Homelessness: We all pay
I have the privilege of living in a lovely downtown Vancouver neighbourhood. The late-fall mornings are crisp and fresh and, even in a light drizzle, it’s a pleasant place to live, work and walk. But here’s something that makes me reject any claim that Vancouver is one of the world’s most “liveable” cities: On one […]
Overcoming the cost of regulatory paralysis
Cities can improve housing affordability but they need help “Time is money” – it’s a phrase you might hear when the boss is complaining about your productivity (or the lack of it). In that instance, you might understand it to mean: “Let’s not be standing around when we could be doing something productive.” But in […]
Who says, “Vancouver has run out of developable land?”
Canada’s most livable city is perfectly able to make room for newcomers Even amid the flurry of headlines about Vancouver’s prohibitive housing prices , it would be fantastically incorrect to claim there is no room left in Canada’s most livable city. Yet, that’s just what Grant E. Moore, the former Manager of Planning for the […]
Let’s Get Serious about Supply and Demand
The single-family housing shortage is a problem of physics, not politics In light of the proven popularity of Stradivarius violins, it is an outrage – an OUTRAGE! – that the government allows mass production and/or import of high-quality alternatives to fill market demand. I hope we all can agree that sentence is ludicrous. Antonio Stradivari […]
Opinion: Don’t sell assets to pay for infrastructure
*This article was originally published in The Vancouver Sun newspaper on March 20, 2017 here. We will regret selling infrastructure that Canadians still need The Canadian government is pursuing a policy that could leave us all, as citizens and taxpayers, tenants in our own house. It’s a risky, unnecessary direction that we all will come […]
Welcoming a million people to Metro Vancouver?
The recent unanimous vote by the Mayor’s Council to fund the first phase of their ambitious and essential Vision Plan for the region’s transit and transportation system reminds us yet again that we are living in a dynamic place that welcomes 35,000 new people every year. It also reminds us that we need to keep […]
Housing Boomers
For his 2015 book The Stackable Boomer, David Allison asked me to look at how we can make suburban baby boomers feel at home in a more urban mid- or high-rise dwelling. As a boomer, one of nearly 10 million Canadians born between 1946 and 1965, I offered my perspective by saying that the world […]
No need to be frightened by higher densities in neighbourhoods
By: Gordon Harris Special to The Vancouver Sun A quiet neighbourhood: the phrase evokes leafy streets, tidy gardens and carefree children, quietly at play. But in the image painted on this page by Gordon Gibson, the quiet neighbourhood was further freighted by the presumption it could not also be a densely populated one. With respect, […]