Archive for the 'affordable_housing' Category
Friday, December 9th, 2011
In a kind of yang-ish counterpoint to my last post about yin-ish Portland (and Victoria), here’s a pointer to a BC Business article, Housing has become Vancouver’s toxic asset, by Tony Wanless, that makes me think Vancouver’s yang is just a tad out of control. Wanless points to a blog post by Vancouver independent city […]
Filed under: affordable_housing, vancouver. |
| 2 Comments »
Monday, May 30th, 2011
How to Save Downtown Victoria BC Canada: article submitted to FOCUS Magazine (June 2011), original and complete version. FOCUS online version is compromised, and the print version is rubbish. Read this for the real thing.
Filed under: affordable_housing, architecture, dying_downtown, FOCUS_Magazine, land_use, urbanism, victoria, writing. |
Tags: how_to_save_downtown
| 2 Comments »
Saturday, June 5th, 2010
The title of my post is semi-serious, semi-ironic. I’m ambivalent about gentrification: if it means unslumming, I figure it’s good; if it means homogenization toward a single class (typically privileged) at the expense of economic diversity, it’s probably not-so-good, right? When I write “Gentrification 2.0,” I’m saying that I’m not sure how this particular example […]
Filed under: affordable_housing, architecture, cities, homelessness, housing, innovation, jane_jacobs, land_use, social_critique, vancouver. |
Tags: gentrification, unslumming
| 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort and Archie Bunker’s inability to avoid rubbing up against people explored as an issue of urban form and domestic architecture.
Filed under: affordable_housing, architecture, cities, housing, ideas, land_use, politics, social_critique, urbanism, writing. |
Tags: all_in_the_family, archie_bunker, bill_bishop, the_big_sort
| 7 Comments »
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
It took a while for me to catch up with my own goal to blog about the articles I’ve posted to Scribd, but here (finally) is a quick pointer to Housing 2.0, the piece I published in the February 2009 issue of FOCUS Magazine. It’s a funny title in some ways, but this brief introductory […]
Filed under: affordable_housing, architecture, cities, FOCUS_Magazine, housing, writing. |
Tags: gregory henriquez, housing 2.0
| 3 Comments »
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
After attending today’s Urban Development Institute Luncheon on “The Story Behind the Six Storey Mid-rise Initiative” (with speaker Trudy Rotgans, Manager, Building and Safety Policy Branch in the BC Government), I have some additional thoughts on the topic (first broached from another angle here). As billed, the presentation’s topic was this: You heard about it […]
Filed under: affordable_housing, architecture, canada, housing, land_use, victoria. |
Tags: mid_rise_initiative
| 2 Comments »
Friday, December 19th, 2008
We’re experiencing an exceptional cold weather spell in southwestern British Columbia, and last night a 47-year old homeless woman died in Vancouver. She burned to death, trying to keep warm with a live fire; the police think her blankets must have caught fire. The story is all over the news of course, including here: Woman’s […]
Filed under: affordable_housing, canada, cities, housing, justice, social_critique, street_life, vancouver. |
Tags: downloading, homelessness, offloading
| Comments Off on Canadian cities in a quagmire?
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
Ok, tell me you don’t find this story by Vancouver Sun’s Frances Bula rather alarming: Shelters turned away homeless 40,000 times in nine months? I wonder if there’ll be follow-ups, and whether the count that people were turned away 40,000 times over a nine month period is accurate. If it is, then that’s proof that […]
Filed under: affordable_housing, canada, cities, homelessness, housing, social_critique. |
| Comments Off on Vancouver Sun article: “Shelters turned away homeless 40,000 times in nine months”
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
An article in today’s local media reports that British Columbia’s Premier Gordon Campbell is proposing changes to the province’s building code to allow wood-frame construction for buildings taller than 4 floors. Going higher … using wood Canwest News Service Published: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 A plan by the province to raise the minimum height for […]
Filed under: affordable_housing, architecture, housing. |
| Comments Off on Building taller buildings: in wood, not reinforced concrete