Provincial NDP Gets Into Bed With Developers

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Earlier this week, the Provincial government introduced amendments to the Local Government Act that will reduce public consultation on zoning and planning matters and increase even more (if that were possible) the insider influence of developers. To quote the government:

“The proposed changes will remove the default requirement for local governments to hold public hearings for zoning bylaw amendments that are consistent with the official community plan. The amendments will also enable municipalities and regional districts to delegate decisions on minor development variance permits to local government staff.”

The matter is well covered in an article in the Georgia Straight today, primarily with an interview with the always excellent Randy Helten of CityHallWatch.

Vancouver operates outside the Local Government Act but , as I mentioned in my own interview with the paper: “What [the Province is] doing is catching with what Vancouver has already done, which is to reduce public engagement as much as they can.”

The Grandview-Woodland Community Plan, which the City now uses to cover a multitude of sins and as an excuse to restrict public engagement, was never a community-driven process. It began as a Planners’ plan and ended the same way as I described in my book “Battleground: Grandview“. Local activists say the same thing about the West End Plan, the Marpole Plan, the DTES Plan.

Pretty soon we will have the Broadway Plan and, eventually, the Vancouver Plan, all of which will be manipulated in the same developer-first way unless we radically change the membership of City Council and, they in turn, instruct Planners to heed the needs of local residents first and profit-driven developers a distant second.

Image: Egg Playing With Cat

Night Music: Una furtiva lacrima

One of the great arias.

Image: Self Sequence

On Being Seventy-Two

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Today is my birthday, which I share with Bob Ross, Joseph Goebbels, and the ballpoint pen.

I am seventy-two years old.   Just saying that feels unreal.  When I was born in 1949, average life expectancy for a man in the UK was about 65 years; I have somehow managed to beat that.

I am part of the generation that didn’t trust anyone over thirty, and who made terribly dangerous choices on a regular basis throughout their thirties and forties. By the 1990s, what with all the drugs and the booze and the carousing, I was certain I couldn’t possibly reach fifty, and I wasn’t all that sure I wanted to.

Now, I have kids in their late forties, grand-children in their mid-twenties, and I am sure that great-grand-children can’t be far away.

The fact that I am still here, walking and talking and pretending (to myself at least) to be young, is astonishing, a wonder, a miracle of modern medicine, and a tribute to the Everloving who takes such good care of me.

My future keeps catching up to my present and I hope it keeps doing so for a long time.  After all, I have promised myself my first ever Big Mac on my one hundredth birthday!

Night Music: Champagne and Reefer

The True Growth of Grandview

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Back in October of last year, I reported on the publication of a City of Vancouver document called Grandview Woodland: Neighbourhood Social Indicators Profile. I mentioned a couple of interesting graphs but didn’t really have time to delve into the details. Today, I was reminded by a correspondent of the document, who pointed out the population and density figures displayed.

As can be seen, Grandview in 2016 had reached a population equal to its previous highest in the 1990s. During the Community Plan, then Councillor Geoff Meggs wrote that Grandview had “flatlined”. He was, as in so many matters, wrong.

Not only were we not flatlining, but we were attracting young families with children who will be the future of our neighbourhood:

“From 2011 to 2016, Grandview-Woodland was a destination for people between ages 20 and 35; there were more than 125% more 25-year-olds in 2016 than there were 20-year-olds in 2011.” (p.13)

Throughout the Grandview Woodland Community Plan process we were told over and over again by Planners that we needed to increase density in the neighbourhood. When the Community Plan was approved in 2016, the same Councillor Meggs declared himself disappointed that Grandview was “not bearing its share of density.” He –and the Planners — were wrong yet again as the City’ own figures illustrate:

“As of 2016, Grandview-Woodland’s population density was 64 persons per hectare, about 18% denser than the City of Vancouver’s average density overall.” (p.10)

Why am I digging up these figures again? Because the Planners when pushing new developments in Grandview continue to press us to take more density than most other areas of the City. They never give the data and just suggest that somehow we are not pulling our weight.

This is particularly important when we look at the massive towers and new density suggested for the Safeway site at Broadway & Commercial. We know that a number of people have declared their support for the Safeway towers based on their belief that Grandview is somehow falling behind in either population and/or density.

These are false beliefs and it is vital that we move forward ONLY based on true and accurate data.

Update on Alma Blackwell Housing

Readers may recall that we have been following the situation at the Alma Blackwell housing project on Adanac Street here in Grandview. It appeared that the managers, Entre Nous Femmes Housing Society (ENFHS) had decided to relocate and/or evict the current tenants, demolish the building and its well-established community, in order to build a much larger facility.

After a prolonged outcry by the residents, a public meeting at GWAC, and media coverage, ENFHS wrote to the residents noting that they were re-organizing under a new Executive Director and that no-one would be displaced until the end of 2022. Unfortunately, it was also clear that their plans for the community had not changed.

The residents have been in touch with Neil Mockton, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, who had apparently agreed to arrange a meeting between the residents and the Mayor. They noted their struggles to get proper maintenance and repairs for the building, the lack of reasonable communication between managers and tenants, and the fact that — during Vancouver’s housing crisis — ENFHS has allowed 15 units to remain unoccupied for many months.

Monckton responded by advising BC Housing and CoV Planning Department of the concerns raised, but suggested there was little he could do as no formal re-development application has yet been received by the City. He advised the residents to be in touch with the City’s Renter’s Office from which the current residents have already been turned away with “that’s not our job.” He gave little hope that a meeting with the Mayor would be forthcoming.

In the meanwhile, ENFHS — who have shown themselves unwilling to do basic repairs and maintenance on a building that still houses 30 households paying rent — have issued an advertisement for a new Executive Director at a salary of up to $120,000 a year. No meeting with the tenants has yet been arranged.

Not unlike the leaseholders and co-op residents at False Creek South, about which much ink has been spilled this week, the families in the Alma Blackwell building continue to face an uncertain and nervous future.

Flash Fiction: It’s Monday Already

It’s Monday already, and as soon as it’s Tuesday I’ll be dead.

As soon as it’s Tuesday they’ll strap me to a gurney and inject me with death while a dozen good folks who have done nothing worse in their lives than drown kittens or abuse their workers or cheat on their wives look on. A bunch of them will watch with vengeance in their hearts and with grim grins of satisfaction. A few might be sad. Most — the officers and journalists and the warden — will treat my death with as much indifference as they can manage.

These same people have kept me locked and chained for eight years. They’ve allowed inmates to abuse me, guards to kick me, lawyers to buy boats from the proceeds of unwanted appeals. This afternoon they will feed me a steak, rare, with Caesar salad and french fries on a paper plate with a plastic knife and fork.

They tell me that because I never did drugs it’ll be a cinch to find a vein. I won’t even feel the needle they tell me. Not like those poor bastards who get their heads blown apart with 12000 volts of Old Sparky’s best. I’ll be asleep before death comes, they say, as if that makes it OK. I’m lucky, they say.

Well, I am lucky. As soon as Tuesday comes I’ll know the truth, while they’ll still spend sleepless nights wondering what death is like.

Oh God almighty, it’s Monday already.

Altering Vermeer

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One of my favourite paintings, Vermeer’s Girl Reading A Letter at an Open Window, has been revealed to be something other than what we have all grown to know.

Recent restoration has shown that the blank white wall in the background originally contained a large picture of Cupid, probably indicating that the letter in question was a love missive.

“Behind [the girl] there was an empty white wall. But in 2017, we started with a big restoration and research project to do the restoration of the painting,” Uta Neidhardt, senior curator at Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery) in Dresden, Germany.

Laboratory tests indicate the overpainting was done about 70 years after the painting was completed, and after Vermeer’s death in 1675. One theory is that the picture had been attributed to Rembrandt and the cupid was removed as it was not a detail usually associated with Rembrandt; the alteration thus added to the valuable — but wrong — attribution when the painting was presented to a Saxon prince in the 1740s.

Image: Coming In

In Honour: Dylan Thomas

Today would have been the 107th birthday of Dylan Thomas, one of the finest writers (for me, perhaps, the finest) of the generation before mine.

Thomas was very popular when I was a boy and I was lucky enough to be in two different productions of “Under Milk Wood“, as well as doing a solo turn reciting large sections of “A Child’s Christmas“.  For decades, at least into my 40s, much of my own work was highly derivative of Thomas’ style, with aggregations of melodious adjectives cascading through the sing-song lilt of a Welshman speaking English.

He was a master poet, able to craft the most exquisite sonnets and villanelles, difficult forms to manage, concerning both the ordinary and extraordinary things of life and death.  “The Force That Through The Green Fuse“, “Fern Hill“, and his paean to his father’s death, “Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night“, are sublime beyond measure..

His mastery of prose was equally fine, shown best in “A Child’s Christmas In Wales” which needs to be heard as read by the poet himself.

And then there is the extraordinary masterpiece, the radio play “Under Milk Wood“.in which Thomas’ talent, both as a writer and as an observer of rambunctious village life, are shown to the full.  If you can get a chance to listen to the Richard Burton version, then that is an experience not soon forgotten.

Thomas didn’t think much of being Welsh, let’s be frank about it.  And in just a couple of weeks we will celebrate the 68th anniversary of his sorry and inebriated death at the early age of 39. But he was an original, a genius, and I suspect he got more out of his 39 years than most of us do with three-score-and-ten.

Dinner Tonight #73

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Tonight I cooked a wonderfully spicy mushroom cream sauce with rotini. Delicious!

Night Music: Gambia

Vancouver Plan

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Many of you will know that the City of Vancouver is developing a city-wide Plan for future zoning and development; this is the Vancouver Plan.

The next stage of this Plan includes a series of “neighbourhood” open houses. For Grandview, our sessions are scheduled for:

• 8th November between 6:00pm and 7:30pm

• 9th November between 10:00am and 11:30am

You can register at the Eventbrite site.

Given the way that the City of Vancouver is actively limiting or eliminating public consultation on many developments — and forcing through individual projects in advance that should be subject to the Vancouver Plan — these workshops may be one of the few occasions on which you can at least try to make your voice heard on the future of our city.

Therefore, I encourage everyone to register and attend whatever session makes sense for you.

Image: The Gardens

Poem: Rolled

 

The woman with crow’s feet wrinkles

and smeared makeup

unfolded the billfold

removing the twenties and leaving the fives

— she had doubled her money and was willing

to leave him

cab fare home.

She waited a minute,

sharp ears listening to the spattering rain

and the flight of an early flock

flying north for the summer.

Slipping on the plastic green raincoat

she slipped out of the room,

leaving him undisturbed

in the empty barn

of his sex-sodden dreams.

 

 

Night Music: The Sky Is Crying

Image: Streamers

Happy 6,025th Birthday World!

According to the calculations of Archbishop Usher of Armargh, today is the earth’s birthday.  His calculations led him to believe that God created the world on October 23rd, 4004 BC.

Now, there are those who say his math is wrong, but let’s not quibble on our birthday!