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Help make Vancouver less boring, design-wise

March 5th, 2009 · 9 Comments

Okay, all you people who love to trash Vancouver. “It’s not so world class,” you say. Every time I (or anyone else) ever writes a story suggesting there’s anything admirable about Vancouver, the naysayers come out in force to say we’re deluded and that the whole city is just a bad condo marketers’ power point. […]

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Developers versus pre-sale buyers: Round 4 or is it 5?

March 5th, 2009 · 9 Comments

As the Pappajohn brothers desperately look for ways to salvage their Jameson House tower project downtown, they’ve found themselves fighting not just to get financing but also fighting to keep their unhappy pre-sale buyers on board. Derrick Penner’s story in the Sun this morning details the current state of legal affairs among all the parties […]

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Development permits in Vancouver plunge even more

February 26th, 2009 · 5 Comments

Councillor/journalist Geoff Meggs has another interesting tidbit from city hall, the latest report on development permits continuing the downhill slide. By the way, his post below that one is also pretty interesting — a dramatic account of the city meeting over a Fraser Street re-development project, which includes people crying and fainting. Who ever thought […]

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Private security in LA business areas lowers crime

February 26th, 2009 · 16 Comments

One of my very favourite things about Vancouver (heavy irony, folks) is the way we always think the problems here are unique to us and not actually part of a large trend hitting many cities. So I just love it when readers pass on to me interesting stories about how other cities are tackling exactly […]

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Lee Building victory unleashes city to go after other billboards

February 25th, 2009 · 8 Comments

After years of court battles between the owners of the Lee Building and the city over the billboard on the top of the building, the city finally won last year. The sign at Broadway and Main has been getting slowly dismantled since then. Now, with that out of the way, city staff are ready to […]

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A thousand car-free days in Vancouver not about to bloom

February 25th, 2009 · 7 Comments

The staff report is just in on neighbourhood response to holding car-free days every Sunday for three months during the summer. The new Vision council had been hoping to encourage that kind of activity in three or four districts this summer, following on the wild popularity of the one-day car-free festivals that have been taking […]

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Mr. Mayor gets a warm reaction from developer crowd

February 22nd, 2009 · 10 Comments

Sorry, it’s taken me a while to get this up (I’ll spare you the details why), but I promised in my Twitter tweet to provide more details on Gregor Robertson’s speech to the Urban Development Institute, aka the developer crowd, Friday. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It […]

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Homeless shelters make a dramatic change to downtown

February 19th, 2009 · 4 Comments

It’s hard to get a read on Vancouver’s homeless situation through either direct observation or statistics. Few of us monitor the streets at night to do a count and what we see in the daytime can often be deceiving. Lots of people who have homes are still out on the streets during the day. Even […]

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Affordable housing the latest project to get a SWAT team

February 12th, 2009 · 5 Comments

Remember the Vision Vancouver promise to create an affordable housing boom? Here comes the task force to accomplish same, as you can see in this motion coming up next week from councillors Geoff Meggs and Raymond Louie here. It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of solutions they can come up with, given how dramatically […]

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More than one in 10 cycle to work in some Vancouver neighbourhoods

February 11th, 2009 · 32 Comments

That’s the news from the highly anticipated, recently compiled statistics on cycling and walking in Vancouver, which comes out just in time for the pro and con sides in the Burrard Bridge debate to whack each other on the head with the numbers. It’s also the occasion when Vancouver lords it over all the other […]

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