Your friendly neighbourhood Vancouverite Housing abundance enthusiast. Real Estate Consultant. Vive le Canada. Elbows Up
2,058 followers 473 following 7,178 posts
view profile on Bluesky 
Here's a speech I gave in 2021 when they required a rezoning for an unremarkable 6 storey building next to 2 train lines. It was really frustrating how the planners and politicians I talked to really obviously did not give a shit; occasionally made me feel like Abe Simpson here.
are you going to tell that to Mrs. Ptarmigan to her face?
I have more weekend pictures
They hire the Spanish tunnelling firm but you have to be able to listen to and legally implement their advice. You also need your own engineers who are capable of l/empowered to overseeing the contractors and professionally interested in doing so
I think we do, we just don’t know how to successfully administer its constriction or and operate it
Campaign messaging =\= implementation That said, I don’t think the province even realize the extent to which this is often not even bad faith just an outside context problem for the as-practiced disciple of urban planning in British Columbia
If you say the most hick shit imaginable in a posh English accent it goes down much easier I think
I certainly don’t think that the suite of abundance policies is a freestanding “popularist” messaging strategy but the available combinations of things you can run on are numerous and potent
The B.C. NDP ran on legalizing apartments near transit, multiplexing single family zoning, and sticking it to snob municipalities that obstruct housing *because their pollsters told them those issues were winners*
telephone-tag versions of Matt Yglesias
More specifically it’s become a general slogan for loosely related griping about an imagined wonk centrist liberalism
One hundred and eighty five thousand million dollars worth of…trams
It doesn’t even look that impressive if I turn the terrain scaling onto Ontario Mode
There is no greater destroyer of ideology than free parking
I am only putting this together to spruce up a proposal but honestly probably putting to much effort into it for the same reason
Most of that is going to be for parking
Here we the metropolitan region of British Columbia, where just shy of 3/4 of thr Province’s residents make their home
Yes, that’s a very common dumb policy and they should stop
I think Calgary is doing better because they just aren’t so precious about housing and have a fairly market oriented notion of how to plan for them.
Was that appreciably different from traffic everywhere yesterday afternoon though? I certainly thought so on the Sea to Sky.
It’s been a very successful development making use of an otherwise sterilized Skytrain station area?
That said, the province really does have an obligation to cough up their B.C. Transit matches and also not let whole regions bus networks go down for 7 months and counting.
Worth a read www.biv.com/news/real-es...
Ya, you can’t spot the volcanoes north of Baker from an elevation map, they’re too glaciated and insufficiently separable from the background terrain
They are though! people walk, they ride bikes, they car-share or the housing gets built with parking anyway to be salable
I just think it’s neat
They are only outside if your city is permitting them to be squat there This is a choice!
“We demand moar traffic congestion!” It’s just such a crazy policy default
Or at the very least the market can figure this out faster than planning departments and town councillors
You got anymore of them windows?!?
It really is something that should be illegal to require. The market can figure this out and the supposed negative externalities are 100% due to municipal unwillingness to manage their own curbs
*high birth rates were?
These poor people with ‘only one direct train per hour’
Imagine a world where the train or connecting trains between Cleveland and Columbus were consistently 10-15 minutes faster than the interstate and this was something that just was done at some point rather than some huge political football mega-project in development hell
Some day I would like our society to figure out the technology of not-bundling-huge-cavern-with-every-building
found this little guy stuck in my water filter hiking, a tiny freshwater shrimp (a lacustrine scud)
sad to see the tremendous resource of @electionatlasca.bsky.social is gone and seems to have been taken over by boner-pill spammers
this all smells so delightfully familiar
An elderly real estate guy I used to work with, really hit his career stride in the 1970s, just could not wrap his head around indigenous-led developments going ahead with high density and un-mollified neighbours. He wasn’t against it, it just seemed fundamentally foolish as a business method to him
Now it’s just insurers and stata board that are insane about this but small victories
Greetings from the mountaintop
Report: Entire world refreshing newsfeed for no particular reason
you don't need another 1-2 lanes from LA into the desert you need jesus
skipping down the list quite a bit because I don't want to look at another Toronto bank, one of Vancouver's largest headquarters, miners and mineral refiners Teck Resources based across the street from my office in the financial district. Across the street from Burrard Station, very urban
Cenovus Energy, oil extractor, refiner, transporter and merchant suitably based in Downtown Calgary, facing the C-Train, in Calgary's tallest building. Incidentally, their landlord is Brookfield
Place Ville Marie, their Montreal HQ and actual HQ before 1976 is similarly downtown and urbane in Montreal
the Royal Bank of Canada purports to have two HQ's, the real HQ in Toronto and the traditional HQ in Montreal. Royal Bank Plaza in Toronto is next door neighbours with Brookfield, so also deep downtown and transit accessible
ya, looks like it was nationalized some time ago, such is the fate of seemingly all the endeavors of Sr. William Mackenzie
Loblaws itself is based in this large office park by the 407 in the bleeding edge of Brampton Ontario. the address is literally '1 President's Choice Circle'. The office is served by an hourly bus and is a 4.5 kilometer walk to the nearest train station. very not urban, worse than Couche-Tard
George Weston, parent company of Loblaws is based in this unassuming office tower at St. Claire and Yonge in Toronto outside downtown. Convenient for any Rosedale businessman, and accessed by the Yonge line as well as the St. Claire Streetcar
Alimentation Couche-Tard, which you may know as Circle K or other names, a Canadian corporate titan claims that this small industrial park office in Laval outside Montreal is their Global Corporate Office it is about 1700 meters from a train station (Vimont), for what its worth
(wikiing this has lead me to discover that Brookfield traces its origins to 1899 as the Sao Paulo Tramway, Light and Power Company which was founded by Canadian railway investors)
Brookfield, 2024 biggest by revenue is about as urban as they go - core Toronto financial district, kitty corner from Union Station.
Just out of curiosity, what is the urbanism of Canada's largest corporations?
You could charge your phone and then a line would go up
Shoulda made it wider
I’m just lookin’ at the CNN figures www.cnn.com/markets/afte...
Dow and S&P futures are implying a positive open Nasdaq futures a negative one
Gonna tie these things together and say that we must defeat nimbyism and planning frivolity in British Columbia so that we don’t force as many people to put up with…that
Am I reading this correctly that the Government of Alberta has shutdown its own education system in pursuit of a labour dispute?
Following the dynasty’s final deposition, the streets of Washington were littered in the flannel shirts the Canadians had required be worn as signs of submission
Edmonton has built more, grown faster, and maintained radically better affordability than the deteriorating situation in Vancouver. morehousing.substack.com/p/rbc-june-2...
I don’t know if there’s a solution to this problem other than trains
To think the Budd Metroliner only recently moved past those 45-55 peak earning years. smh
They have had them for half a decade now?
From what I understand the ICF is currently pitching hi-rail buses, which just might be cheap enough for them to do to keep the corridor technically alive
The patience of the First Nations (50% stake in the Island Rail corridor plus fairly robust land claims to reserve crossing sections) and the courts with holding this land vacant for speculative future railway operations is worn thin. The corridor has been cut by Snaw Naw As, near Nanoose
There is a short segment around Nanaimo that is still in operation, as well as a number of barge access industrial facilities But otherwise the corridor is to my knowledge more or less doomed
I see the very air is a poisonous fume again
O reader, gaze upon this statistic, what do you see?
Ya but tall buildings give ol’ Doug the ick
For what ever reason profit seeking enterprises seem to have a greater affinity for spending a bunch of money on renting centrally located office space.
It’s also a formula for traffic congestion. Every one calling for job de-centralization imagines jobs near them, not driving to jobs on the far side of the metro area that don’t have good transit connections
Ya, the nearest being 450m from my front door is at the edge of utility for me, probably made up for by their being fun to ride
Vancouver getting these years after everyone else is a great example of the costs of our precious planning disposition
And moreover, small electric vehicles like e-bikes and scooters make this much less niche potentially
The thing about bikes is that while they are inherently kind of niche they’re incredibly cheap people-moving capacity to provide from a policy standpoint
I talk to this rather deeply britannophile finance guy who has this unusual fixation on his hopes that policy and market trends will crush oikish exurban small firms in favour of larger and more capitalized developers
Someone get that man a pickup truck
Seen downtown: a guy in a hard hat and hi-viz riding lime scooter to his worksite, carrying a cup of coffee
The certain strain of socialism that subliminally wants the state to run things and prevent uncultured petty capitalists from realizing their tasteless aesthetic preferences
So what if it were true? Vancouver would do well to provide for all the jobs (and housing) that would find fit to be here.
My wife is in the background of this short about bull trout in the Squamish River youtu.be/GRSlgDPYh3k?...
Related, I have noticed that Matt seems pretty thoroughly defeated lately,
exciting to think of how many tyrannical centuries remain just after Nero!
[Future History Show Presenter] Many people don't realize that the Maralagian Empire is actually just the later continuation of the American Empire!
That mostly seems to be an artifact of question framing more than anything else
Conrail is effectively this no?
No one complains that they speak French in Quebec the complaint is that they enforce the speaking of French. That complaint may be unreasonable but it is a substantively different complaint
BC has been quite accommodating of natural gas pipelines, I don’t think we’re the problem here
I believe that’s actually the brain fungal infection acquired from living in old wooden buildings that can never dry out
There is no sun in any “outer” neighbourhood in San Francisco
With grain this sorta works because that window coincides with the harvest. But natural gas that couldn’t be shipped at the time of year people turn the heat up in Germany?
How does it make sense to build the (expensive) infrastructure to pipe and liquify natural gas in Churchill, a port that is only open between late July and Early November
Two railroads is plenty enough
I think because all the focus on other stuff is just focus on those things. Because there is approximately nothing along a lot of that “corridor” it only exists in so far as it can be discoursed into being
You gotta admit that given recent collective choices that it at least a little tracks
