open houses in what’s called Vancouver’s historic areas over the last few weeks to talk about potential height increases for those areas. City staff have asked the public to consider a few options, which they’ve graphically illustrated in a kind of cool […]

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One of the aims of the city’s plan for becoming the Most Greenest City, though it wasn’t spelled out anywhere, was not to moralize about how everyone should be a better environmental person. To that end, they focused on incentives and opportunities rather than scolding and penalties, as I note in my Globe story here.

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Oh, poor Paul Hancock, the city’s Freedom of Information officer. He must be working overtime these days, dealing with all the FOIs that have flooded in in the last four months. Here are the latest results from one of my requests. The details of Judy Rogers’ severance agreement. Not much new in terms of the […]

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While many of you were watching a couple of hockey teams face off on Tuesday night, there were two other teams facing off at city council over an issue that is key to what kind of city people think Vancouver is about: how much housing should be allowed downtown and how much of the downtown […]

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One of my sharp-eyed phone buddies noticed that President Obama’s plan for high-speed train links throughout the States also includes a couple of stops north of the border. One of them is, you guessed, the Terminal Lotus City itself, Vancouver. The link is here. That would be pretty exciting for those of us who like […]

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For my latest in Vancouver magazine, I got to spend some time with the province’s ambitious Housing Minister NOT at housing announcements. Love him or hate him, no one can deny that Coleman is pouring a lot of energy into the housing/homelessness issue. The question for some is what the long-term consequences of his vision […]

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