Sometimes The Mayor Gets It Right

Regular readers will know that I am not a big fan of Mayor Gregor Robertson. However, once in a while, he — or rather his extensive “communications staff” — come up with something we can all agree with.

In a response in The Walrus, the Mayor takes on Kerry Gold’s piece of last week “The Highest Bidder“.  His main point is that there are a lot of reasons for Vancouver’s stratospheric housing market and we shouldn’t be blaming just the offshore Chinese investors. One would have to make up one’s own mind as to whether one believes his defence or not.

In a section on how we got to this state of affairs, Mayor Robertson makes a serious point:

“Planning decisions … that prioritized condo towers over townhomes and row houses have resulted in a lack of choice available to today’s buyers.”

I guess it is too much to hope that Boffo Properties will take that warning to heart and decide on pursuing a community-friendly alternative to their ghastly tower proposal for Commercial & Venables.

Image: Coaster #5

Calling All Renters!

Night Music: My Generation

If these didn’t play so well, they would have been the true pre-punk punks.

Poem: Martyr

 

He had long ago accepted the loss as permanent,

but that acceptation was merely a gloss, as yet skin deep,

 

not yet having bled into the very marrow of his being,

nor led him to that place of serenity.

 

His bitterness lay as deep as the roots of cedar in shale,

following tracks as distant and serpentine as the staged attacks

 

of true hackers working their miraculous juju through the internet

ether, and forever ending in a sad soiled grace.

 

And, though he could choose to confuse his loneliness with tragedy –

as if he were the sainted prophet of his own persecuted

 

exarchate in exile — it was but loneliness nonetheless,

and it hurt as bad as the arrows of martyrdom.

 

 

How Totalitarianism Works

In a well-argued piece on his blog yesterday, COPE’s Tim Louis writes about the public hearing so disastrously chaired by Clr. Raymond Louie about the Cresswell development on Commercial & 18th in Cedar Cottage. This was always going to be a divisive hearing about an important issue concerning development on arterial roads.  Activists from Cedar Cottage Area Neighbours and from across the Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods network had been discussing the hearing for some time before the event.

At the hearing, most resident speakers spoke against the development, and Louie made decisions as chair that clearly breached common sense and the City’s Procedure By-Law. In the end, the three NPA Councillors along with Green Clr. Adrianne Carr stormed out of the hearing, bringing it to a close due to lack of quorum. Joseph Jones has reported some of the goings on. Oddly, this was the first hearing in living memory when Vision Vancouver had failed to show up with a majority (the Mayor and three others were missing). There was something fishy going on from the off.

Tim Louis’s point in his post today is the Vision regime’s handling of public participation in public hearings has deteriorated over the years, and this anti-democratic behaviour is now institutionalized in the rules of Procedure passed by that same Vision majority.

It is these same anti-community rules that will constrain the way Grandview residents will be able to formally challenge the Boffo Tower proposal and, even more importantly, the redrafted Grandview Community Plan later this year.

It is from a series of such seemingly innocuous (by themselves) administrative changes that totalitarianism is made to work. They beat you down not with the barrel of the gun but with the letter of the law.

Image: Flower Offering

Theft Of The Community’s Voice

One of the most noticeable successes of the campaign to halt the development of an intrusive and massive tower at Commercial & Venables has been the large number of lawn signs that are festooned across the neighbourhood — a clear indication of the community’s support.

Unfortunately, another continuing feature of the campaign has been the number of lawn signs that get stolen. Who knows who by? Though presumably it is someone who doesn’t want to see the campaign succeed.  Over the last year we have lost about a hundred signs;  the sign outside my own place has been stolen or damaged three times.

We had hoped that this juvenile behaviour — anti-democratic and anti-free speech at its heart — would pass like a phase in an adolescent’s growth.  But it seems the perpetrators are still determined to expose their childish sides. I received an email this morning from a correspondent just one block east of the Drive:

“for the 7th time, all the signs on our block were stolen last night sometime between 7pm and 11pm.  Perhaps it is a reflection of the Tower Proponents  way of operating –  repeated THEFT OF SIGNS, THEFT OF THE COMMUNITY’S VOICE, then finally THEFT OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD.”

It is hard to disagree with those sentiments.

The Longest of Memories and the Highest of Mountains

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the first successful climbing of Mount Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.  News of the success arrived in England the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and I remember my father, who was very excited by the news, telling me all about it.  For years thereafter Edmund Hillary was the greatest hero of my young imagination.

I have one or two memories about my brother and me that pre-date May 1953, but Hillary on Everest is the earliest I can recall anything outside the family.  I know from photographs that there were massive street parties I attended to celebrate the new Queen: I remember none of that.  But Hillary on Everest has stuck with me all these years.

The picture is of Tensing Norgay taken by Hillary.  There are no pictures of Hillary on the summit because Tensing didn’t know how to work the camera and, as Hillary said, the summit of Everest was no place to start teaching him!

Night Music: Jelly Beans

I may have been the only person to buy this single in England, but it was my favourite music for a whole summer.

Image: The Business of Fishing

Night Music: Things Have Changed

Memories of Bob Dylan and the Hawks

Fifty years ago today I went to the Albert Hall in London to see Bob Dylan.  There were walk outs and cat calls in the second half as Dylan went electric accompanied by the earliest iteration of The Band (most of whom were from The Hawks).

I have a sense that I enjoyed both halves of the show just as well, though the second half, the electric half,  was still unexpected even though one knew it was going to happen.

Image: Sky Diving

 

Select image for a larger view.

Night Music: Roberta Flack

The Best Illustrations of 2016

The annual V&A Illustration Awards celebrate the best illustrations published over the previous year. These are some of the winners:

The first image is the top award winner of the year (and Best Book Cover) for Davis McConochie’s cover for “The Folio Book of Ghost Stories”.  Below that, on the left, is Jason Brooks’ illustrations for “London Sketchbook” which won the Best Book Illustration award. On the bottom right is the winner of the best Editorial Illustration, Bill Bragg’s “But today I am afraid” from the Guardian.

The awards are reported by the always excellent Creative Review.

 

Yeah, I’m A YIMBY!

I am tired of certain people making up stuff about what it is I am against. Blinded by their own personal agendas they cannot see — or perhaps choose not to see — the positive message that I pursue.

Yes, in my backyard (specifically that part of my backyard on Commercial between Venables and Adanac), I want to see a fine four-storey permanent home for the Kettle Friendship Society; a home that will include 30 supportive housing units and 12,000 square feet of admin and Drop-In space. I want to see this home built on what is now the publicly owned parking lot (shown on map as (5).

I want to see the buildings along Venables (1, 2, and 3) replaced by a four-storey block with retail on the bottom floor and three floors of apartments. There are several of these already completed successfully in close proximity, including City View Terraces, right across the street from the proposed building), the block at Venables & Salsbury (just one block away), and the apartments on the Drive opposite Grandview Park (just four blocks away). The Casa and the Marquee would be examples a little further south along Commercial. I would see these as rental apartments.

I want the old and little-used Commercial Drive section between Adanac and Venables (6) to be closed off to traffic and turned into an Italian-heritage style piazza. This I see as a lively community space where, for example, Uprising Bakery (7 on the map), could have tables and chairs out on the piazza, adding to the street life, recalling the public squares of Italy. This would be a significant addition to the public realm.

That’s what I want to see in my backyard, and I am certainly not alone. A design along these lines would give the Kettle exactly what it is asking for, would increase density while maintaining neighbourhood building forms, would provide Grandview with much-needed rental accommodation, and would provide the Drive with another lively public space where they can meet their neighbours and have fun.

But that’s just the YIMBY in me talking.

Image: City Abstract #4

Poem: Having

[in homage to Ginsberg]

 

I have seen the best minds of my generation squander their extraordinary talents on the marketing of consumer goods and the maintenance of shareholder value.

I have seen them abandon all pretence of worker’s rights at the behest of foreign and domestic bankers, Friedmanites from Chicago and MIT.

I have seen them relegate the environment to the dustbin, a victim in the race for quarterly profits and analysts expectations.

I have seen them treat safety issues as public relations issues, and seen them lobby to lessen their liability.

They have shamed seniors into wearing diapers, taught children how to smoke, and taunted teens into starving themselves to death.

They have sold goods that have killed millions, children, pregnant women, families, clans, tribes and nations, here and around the world.

They have spiked the waters of the masses with a poison called greed.

They have swallowed our ethics and morals and spat them back in our faces as branded goods for which it is right and necessary that we pay to display their logos.

You have contributed to their victory with every discretionary purchase, every dollar saved or spent.

You have accepted their world view with every envious glance, every lottery ticket purchase, every time you have watched a TV program starring “celebrities” or giving away a million dollars.

You have bowed to the inevitable with each ring of the alarm clock, each punch of the work clock, each end-of-week celebration.

You have become your parents, your older sister, your Uncle Frank with his shiny pants, your parents once again.

I have purchased things I could have made myself.

I have allowed my city to become plastered with advertising slogans, from store signs to billboards to the names of buildings and arenas.

I have dressed my children in designer labels, given then Elmo dolls and Flintstone vitamins, and let them choose CocoPops and TV cartoons over papaya and reading for breakfast.

I have enough of everything I need, and yet forever I need more; and

We have accepted all this bullshit, washed it down with the liquid lies of the liberal’s election hoax.

We have time and again made the wrong choice; time and again we have meekly accepted that the choices we are offered are the only choices possible.

We have been active participants in our own kidnapping, paying the ransom over and over again.

We have failed ourselves — and the bastards have won.  At least for now.

 

Night Music: Dear Mr. Fantasy