The Secondary Suites Review Committee has finished its long and quite extensive consultation and has handed in its final report (PDF) to council last night. Predictably, council opted to talk a little bit more about it. Leading off the talking was Councillor Jensen, chair of the committee, who started by thanking everybody that participated, especially [...]
Posts under ‘Housing’
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside makes the Beeb
On the eve of the Olympics, right on the front page of BBC News is a story about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The story is lovingly titled Vancouver: ‘Drug Central’ of North America and recounts many of the horrors of the DTES including rampant drug use, homelessness, and prostitution. It also brings in the gang wars [...]
From the CBC’s archives: White-picket Dreams
“Out of the monotony of unplanned suburbia…”, so starts White-picket Dreams, a clip from this Nov 21, 1954. Even back in 1954 they knew suburbia was a bad idea, if only unconsciously. Mentioned in the story is the planned community of Don Mills, when in the early years of suburbia, promotion of walking was still [...]
Toronto seeks way to temporarily stop demolitions
The City of Toronto, or at least one of it’s councillors, Joe Mihevc, was publicly wondering in the Toronto Star about the need for a way to temporarily stop the demolition of historically important buildings after a developer from the melodiously named 1626829 Ontario Ltd all but demolished a heritage home in that city. The [...]
Followup on the ethical purchasing workshop
Greening the Inner-City has picked up on my blog post on the ethical purchasing workshop. He correctly takes me to task for not mentioning the Community Benefits Agreement that was put in place as part of the Olympic Village construction. It had some truly amazing results, training more people than originally planned with a great [...]
The pending Jordan River disaster
The long struggle over the future of Jordan River is nearer to a conclusion after a court ruling in favour of Western Forest Products, the development company masquerading as a forestry company. Gordon O’Connor, forest campaigner with the Dogwood Initiative quite rightly says, a step backwards for this area and everyone who cares about the [...]
6 story wood building survives test earthquake
Given we live in an earthquake-prone part of the world and have recently approved the construction of six story wood buildings, you would think it might be good to test whether or not these shiny new buildings, designed to make apartment buildings cheaper and thus more attractive to build, are going to survive the big [...]
Renters! Your voice is needed on secondary suites
Oak Bay has been considering legalisation of secondary suites for most of this year already and they have recently sent out a form asking for opinion on secondary suites as part of the tax notice. But us poor renters don’t own the property and thus don’t receive the tax notices (although we do pay the [...]
A daily grab-bag of links
The world keeps turning, even if I have been crazy busy with various non-bike relating things. So I present a grab-bag of fun links and commentary on news stories: Packed in like sardines. It is a cliche and yet our buses (and public transit across the world) often feel more like a can of fish [...]
Some people have a strange sense of humour
In response to my post about the secondary suite consultation (specifically the part about the call for a vote by homeowners, not voters): Image created by Wirelizard Designs
