City council has taken a step in the right direction by voting to prohibit short-term rentals like Airbnb for anything that’s not a person’s principal residence. This much-overdue decision will hopefully bring some relief to long-suffering tenants who are finding it more and more difficult to secure rental accommodation in the city. While I welcome…
Category: Metro Vancouver
Transit justice now: Bring HandyDART home
Many of you will be unaware of the fact that TransLink’s HandyDART service is not operated by TransLink. Instead, this very important shared ride service for people with cognitive and physical disabilities is contracted out to a third party — ultimately, an American, for-profit company called MVT. (The parent company of MVT Canadian Bus Inc.,…
Diminished by a mega-mall
Tsawwassen Mills shopping mall had its official opening Wednesday, October 5. This is a shopping centre of truly gigantic proportions situated on Tsawwassen First Nation land in Delta near the ferry terminal. Described by some as “alarmingly big”, this mega-mall is over 1 million square feet in size and composed of not one but 16…
Growing quality, not quantity
With the Globe 2016 conference happening in Vancouver, politicians and leaders from some of the world’s biggest businesses are coming together to try and address “sustainable business” — in other words, how to continue to grow their businesses and the economy while doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. The implied goal — indefinite, continued…
Time to “tap out” TransLink’s senior managers
Most folks are surprised when I tell them that TransLink spends 10 cents of every farebox dollar on the process of actually collecting that dollar. Economists refer to this as the “friction cost.” By comparison, the collection of income tax is incredibly efficient, with a friction cost so small that it amounts to a rounding…
Liberal premiers of two different stripes
Christy Clark and Kathleen Wynne. Two Liberal premiers. Two very different approaches to global warming. In British Columbia, forest fire season is upon us a month ahead of schedule and worse than ever recorded. Thirty new wildfires are expected every day for the foreseeable future. Air quality in greater Vancouver has been the worst it’s…
Crimes in the Making – Vancouver’s Affordable Housing Crisis
In a world drowning in wealth; in the richest era ever in the history of humankind; in one of the richest nations on the face of the planet and one of the richest cities in that nation, it’s a crime we have people living on the streets of Vancouver. It’s even more of a crime…