One thing is proven without a doubt in this wide-ranging, deep political dive with Gord, Rob, and return guest George Affleck — these guys don’t know their Tolkien.

And while there was no cranky, right-wing guy in Middle Earth, there is a central character whose very rigid way of thinking begins to soften. If that seems to be the case with Affleck, it may be with the benefit of retrospect, especially with an eye to the performance of current council, and specifically in contrast to its predecessor.

That’s because Affleck’s behaviour while serving in opposition to Gregor Robertson’s Vision Vancouver juggernaut was largely the result of him seeing the majority votes walking into the council chamber every day, “knowing exactly what they were going to do”. Idealogical alignment can be like a wall; in the form of a political caucus, it’s a brick wall.

Contrast that with today; by Affleck’s count, there are just two parties in Vancouver Council, the NDP and the BC Liberals (and 1 or 2 predictably dogmatic, even irrelevant votes). So these decisions should be, well, decisive — consistently predictable and relatively quick. But, as he notes, “it’s 100% not working like that.”

Affleck talks about the splintering sound coming from the NPA corner. He talks choo-choo trains. And he talks bike lanes (remember, he’s not anti-bike lanes, just pro-process).

Lastly, Affleck makes a startling admission, perhaps revealing that aforementioned soft spot, one which may represent the rotting core of traditional NPA preservationist ideology — that the current political trend towards framing the decision-making process around community consultation (rather than incorporating and contextualizing it into decision-making) is a great way to give anti-growth, naysay perspectives platform and influence. And that it’s probably incorrect.

He sees it in West Vancouver, in White Rock, in Surrey, and even in PoCo. He sees pragmatism, he sees populism, and it seems he has a pretty clear view of the line to be drawn between the two.

Which leads to some interesting speculation on the nature of political campaigns of our not-too-distant future — those of Kennedy Stewart, the NPA and, yes, Affleck himself.

A tale of two city-makers — one, a son of the working poor, who showed an early knack for creation and collaboration, in part through the use of polyhedral dice; the other, a world-renowned urban planner, with a Twitter following as large as the populations of some of the cities he now calls clients.

The two are, of course, the same man. Brent Toderian arrived in Vancouver in 2006 as the new Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver, stepping into the role jointly held by Larry Beasley and Ann McAfee. In addition to being part of the team of “mad geniuses” at 12th & Cambie, Beasley and McAfee were already legends in the planning community for having presided over the era which introduced Vancouverism to North America.

In explaining the trajectory that brought him here — an early passion for law, a degree in environmental science from University of Waterloo (major in urban and regional planning, natch), and early success managing city centre planning and design in Calgary — Toderian plots and connects a few new dots in his life story.

That’s the opening flourish, however, to a more fascinating and controversial narrative, one which to this day still casts a shadow on the political makeover initiated by Vision Vancouver in the early days of their first majority on council (2008-2011). An administrative shake-up of epic proportions placed Toderian — halfway through what might have otherwise been a legendary tenure of his own at City Hall — in a very, very difficult position, one which ultimately became untenable.

If you know anything about Toderian, whether personally, by reputation, or by Twitter feed, you agree with his self-assessment: he has zero tolerance for boredom, he believes planners aren’t (or perhaps shouldn’t be) neutral, and he’s unafraid of speaking truth to power (both the act, and its potential consequences). All of which might explain why he only lasted three years into the reign of then-City Manager Penny Ballem, who replaced her much-venerated predecessor Judy Rogers in 2008 to the chagrin of, …well… almost everyone. It’s an act of political interference still bemoaned for both its immediate and long-term consequences.

But in case that’s still not enough of an explanation, Toderian speaks for himself — perhaps more candidly than you might have expected — as to the impact of that personnel change, and why he couldn’t stay at CoV. Whether due to the mellowing effects of time, fatherhood, or his subsequent success as an urbanist consultant and celebrity with Toderian UrbanWorks, Toderian opens up about this exciting, fraught time of his career, in a fast-moving discussion with Gord.

It was 2009, Vancouver was about to become the largest metro region to host a winter Olympic Games, and the city faced a challenge of similarly grandiose proportions — how to accommodate a 30% increase in downtown transportation trips alongside a 30% reduction in road network capacity, thanks to Games-related operations.

For Lon LaClaire, a transportation planning engineer at that fraught moment in the city’s history, it was an experiment that would prove to be the ultimate litmus test of the city’s potential to lead North America in the prioritization of efficient, effective, and (still) decidedly unsexy transportation modes — walk, bike, transit.

It happened of course (turns out snow was the issue — go figure), and that experiment’s success paved the way for the past 10 years of a transportation paradigm shift in policy and investments that is indeed now recognized across the continent, if not the world. And it’s due in no small part to LaClaire’s leadership on the City’s transportation engineering team, not to mention a certain je ne sais quoi….translation: “How is this guy so calm?!?”

Today, he’s Director of Transportation with the City; if you’re part of Twitter’s #vanpoli urban wonk mob, you heard Cambie Report’s interview with LaClaire a month ago. And if you’re one of the many visitors to Vancouver for next week’s 25th Annual Rail~Volution Conference (considered by some as the Olympics of urban planning), Gord gets LaClaire to chip out a few new gems.

Such as his ‘what if?’ moment about Vancouver’s transportation history, to complement a plethora of our real-life ‘aha‘ moments. Or his explanation for why, over the last 25 years, our streets are moving less traffic, even while population and commuting trips has grown. Better yet — LaClair’s compelling reason why anyone concerned about transportation in their backyard should run, not walk, to VanConnect to report street issues and concerns. Most worrisome? His prediction of the problem many of us will face on opening day of the Broadway Skytrain extension in 2025.

All that, plus the secrets of grid resilience, the transit hub where City’s motto comes to life, and what to do with unused asphalt. Only the best for our 50th episode…

Every child is full of questions. And while the science is fuzzy, it seems that children who ask questions about the future — not how things work today, but how they could work better tomorrow — tend to make great planners.

Michael Gordon was one of those children. And his legacy as one of the most important planners of Vancouver’s Golden Age (thank you, Larry Beasley) has been built by finding answers to the most difficult of questions about the growth of inner cities. Namely, is it possible to make exponential leaps in urban densification — doubling or tripling the number of people living in communities — and maintain quality of life, even (or especially) their character?

Growth and stability. Heterogeneity and heritage. They’re almost impossible dynamics to manage, being both deeply personal and matters of public interest. Yet, somehow Michael Gordon has made them work.

Like supporting a doubling of the West End population over the last generation, while allowing its Robson, Davie and Denman ‘village’ communities to remain desirable, even improving by most measures. Or masterminding the slow but sure transformation of Granville Street (especially the 900-block) into a downtown entertainment district extraordinaire, without sacrificing the existing retail mix and transit hub activity.

He also showed his peers — at the City, as well through his extra-curricular dabblings with UBC School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), the Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) and the Planning Institute of BC (PIBC) — that you’re never too old to be an effective planner for new tricks. Like skateboarding, which he took up at age 47, and added to his portfolio of planned placemaking via the Downtown Skateboard Park, tucked under the Dunsmuir Viaduct at Quebec and Union streets.

So…since he now has a lot of the answers, Gord Price and co-host Rob McDowell started asking the questions. Have engineers displaced planners as the creative forces in cities? Will the City-wide Plan solve everything? Did he, along with everyone else, miss affordability as a factor in community planning?

And how do planners plan for the future — plan for change — when the communities themselves seem not to want it?

Sure, that sounds like Peter Ladner. But in this edition of Price Talks torch-passing, it also describes Vivienne Zhang, the successor to Ladner’s predecessor.

Zhang is a UBC grad, currently en route to the Paris Institute of Political Studies (‘Sciences Po‘) to begin her Masters in international security, with an eye to a future career in politics. Born in Beijing, with years spent between the Chinese Mainland and the Lower Mainland, Zhang has, over time, become very self-aware of the richness of her bicultural perspective — two ways of living, two political systems, two views on the role of the individual in society.

Ladner, also a UBC grad, can tell her a thing or two about politics on Canada’s west coast; the former journalist and co-founder of Business in Vancouver was at the forefront of municipal politics in the early 2000s as an NPA councillor and mayoral nominee, and has a brand name in local retail politics that’s literally on the map. Now a decade removed from political life, Ladner remains active in governance and policy as Chair of the Better Transit & Transportation Coalition, and past-Chair of the Board of the David Suzuki Foundation.

And, like the host of this podcast, Ladner also remains interested in the evolution of the liberal democratic model, the sustaining legacies of certain political and institutional norms, and of the collective (or perhaps majority) mindset of the new generation of leaders who will be in the thick of it. Zhang, for Ladner, is one of those emerging leaders to watch, to listen to.

Who does this generation trust? Are they integrated with the world they’re stepping into, or are they shaping it? Do they see problems with liberal democracy, and how are they dealing with it?

Read more »

According to Vancouver Green Party councillor Pete Fry, consultation won’t build us the city of the future.

“Where we’re going, we don’t need sticky notes on a wall,” he said (kind of). To Fry, consultation simply means, ‘the plan has already been written’ — not the right approach for the city-wide plan. Ironically, it was a lack of consultation that almost resulted in a freeway blowing through his Strathcona neighbourhood, but that’s a story for another time.

He wants co-creation. Neighbourhoods helping to design their communities. And if people — like, any people we assume, but at the very least highly organized people, unless he literally meant all people, but honestly we’re not entirely sure about any of this — if these people see something planned for their neighbourhood they don’t like? Council could, Fry suggested, “consider veto feedback on its merit”. (Really.)

That should go well.

This idea of co-creation, whether belonging to Fry alone, Vancouver’s Green Party, their fellow councillors, or (just maybe) staff themselves, is either a brilliant new way to govern, or a new word for old tricks. It could also be a moot point, as it is likely doomed to fail, though in principle we see it working already; certainly, one could interpret the recent rejection of the Granville Street townhouse development as one outcome of co-creation. No surprise to Green-watchers, of course, that all three Green councillors confoundingly voted against the application (“I stand by the Shaughnessy vote,” says Fry).

As he chats with Gord — and meat ‘n’ sizzle co-host Rob McDowell — Pete Fry is crystal clear on one thing: as keen as he is to co-create with his fellow citizens, there are still some hills upon which he’s willing to fight, and we presume die.

Like the pending Georgia and Dunsmuir viaduct removal. Or what we do with the city’s existing zoned residential capacity. And why reconciliation is part of decolonization.

More important, though, is what Pete Fry thinks Elizabeth Murphy really doesn’t get about our housing crisis…

The Price Talks team hosted its first public podcast recording, held in front of a live library audience in the District of North Vancouver on June 26, 2019.

We’ve lobbed quite a bit of criticism at the North Shore generally over the past eight months, regarding recent decisions about housing, transportation and the public realm, but felt it was time to actually hear from residents.

Joining Gord for the discussion were:

• Dominica Babicki, formerly Energy Manager with the District, currently completing her PhD in geography focusing on issues related to related to energy, buildings and climate change. A lifelong resident of the Edgemont neighbourhood, mother of teens, and part-time caregiver to both parents.
• Justin Scott was born and raised in Deep Cove, went to Cap U, and is starting a new career in marketing. He currently lives in an apartment in West Vancouver, and is considering his long-term housing situation.
• Victor Schwartzman is a Brooklyn native who came to Vancouver via a decades-long stop in Winnipeg. He currently serves on DNV’s Community Services Advisory Committee, hosts and produces Soapbox Radio and World Poetry Cafe on Coop Radio 100.5 FM, and in renting in a social housing complex in Parkgate.

Special thanks to Lynn Valley Town Centre resident, and community planner and facilitator, Steven Petersson for MC’ing and providing invaluable support throughout the evening.

Our sincere gratitude to everyone who attended the evening — a diverse and attentive crowd, with lots of participation and free-flowing discussion. We hope to do this again.

Last but not least, thank you to Meghan and her team at the Lynn Valley Branch of North Vancouver District Public Library. What a perfect facility, in a beautiful community — paradise tucked into the side of a mountain.

There’s no two ways about it — TransLink, Metro Vancouver’s transit authority, is #1 in North America for year-over-year transit ridership growth. Seattle’s King County Transit is #2. And Kevin Desmond has led them both.

Desmond, now in his 4th year at the TransLink helm, didn’t emerge as a transit planning professional as a result of education, nepotism, or some cultish, hippie-era, preternatural NUMTOT trip (though, thanks to Gord, he’s now officially hip to the ELMTOT jive).

No, Desmond came to transit by mistake. An upbringing in the Bronx — OK, technically Westchester County, but he could walk to the #5 Dyer Avenue train — was followed by various positions Mayor’s Office of Operations during the mayoralty of Ed Koch, working with New York City agencies implementing public policy.

You know, typical New York stuff, like counting trees (there were 800,000), and helping untangle a parking revenue corruption scandal (big money). Which eventually led to an invitation to join the Department of Customer Services at New York City Transit. And so began Desmond’s love affair with transit — as he credits it, a cloying mixture of public policy, public service, and running a business. His great challenge in ’80s and ’90s New York City? Trying to figure out how to drive transit ridership up in a mega-city of abundant transportation options. His focus was to paint transit as a desirable consumer product, and to do so with the support of “a lean mean, growth-oriented consumer product organization”. And it worked.

Desmond tells Gord all the stories…of how he tried to bring more attention, and money, to the bus system in New York, when the subway tended to suck up all the oxygen….what prompted him to swap coasts in what eventually became a 12-year stint as chief executive of King County Transit in Washington State…how his efforts in the Puget Sound region culminated in a successful $54 billion tax package ballot measure for transit that included a multi-phase plan for high-capacity light rail (jealous much?)…and what ultimately led him to Vancouver.

He also waxes on about Transport 2050, the largest public engagement in TransLink’s history. But what we really wanted to know was what Desmond thinks of ride-hailing players like Uber and Lyft, slagged by Price Talks guests (among many, many others) as malignant, transit-killing tumours on the rumps of cities across the continent.

“Not something to be feared,” he claims. Why? You’ll have to listen to find out.

More bus routes with greater capacity. Ground level retail in proximity to low-rise residential buildings. Communities designed with walking, cycling, and integrated multi-modal mobility in mind. And yes, rapid transit.

Surrey and Langley are two obvious examples of cities south of the Fraser taking slow, but steady and at times bold, steps towards the future, thanks in no small part to the work done by people like Paul Lee and Nathan Pachal.

In this second edition of our “Predecessor/Successor” series (see also Episode 31), Lee and Pachal explore the similarities between their own outsider experiences, and their respective roles promoting progressive, sometimes unpopular agendas, as both urbanists and leaders.

Lee worked in transportation planning for over three decades in both the private and public sectors, first working on implementation of the ’90s-era regional transportation plan, and most recently managing the City of Surrey’s light rail portfolio (may it rest in peace). Pachal is in his first full term, and fourth year, as councillor for the City of Langley; he’s also the indefatigable author of the long-running South Fraser Blog.

Both of Gord’s guests are used to talking to people about transportation investments, but as often from the prospective of what communities want, as what they really need. And dealing with the political decisions, as Lee learned, that often fit neither category. “Where do we need to win? Let’s build Skytrain there.”

Yet, despite occasionally blips in the process, there may be little doubt that there’s a line connecting the type of work Lee did in the 1990s and 2000s, and what Pachal has seen emerge in his short time on council. In this case (as he says with an almost astonished grin) a bus every 90 seconds in Langley City along Fraser Highway. “Walk 5 minutes, and you’re in a farm field.”

Transportation planners and policy geeks — like these two guys — know the real secret about growth in Metro Vancouver. The really exciting stuff is happening south of the Fraser.

In 2015, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA) undertook a strategic planning process that might have invited a bit of cynicism — give a fancy name and lengthy timeline to a stock-in-trade exercise, and call it transformative.

That exercise, however, was Re-Imagine Downtown Vancouver, and it has already proven to be anything but typical. For one, it’s a 25-year legacy ‘vision’ project laid upon a foundation of rigorous research and public engagement. For another, it included recommendations that, unlike many corporate visions, were tied to tangible actions that would change the very face of downtown and how it would be utilized for the next generation.

And as a public expression of that vision’s intention, CEO Charles Gauthier committed DVBIA to “bring something to life” within the first year of releasing the report. So they did — award-winning Alley Oop, the laneway behind West Hastings street between Seymour and Granville, which was transformed from service corridor into a bright, playful public space.

An even better example of the Re-Imagine commitment? The governance structure of the DVBIA itself which, behind Gauthier’s leadership, was re-jigged — Board refreshed, committees disbanded, committees created — in order to empower and energize the organization, and better position it to realize the recommendations contained in the Re-Imagine report.

As a result of bringing the leaders of tomorrow to the forefront of the organization, the DVBIA has, of late, found itself championing a variety of initiatives that, as Gord put it, seem a bit foreign for a business-forward organization. Bike lanes. Child care. Living wages. Why would a business advocacy organization be involved in many of the same issues that are often believed to make business more challenging?

Gauthier answers this question, and many more, with the support of special guests Landon Hoyt and Julianne King of the SFU Public Square research team that led the project. Armed with three years’ worth of data and insights, they compare reality to the plan, and give an honest assessment of how well-positioned the DVBIA is to move forward, both with ongoing dialogue, and the commitment to change.

“Championing the Vision: 3 Years into Re-imagine” will be presented to members at the DVBIA Annual General Meeting next Tuesday, as one of the cornerstones of the organization’s resolution to renew its mandate for another 10 years, which will be subject to a vote.

Guess what? We think it might just pass.

“A lot of people thought we were wildly pessimistic as to the speed with which we were facing this crisis. Turned out we were wildly optimistic.

This is happening faster than those of us who started getting interested in it 30 years ago could possibly have conceived.”

In recognition of the 30 year anniversary of Clouds of Change, the 1989 report from the City of Vancouver’s Task Force on Atmospheric Change, Gord speaks with a key influencers for his originating motion to strike the task force, Mike Brown.

You may know Brown’s name as one of the co-founders of Ventures West (R.I.P.) in 1968, the prototype for institutional venture capital in Canada. Or perhaps for his role in helping Ballard Power land a $1.35 million investment in 1987, on the road to becoming the planet’s first major fuel cell player.

Or perhaps you don’t know his name at all. But you should. That’s because he represents one of the most important, and least appreciated (or perhaps least well understood) factors in the race to deal with the climate emergency — capital. Moolah. Money.

He’s a capitalist, but as we learn in this conversation, from a person who’s been thinking about and working on climate change at last as long as many of this podcast’s listeners have been alive, there may not be any other choice for dealing with this emergency than using the levers of capitalism to make things happen, and fast. The marketplace? All the money needed to power the requisite innovations — billions of dollars, all attracted to speculation about the future — is there.

So people like Brown work at advancing solutions, through places like the Institute for Breakthrough Energy Technology, his incubator focused on helping companies shorten the hardware commercialization timeframe, despite the fact that he’s made his money, and “the real issues are going to turn up after I’m dead.”

He doesn’t have to do all this. Giving colour and shape to his pessimism, and using it to make his rich friends feel a little discomfort. But he also knows that when he drives around his electric car, he ain’t burning sunshine. And so he wants those rich friends to part with some of their hard-won capital, and put it towards something that will make a real difference. As he has always done.

“When I started thinking about this problem, I conceived that it was going to be something that would face my great-grandchildren. By the time we got to the mid-90s, it was about my grandchildren. By the time we got to 2005, it was about my children. Now it’s about me.”

“There are places we love, and places we hate…at a certain point, we made it illegal to make the places we love anymore, and we were only allowed to make the places we hate.”

So says Jeff Speck, one of North America’s top urban designers, and a leader of the new urbanism movement, in a recent visit — his first — to Vancouver.

As co-author of 2010’s Suburban Nation with his mentors Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (of architecture and town planning firm DPZ Partners), Speck reached a new level of mainstream urban nerd renown in 2012 with Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

Next came its follow-up, a tactical guide for planners, activists, and even the odd engineer, 2018’s Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places. As part of a speaking tour to promote the book, Speck accepted an invitation from Canada Lands Company and MST Development Corporation to make his first visit to Vancouver, and present at the Inspire Jericho Talks series on May 23.

As a sneak preview, he joined us for a Price Talks soiree, our third such live recording with Gord and friends. Speck covers a variety of topics, including: the formative roles played by Duany and Plater-Zyberk and their early work at Miami-based Arquitectonica in influencing his career choice and trajectory; his early interest in helping to recreate Florida’s throwback vernacular architecture (think Seaside, the un-ironic setting for The Truman Show); the bad news about ride hailing…and the worse news about autonomous vehicles; and, of course, what he means by ‘deep walkability’.

“My audiences tend to self-select”, he says modestly — and while this may be true of his clients, once the The Wall Street Journal calls one of your books “the urbanist’s bible”, such self-effacing statements no longer hold water.

Turning Speck’s own words back on him — if you’re interested in urban design, find this guy.

Or maybe you prefer his first big hit, as co-owner of eight 1/2, the well-regarded Mt. Pleasant restaurant.

You may even appreciate his 10 years as Park Board staff, or his debut in administrative management in the provincial government.

But if you’re invested in Vancouver’s new era of power and politics, you may only want to hear one thing from this conversation with Wiebe — what Wiebe stands for. And, by extension, the Vancouver Green Party itself.

And on that…will the Greens run out of time before they run out of process?

We find out a little bit of everything in this fast-moving conversation, including Wiebe’s intriguing response to that last question. Regardless, one thing is clear — he wholeheartedly believes in the rationale behind his party’s deference to consensus-building as part (in place of?) decision-making.

“If the process is done right, the implementation will follow.” Wiebe commits not just to bringing process back to politics, but to being part of that process. Even f that means being the political target in the room.

Guest host Rob McDowell joins the fray, to try to figure out how Wiebe and the Greens expect to bring about major change — Rental100, a retrofitted Granville Bridge, a “blue way” creek connection from Science World to New Westminster — without being the decision-makers in the room.

“We’re passing a lot. It’s just that our meetings take two or three times as long.”

It’s not Vancouver, but it sounds like the Vancouver we want to be: multi-family residential buildings located close to the urban centre. Generously spaced laneways and semi-private lots for kids to play. Sufficient access to high storefronts, services and other amenities, in ever-expanding concentric circles of community, neighbourhood, and city.

It’s Heliopolis — once a suburb 10 kilometres outside of Cairo, today swallowed up by the city. And like most neighbourhoods in Vancouver, it’s highly sought-after by Egypt’s urban elite as a place to live, and invest.

It’s also just over a century old, and has also inspired a namesake design genre (Vancouverism, meet Heliopolis Style). And like Vancouver, Heliopolis has done many things right, and yet could be simultaneously teetering on the precipice of “too much, too soon”.

Houssam Elokda tells the story of his childhood home, the urban/suburban dichotomy he found as a young adult in Halifax, and how Charles Montgomery’s Happy City design philosophy affected him deeply.

It also ended up employing him. Today, at just 26 years old, Elokda is Operations Manager and Masterplanning Lead for the urban planning, design and architecture consultancy born of Montgomery’s book.

Speaking to Gord on a Ramadan fast day, Elokda turns what should be a low-energy, baseline rally on easy topics, into a fascinating serve-and-volley on some pretty deep ideas. About happiness, and the role of ‘tribal’ affiliations. On what architecture can and can’t do, and on finding his footing in Vancouver’s invitation-only culture.

Is there an architecture of loneliness, a way to engineer happiness? Or are people more likely to interact in larger numbers, and in greater proximity, to one other?

And who’s in your tribe?

Can we create community out of diversity? If so, will it require changing the scale and character of urban forms within our communities…the very change some Lower Mainlanders have recently become notorious for rejecting?

It’s one of many thorny questions tossed around, grappled over, and occasionally outshouted by our venerable host and his subject Mark Busse, Director of TILT Curiosity Labs at HCMA Architecture + Design, and host of the Creative Mornings Vancouver breakfast lecture series. There’s a give-and-go to this conversation that Price Talks has not yet witnessed, or had to edit around…

It begins with a game of Podcast Ping Pong (you don’t know it because Gord just invented it), and ends with a discussion of the possibility that, not only have we not seen the end of Gen X, we may yet have the opportunity to witness their best and brightest contributions to society.

In the middle is a wide-ranging debate about the role of designers — not planners mind you, but a broader creative class — in contributing to the directions our cities and communities take. Often bespoke approaches to prescribing how relationships are facilitated and move in space, and what we could call the ‘special sauce of serendipity’ that has come to mark social interactions in the new communities of the future, today. In places like downtown Vancouver, and Surrey, for example.

And by the way, what is community? Says Busse: “There’s data that says people living in close proximity, sharing and touching skin on skin produces happier, and healthier human beings.” And if that means breaking the bargain we’ve made with previous generations who have come to counted on having homes that the kindergarten class have depicted for generations — detached house, pitched roof, chimney, backyard, and generous garden — then so be it. “Sorry, grandpa.”

And when Gord asks if Gen X has blown it, Busse suggests that, perhaps with the support of a little Millennial tailwind, the best of this generation may be just over the horizon.

In George Affleck’s world, the only thing worse than the politician who tries to please everyone is the politician who only focuses on the base.

So you can understand why the only thing to possibly vex him more than last council — in which he withstood endless punishment from a neo-leftie Vision Vancouver majority — could be this council, the least experienced in…possibly forever.

The two-time former NPA councillor, alongside friend of the podcast Rob McDowell, joins Gord to dissect the goings-on at City Hall. And if there’s one common theme, it’s that this NPA caucus is very, very different from past NPA caucuses.

No surprise — Vancouver’s favourite artisanal-partisanal political party apparently tends to shape and reshape itself every election cycle (at least according to this particular trio, who would know); the last reshaping led not only to Affleck stepping back, but resulted in a party unable to attract enough voters from the “mushy middle” to elect a mayor, and thus plunging the city into uneasy, unpredictable coalition territory.

So why *did* Affleck extract himself from the last campaign? Who’s shaping the NPA today? Is the 2022 election already looking like  slam dunk, or a problem….or both? And how many NPA councillors have an eye on the mayor’s chair. (Hint: all of them.)

Most importantly, what would he have done about the 420 coughuffle? (This is the discussion that earns us our first E for explicit content.)

We hope to have him back; in the meantime, you can hear more via his UnSpun podcast on The Orca media network with Jody Vance.

Chris Fair helps places — communities, cities, regions — think about the future.

That thinking drives the design of everything from the branding of a destination, to the design of streets, buildings and other public spaces, and what is put in them in order to make a city not just liveable, but loveable.

Fair’s belief? That if you stop looking at how people behave, and begin understanding how people may want to behave in the future (in part through creative disruption, and of course big data), you have the best possible chance at helping a place realize its full economic potential. Beyond tourism, this applies to business attraction and retention, not to mention drawing in the talent that keeps economies bumping along.

In some cases, this approach — thinking about lifestyle and what sorts of experiences might resonate with people — can actually save a city. In his opinion, this was the case with one of the most interesting revitalizations of a downtown in the world. (For that answer, you’ll have to listen in.)

In the process of explaining his placemaking approach and the rationale behind it, Gord gets the Calgary-born creative to reveal how his company, Resonance Consultancy, was inspired in part by his passion for skiing and his eye for opportunity; casting aside creative writing two decades ago to leverage the Intrawest investment in Mont Tremblant into his own company, a bilingual media outlet. Today, Resonance has an international footprint and is known for helping translate contemporary lifestyles in a way that local governments can “get their heads around”.

Some interesting questions are posed, and not necessarily resolved in this conversation: Is Vancouver a resort city only for the rich, or a real place? Does liveability necessarily equal prosperity? Should we make Vancouver less attractive so more people can afford to live here down the line? How do we prioritize public amenities so they don’t just result in elite experiences?

And of the superstar cities of the 21st century, where does Vancouver rank?

If you follow Vancouver politics, you don’t need an intro to Melissa De Genova.

In just her second term as Vancouver councillor, De Genova suddenly has the second-longest tenure of anyone in council chambers, and has also become (surprisingly, to some) one of the more credible authorities on policy, staff relations, and council protocol. Maybe even one of the adults in the room.

Falling on the heels of three consecutive Vision Vancouver council majorities — in which De Genova was a favoured and frequent combatant — it all still seems so…off. De Genova? The voice of reason? Champion of affordable housing? Responsibly wielding the gavel…as deputy mayor?!?

Yes indeed. In this new era of Vancouver Council, black is white, up is down, and everything is slightly batshit crazy. Yet, MDG (as she’s affectionately and slightly obviously known, duh) is quite possibly the throwback NPA leader we’ve all been waiting for.

In this snappy interview, in which Gord is joined by friend of the podcast Rob McDowell of The Independents, MDG talks about the past, present and future of Vancouver’s political scene. What did she learn from her 5-term Park Board commissioner father? What coercive, even threatening, tactics did past Vision councillors use against her? What’s Kennedy doing right?

And most importantly, who’s having lunch?

Legendary is not a term to be taken lightly, but neither are the accomplishments of TEAM (The Electors’ Action Movement), the municipal political party formed in 1968 in Vancouver by Art Phillips. TEAM steamrolled into City Hall with an 8-seat majority in 1972, and is credited with steering the city into a direction which is often recognized as upholding a world-class standard for quality of life.

Similarly, living legends are rare. But, in the case of V. Setty Pendakur — as with Vancouver council in the TEAM era — the ‘legend’ label just isn’t up for debate.

Transportation engineer, professor at UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning, self-described agitator, family man, and the city’s first (and still only) member of council of South Asian descent, Pendakur is one of the central figures from that TEAM blowout. His opposition to the city’s long-planned downtown freeway brought him into the political fold, and the ’72 election result dealt with that issue decisively.

And that was just the start.

In just a single term of elected office — which, at the time, was just two years — Pendakur either directly led or influenced some of the most important changes this city has ever experienced, feats of urban planning and engineering whose reverberations are still felt today. The Stanley Park Seawall (and its curious connection to housing development); the waterfront plan, which led to the connected public paths from False Creek to the west side beaches; the Development Permit Board; the Property Endowment Fund; the social planning department; CD1 zoning; and the institutionalization of community consultation.

Pendakur dishes on these backstories, plus his impression of public life as a member of a visible minority over a generation ago. He speaks to what it means to be Canadian today. And he tells us which category of civil servant he considers to be most like a buffalo.

Public transit consultant Jarrett Walker says the value of his work with municipalities around the world is never predicated on delivering his own recommendation. Instead, he says he “fosters conversations, leading to confident decisions”.

That might get his firm Jarrett Walker + Associates the job. But as he demonstrates during this enlightening and entertaining chat — Price Talks’ second live recording at Gord’s West End apartment —”convening people in the presence of reality” is Walker’s true skill.

What does that look like? He discloses some of his interdisciplinary secret sauce, various processes and approaches to helping North American cities re-think how to move people. And some of it sounds very much like child’s play.

Walker is well familiar with Metro Vancouver’s complex political, geographic, and fiscal environments for transportation-related capital projects — he worked and lived here a decade ago as consultant to TransLink — and has some compelling advice for the audience.

(An auspicious collection of academics, advocates, and regional and municipal government leaders, with journalist and knitter non-pareil Frances Bula keeping everyone honest. Listen closely to the questions, and play a little game of “who’s who”.)

One such nugget: get over your reluctance to fight for municipal self-determination in transit. Another one, eminently Google-able for extra colour and context: take on the ‘elite projections’ of technocrats like Elon Musk when discussing what the future of transportation should look like.

Oh, and of course a few thoughts on ride-hailing. On Uber and Lyft: “People who can afford it become completely addicted to it. And it only works as long as not many people use it. It can strangle the city.”

Enjoy.

The Sea Captain is the newly unveiled public art piece, held aloft from the ceiling of the newly upgraded Surrey Central SkyTrain station on Expo Line. It’s also, perhaps, an apt metaphor for themes covered in  this episode.

Themes like encounters with colonialism, and the different forms they can take. Figuring out how different peoples live together in one place.

Gord explores these, and many other themes related to culture, settlement, and “the Canadian experiment”, in his wide-ranging discussion with Sukh Johal.

Johal, a Surrey-based realtor and passionate advocate for slower, safer communities and responsible land use, tells us a story that begins in an unexpected corner of the British Commonwealth. We get a peek into Sikh culture, the impact of change on Surrey’s urban youth in the ’90s, and today’s South Asian culture that is largely responsible, over the last 25 years, for buoying Surrey into second place amongst BC’s most populous cities. (In terms of both population and area, it’s like two-and-a-half Richmonds.)

There’s never been a discussion like this before on Price Tags. The respect, the ‘just so’ flattery, the crisp enunciation — like a true politician. (Sukh, not Gord.)

And what about the Strongman in the title? Someone up there with Trump and Putin. And it’s not who you think.

It was one of a few memorable tactics Sylvester deployed during the endless campaign. Like having policy platforms, and speaking authentically about topics with which she had direct experience. Something definitely worked, because her independent run captured 20% of the vote in the mayoralty race, for third place.

The LinkedIn thing, by the way, is no joke. Because only by viewing it can you understand some of the breadth and depth of her leadership experience, over 40 years with organizations which literally make the world a better place, in how they operate or what they do (and often both).

To give Veronika Bylicki any less space and attention seems criminal, and yet it’s simply impossible to compete when, by comparison, you’re only a decade out of high school.

Bylicki has been impacting the world in a serious way for only one-fourth as long as her fellow alumnus of St. Patrick Regional Secondary School (Main & 10th). That said, City Hive is no small thing. The organization, which Bylicki co-founded, helps develop youth participants and leaders in public policy and civic processes, and works with government to ensure youth voices, needs and experience inform the shape of Vancouver’s future.

Sounds like the kind of organization Sylvester would aspire to be part of.

In a discussion that’s equal parts refreshingly positive, entertaining, and “where is this going”, Bylicki and Sylvester grapple with Gord on such topics as millennial media consumption, fake news in the 2018 campaign, why intersectional representation always matters, and what leadership looks like in a climate crisis.

Past Vancouver City Council candidates — and Price Talks pundits — Adrian Crook and Rob McDowell return to the podcast to give their latest letter grades to our local leaders.

And much ground is covered in the process, including Rental 100, the Broadway-UBC subway, and the back-story to the cold shoulder given to Vancouver Rape Relief’s grant request. Plus, teapot tempests such as councillor budgets, and the big mistake Kennedy made early in his mayoral tenure.

The team also ruminates on two of our North Shore governments, and their tin ears for the true needs of their communities. What to do? A few good ideas are tossed around, and one “truly awful, awful” one. (Tell us how you really feel, Gord.)

But back to Vancouver. Our esteemed duo answers the most pressing questions about our trail mix of a local government. Why should the parties caucus? Who helped the newbie councillors walk back problematic votes? Who’s filling the role of hood ornament? And how corrupt are we, really?

An activist, political and urbanist voice in Metro Vancouver for four decades, Gord’s public life has been informed in no small part by his upbringing in Victoria, which included some formative cultural, social and personal influences that eventually led him — with some trepidation — to Vancouver’s West End in 1978.

It was an era of evolution for that community, one in which Gord played an important role. Sure, he’s told parts of the story before, and yes, we get some of his patented activist, political, urbanist, and wonkish intellectual perspectives.

But this time, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, he let some of the editorial guard down, and gives a truly heartfelt and personal perspective on Vancouver — the city and the region, the place to which he has been so committed, for so much of his adult life.

We get the real Gord. So enjoy.

And happy birthday to the SFU Centre for Dialogue Fellow, former SFU City Program Director, former Vancouver City Councillor, AIDS Vancouver founder, and West End activist and resident, Gordon Price.

“Google ‘Tumlin NIMBY’ or ‘Tumlin Santa Monica’, and you can see a little bit of the story arc.”

An effective stage-setting for a dialogue earlier this month, in front of a small gathering at Gord’s West End apartment, with Jeff Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy for Nelson Nygaard.

One in a long-running series of Price Tags Soirées, and our first live audience recording, the chat included a Q&A with a few special guests well-known to #vanpoli followers.

Tumlin, raised in LA and happily transplanted to San Francisco via Stanford university in the late 1980’s, survived the recession of the early ’90s by (essentially) growing a branch of the transportation demand management tree — he was able to, over time, convert Stanford’s campus-wide parking into more money to support the implementation of a multi-modal transportation strategy.

Parking = $$$, and he turned it into a generous bankroll for university, and a career for himself with one of North America’s most-respected transportation consulting firms. He’s become an expert in helping communities move from discord to agreement about the future of transportation, and in the conversation you can hear he loves the challenge.  Calling inequity and privilege for what it is and, in the fight for public space, using compassion and humour to move forward.

True, he tacitly acknowledges, sometimes it doesn’t work, as with Santa Monica. But eventually his clients seem to get there, one way or another.

** Spoiler alert: North Shore policy and politics do indeed come up. Why do you think he was in town?

“There is a time coming, in our lives, when the tap of natural gas into our homes and into our city is going to be turned off. It’s not tomorrow — we have time to make adjustments.”

As follow-up to his interview with Vancouver City Councillor Christine Boyle (Episode 19) — mover of a unanimously-approved motion to declare a climate emergency — Gord wanted to speak to one of the ‘generals’ working on a solution to coming disaster. Someone with the knowledge, experience, and character to not just define the nature of the challenge we face in the coming decades, but to take on the mantle of leadership.

Whether Seth Klein is one of those generals is not yet clear, but he certainly seems to be writing the battle book.

The now-former BC Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives —he actually founded the progressive think tank’s west coast chapter in 1996 — Klein has identified some compelling parallels between the effort made by the Canadian government and industry between 1939 and 1945 to mobilize behind the war effort, and what may be required to keep this ship we call Western civilization afloat today.

With little doubt that drastic measures are needed, Klein believes the responses of countries like Canada during the Second World War are not just instructive, but likely instructive and maybe even necessary in this time of existential crisis.

What were those responses? There were many. They were mandated, legislated. And no person, no institution, was immune.

This conversation isn’t just a sneak preview of his upcoming book — it’s a conversation about a similar challenge we faced 80 years ago, how we faced it, and whether we can do it again today.

In 1997, as workers were stripping asbestos out of the old Woodward’s building, the Vancouver planner overseeing the project predicted it would take 10 to 20 years for Hastings Street to change. “From anything we can see, the community will be overwhelmingly low-income for that long,” Nathan Edelson told the Vancouver Sun.

Flash forward 22 years, and he was both right and wrong. True, a lot has changed on Hastings Street since the opening of the new Woodward’s Building in 2010. The central passion of legendary activist, non-profit housing developer, and city councillor Jim Green, Woodward’s has led the urban revitalization — or gentrification — of the west end of the Downtown Eastside. It sure did take a long time to change, but change it did, no matter how you label it.

Yet, one could say it’s also taken a long time for nothing much to change. Edelson can acknowledge a modicum of success, but he’s clear on one thing — there’s lots more to be done.

Because it’s all still happening. The 24-hour drug market. Unchecked addictions amongst the city’s most vulnerable populations. A lack of safe, affordable housing. It clearly gave Edelson pause recently, as he reflected on the past, present and future of inner city planning.

He does so from a different perch today, as consultant with the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association for their *RePlan project (which is focused on the 1,800 housing units on City-owned, leasehold land between the Cambie and Burrard bridges). Back in the day, Edelson and his ‘brothers and sisters’ in the city’s planning department were in the thick of it, focused on what he calls “a reasonable public purpose”: to provide temporary shelter for the poorest in our society and to, over time, replace that with self-contained, permanent social housing.

And so, despite any perceived equivocation over the outcomes of his work over the years, there’s no doubt Woodward’s was a success in providing some of that social housing. It’s just one example of the many civic projects Edelson helped usher through local community planning and consultation processes, and ultimately through the Councils of the day, for populations co-existing across the entire spectrum of need in society. Go ahead, Google him. You’ll see.

Humble almost to a fault — “some of my best ideas were his”, he says, deflecting credit to Jim Green — Edelson continues to carry the torch for housing, which is, in his opinion, job #1 for planners.

So yes, as Gord put it, he was right. Right in his beliefs and his methods, because it all had an impact. Still, Edelson thinks it’s not enough. He’s just not done focusing on those in our city who are in need, and how he can help shape what the future will bring.

Nathan Edelson is this year’s speaker at the Jim Green Memorial Lecture, tomorrow evening (March 13) at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts at Woodwards, 149 West Hastings Street.

This is the creation story of laneway housing in Vancouver…and, perhaps, the beginning of the end of the Bartholomew era of restrictive zoning.

The protagonist is Jake Fry, a self-proclaimed — metaphorical, mind you — child of Trudeau, who grew up in small-town Ontario and attended a one-room schoolhouse. His real education might have come half a kilometre underground; coming from a family of miners, this is where Fry learned hard skills, carpentry first and foremost among them. This ultimately led him to Toronto, and a career in construction in film and television. It also afforded him the means to travel.

So when he and his family eventually moved west, his world view was informed by an intimate knowledge of older, denser places, and an appreciation for living light. He began to work in housing construction, and then one day it all came together. As Fry tells it, he literally lay his tools down in the middle of a job. No more. Time to do something different. Something small.

“Small is Beautiful” was the name of a book by British economist E. F. Schumacher which may be unfamiliar to an entire generation of young people who, nonetheless, live out its values today. The idea that ‘small works’ informed an ethos for Fry, which fomented into a vision of a new type of housing. Small housing, a type that suggests a home can be just enough to meet your needs. Not necessarily a restrictive, one-size-fits-all checklist — ‘just enough’ could mean something different to everybody — but the idea that we might need to start building homes differently.

Fry founded SmallWorks, and speaking the language of EcoDensity, the sustainability strategy created under former mayor Sam Sullivan’s administration, he softly, steadily, surely began to lobby Vancouver City Hall. The objective? To change the rules restricting the building of secondary housing forms — additional density — on lots with existing primary residences.

It worked, and in 2009 laneway housing was legalized. In the decade since, Fry has developed an entire portfolio of laneway homes, co-founded non-profit Small Housing BC (with Bob Ransford of developer Century Group), and is about to release a study showing the economic and environmental advantages of small homes. There’s almost literally nothing standing in his way.

Except, maybe, politics.

“You don’t hold referendums in small communities on a case-by-case basis—you do what you were elected to do, and make difficult decisions for the greater good.”

For anyone following politics in Metro Vancouver these days, this is become the sentiment of some in the planning profession. It’s a message about (and even directed towards, even if not in so many words) the many new, inexperienced members of council in city halls across the region proposing, and making decisions about, the very real housing and development challenges in all of our backyards.

It’s also quite possibly parting shots from the Baby Boomer professional class that, by some measures, could be implicated as much of the source of our current housing and transportation problems in the first place. But not Chuck Brook and Gordon Harris — these are the guys walking the talk.

Brook, former heritage planner in Winnipeg, and then senior development planner for the City of Vancouver during the tail-end of the Ray Spaxman era, is an ardent supporter of what’s often called “infill projects” — the re-development and, often more efficient, use of existing land in an urban environment, for greater density and mixed use. Brook himself is notorious for the relentless pursuit of greater FSR; his career is marked by consistent efforts to increase the amount of liveable floor space that can be developed on a piece of land, relative to that overall footprint. When you think of changing the scope and character of a neighbourhood to accommodate more people, this is your man.

Harris is President and CEO of SFU Community Trust, which oversees UniverCity, the award-winning sustainable community next to the Burnaby Mountain campus. It’s just one of the many projects—some global in nature, many familiar to residents of Metro Vancouver as part of daily life—for which his team has provided planning, market analysis and strategic development consulting work, as part of a similarly persistent approach to sustainable urban development.

They’ve both also contributed to their local communities in countless other ways, and they’re almost ready to move along. But not before they spend the better part of the next decade or two trying to solve the now classic problem: who’s going to be living in this place in 2030? In 2050? What will they need? How do we build that society today, in such a way that, beyond not exacerbating current problems, we might actually mitigate or (in some way) resolve some of the very, very bad problems likely coming our way?

And does incrementalism mean changing the what we develop, or the way we develop it?

In this episode, Gord gets Brook and Harris to unwrap “the pill we have to swallow”, with some pointed words for the District of North Vancouver.

**NOTE: Audio quality improves at 13mins**

As co-founder of First Stop Portland, the organization responsible for telling the city’s sustainability story, and owner of a popular brunch spot in the so-hip-it-hurts Southeast PDX neighbourhood, Iannarone was a political neophyte. She jumped into the race, and with a firm grasp of progressive environmental, social and economic values — and a compellingly forthright approach on the stump — she finished in third place, with almost 12% of the vote. She also captured a lot of the general discontent about the city’s direction, eerily similar to conversations we’ve been having in Vancouver. And because of all this, Iannarone built a following.

Today, she’s an urban policy consultant, a doctoral candidate in urban studies and planning, a volunteer for numerous committees, community groups and NGOs, a prolific tweeter, and a sought-after talking head in Portland media on a variety of topics. Like freeway expansion (she’s against it), police violence (um, also against), the gentrification vs urban revitalization debate (conflicted), and improvements for cycling (strongly for).

Gord spoke to Iannarone at the end of her recent trip to Victoria and Vancouver. The conversation reinforced the separated-at-birth feels we have for our sister city…coffee and cycling and pinot (oh my). Furthermore, she insisted that, despite the snow, the planned Mobi bike tour of downtown and False Creek must go on. She brought her rain cape, after all. Makes us wonder if Portland electoral ballots haven’t seen the last of Iannarone, Sarah.

And while they didn’t run on a ticket — few candidates for public office in Metro Vancouver do — Linda Buchanan and Tony Valente are singing from the same song sheet.

Among other ambitions, they want to invite more density to the 6th-densest municipality in Canada. They support car sharing and the new e-bike share program coming to the North Shore, in a city where 30% of residents already don’t own a car. And, seemingly in contrast to many of their political counterparts in the districts of North Vancouver and West Vancouver, they embrace the recommendations of INSTPP, the North Shore Transportation Planning Project led by TransLink and multiple levels of government.

Buchanan and Valente brought the Price Talks team to CNV library recently, a 10-year-old facility just a few steps from City Hall, boasting a new recording studio. They spoke with Gord at length about their adjustments to their new roles, their early priorities, and the opportunities to bring new housing, transportation and employment options to residents in their beautiful, diverse and growing city.

One could say the true liminal space is the Downtown Eastside itself, a threshold between competing realities that the city has worked hard to define, and reconcile, in the almost two decades since the signing of the Vancouver Agreement. As “A Program of Strategic Actions for the Downtown Eastside“, the Vancouver Agreement was formulated to address poverty, substance abuse, homelessness, crime and injustice, all of which have afflicted the DTES for a generation.

Regan has been a part of a number of organizations and initiatives contributing to understanding that uneasy but critical dynamic — between economic development and gentrification,  top-down social programs and self-determination, and civic integration and maintaining the integrity of community culture and the collective lived experience.

From the establishment of the Portland Hotel Society in 1993, to the Woodwards Squat in ’02, to the eventual successes of social enterprises like EMBERS and Potluck Café & Catering, city staff have learned to embrace this ambiguity. It resulted, in Regan’s estimation, in a collapse of the traditional economic development hierarchy of formal, social and informal economies, into a “livelihoods continuum”. The development and implementation of the city’s Healthy City Strategy and new Community Benefits Agreement policy are just two expressions of policy innovation on the new continuum.

In this discussion with host Colin Stein, Regan talks about his almost two decades living and working in and around the DTES, and some of the practical implications of this new approach to CED.

Think normal clothes, kids in cargo bikes, and families who embrace the car-free lifestyle, riding around the seawall, or along a quiet neighbourhood street— the Bruntletts have helped shape this image.

What began as writing to (and for) local media in support of transportation cycling evolved into their own media creations, through their consultancy Modacity. And by promoting and celebrating everyday, normalized cycling, and blogging, producing videos, and using social media and events to take the Vancouver cycling perspective outside our backyard, the Bruntletts also discovered the Netherlands.

So today, thanks in part to the success of their 2018 book Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality, the new life they begin is in The Netherlands itself, where bike life is truly mainstream. They’ll bring their skills, networks and message to Delft, home of the Dutch Cycling Embassy.

The Bruntlett’s move is perhaps not that different from what brought them to Vancouver in the first place. They talk about this in today’s episode, as well as how their cycling advocacy unfolded, during what can most certainly be seen as Vancouver’s first major step into mainstream bike-naissance a decade ago. We hope to see them back here before too long.

With nine “whereas” clauses — referencing the impacts of BC and California wildfires, the emergency debates at various levels of government following the UN’s recent IPCC report on global warming, the estimated future costs of climate-related disasters to Vancouver, and our current vulnerabilities — plus half a dozen amendments from Boyle’s peers, the motion ended with a series of directives, and a clear call to action.

In short, the motion called for an admission that we’re in a climate emergency. It reminded us all that, despite progress in recent years, we’ve failed to meet our previous targets. And it directed staff to formulate, within 90 days, new targets, actions and timelines to aggressively reduce carbon emissions, in-line with IPCC goals.

Boyle, one of nine first-time Council members, made time over her lunch hour recently to chat with Gord at City Hall about her motion — what inspired it, the potential implications of climate disaster on vulnerable populations in particular, and where we go from here.

Kate, Paige and Carla visited with Gord and the Price Talks team recently, in advance of this week’s special, sold-out lunch event with the City of Vancouver’s outgoing General Manager of Development, Buildings, and Licensing, Kaye Krishna.

In their conversation, they just barely scraped the surface of all the issues related to inclusivity, the inequity in roles for women, and how righting the imbalance matters in city building and real estate development. It’s not just about creating an equal playing field, but about building better developments, communities, and cities for everyone.

Beginning in 1992, with a downtown business core saddled with double-digit commercial vacancy rates, Gauthier has helped usher in new programs aimed at stimulating greater public engagement in more public spaces. More promotional and support programs for downtown businesses.  And with all that, sustained growth and livability in one of North America’s most densely populated and heavily commuted downtowns.

More tellingly, Gauthier has led the BIA — staff, Board and Policy Council — into tough conversations, many of them public, about policy issues once considered outside the purview of the business community. That’s because they’re issues at the core of what makes this city tick — bike lanes, transit, housing policies, and intersectional diversity and representation. First in traditional media, and now on social media, Gauthier has become a voice of reason (and in Gord’ view, “master of the segue”).

Today, just prior to yet another BIA renewal process, and as a new council votes on a number of important motions about active transportation and densification, Gauthier say’s he’s ready…to fight the NIMBYs.

Having started his career in landscape architecture, Dr. Frank’s 1985 thesis on transit mall design eventually led to a Masters of Civil Engineering Transportation Studies and a PhD in Urban Design and Planning, both from the University of Washington. Dr. Frank worked for the Washington State Department of Transportation and held faculty roles at Georgia Tech, but it was his research on the links between the design of cities, environmental impacts and population health — and the trove of data he found which helped make such connections known and understood — that was groundbreaking.

It was also comprised of a set of evolving concepts throughout the 1990s (“How the design of places affects behaviour and health, and health came later”), and over the past 25 years his work resulted in the publication of hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles and publicly and privately-funded projects on the subject, not to mention having influenced public policy shifts towards walkability, bike-ability and transit, and away from vehicular primacy.

Since 2002, Dr. Frank has held the role of Bombardier Chairholder and Professor in Sustainable Transport and the Director of the Health and Community Design Lab at the University of British Columbia, splitting his time between the Schools of Community and Regional Planning in the Faculty of Applied Science, and Population and Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Frank is also President of Urban Design 4 Health, Inc., which develops evidence and tools to support healthy, sustainable and energy-secure transportation and land-use decision-making.

What were they all about? Are BC municipalities in-line with campaign financing limits and disclosure requirements at the provincial and federal levels? What is “the dark money”, and why is that still a thing in local politics?

John Whistler, financial agent for the Green Party of Vancouver, joins Gord in the studio to dig into the details of the recent changes — how they impacted candidates and voters last fall, and additional changes he’d like to see in how election campaigns are conducted in British Columbia.

Want more? In October, Gord published John’s 5-part series on “Failure and Reform: BC’s Local Elections Campaign Financing Act” — simply search for ‘LECFA’ on the blog.

Starting out at the Regina Post-Leader, Bramham moved to the west coast as political reporter for The Canadian Press, until eventually joining the Vancouver Sun. From beat and investigative reporter, to associate editor and columnist, Bramham has helped BC readers understand more about power and politics at all levels of government, and difficult stories about immigration and citizenship, polygamy and abuse, drug addiction and tragedy on our streets.

In this deep-dive discussion, Bramham talks about being a woman in politics and media, some of her favourite stories over the years, and the prospects for news and journalism in Canada going forward.

In this end-of-year wrap up, and summation of standout moments in council chambers over their first two months in office, Gord, Adrian and Rob talk about all manner of hot topics, many of which will be back on the agenda (and in the Comments section and your news feed) in the new year.

Spatial justice. Consultation, the city-wide plan, and ‘clean slates’. Uncomfortable council seating arrangements, and creative alliances (ie. the “GreeNPA”). Our new mayor, and electoral reform.

Oh yes, and which outlaw was ‘most wanted’ for unspeakable crimes in the District of North Vancouver….and what’s in store for development and densification on the north shore?

Karen Ward is a member of the “we”. She’s an ardent and eloquent activist who lives in the neighbourhood and provides emotional support to her vast personal network — a community which spans from Woodwards to Oppenheimer Park, from the foot of Main Street to City Hall. Karen is a former Board member of Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), and former collective member of Gallery Gachet. Most notably, today she contributes to policy strategy as a volunteer advocate to both the BC Centre for Disease Control and as a spokesperson for her community to Vancouver city council and local media. Karen is unquestionably an urbanist, in thought and in action.

Give this episode — just 30 minutes of your life — a listen this holiday season. It’s a small opening into the life led by your neighbours, in a place that was once the beating heart of mainstream, middle-class Vancouver…and which today constitutes “7 or 8 blocks of chaos.”

He’s also co-creator of a new classification method — a simple but compelling matrix — for visualizing the political and urbanist ideologies of the people and parties that ran for, and now occupy, City Hall.

Gord spoke to Bushfield at length about the urbanist-conservationist axis and what it means in the current political environment, his view on housing and the implications of the emerging push for ‘spatial justice’, and what we can expect from Cambie Report in 2019.

Much has been said about Vancouver’s housing crisis, and much has been promised. But now things are about to get real — and advocacy groups are ready. Particularly at Abundant Housing Vancouver.

AHV is a voice for more — policy reform (renter protections, land value capture, zoning laws), non-market housing, and purpose-built rental units. For this, not to mention the specious claims they’re in the pockets of wealthy developers, they’re also the target of vitriol from the anti-supply side crowd, status quo preservationists, and a grab-bag of Twitter trolls.

AHV directors Jennifer Bradshaw and Stuart Smith joined PT Managing Editor Colin Stein for a chat about what pulled them into housing advocacy, what they’re pushing for, and how they deal with the endless antagonism. And of course, to help define ‘spatial justice’…the implications of which may change the city, and the region, forever.

And he’s not wrong. Ken Sim, founder and CEO of homecare provider Nurse Next Door and bagel chain Rosemary Rocksalt, is just two months removed from having come within 957 votes of being the mayor of Vancouver. With five NPA Vancouver councillors, Sim would have led a majority, and thus the face of municipal (and perhaps regional) politics might look very different than it does today.

Having returned to regular family and business life, he goes deep with Gord in this revealing conversation. They discuss the day he got the call from NPA leadership, the big names he spoke to as he mulled his decision (and who finally convinced him to run), his experiences on the campaign trail, his thoughts about the downtown eastside, and what he believes are the major policy priorities for the city.

And more importantly — what does the future hold for Ken Sim?

What does the vote say about the next four years of housing debate and action in the District of North Vancouver? Some big questions, and pregnant pauses, in today’s episode.

As chair of the Metro Vancouver board for seven years, and chair of the Mayors Ten Year Vision Committee in the midst of his decade-long tenure on the TransLink Mayors Council, Moore rolled up his sleeves and left indelible marks of leadership and organizational effectiveness on both organizations, while helping steer his community through a time of change.

In this episode, Gordon Price and the newly-retired-from-politics (***so he says***) ex-mayor talk about the new culture of incivility in civic affairs, the concentric circles of influence that ebb out of Vancouver to the suburbs, what makes for a mayoral mandate, and why planners could perhaps be considered ideal political leaders.

Then, a deep-dive interview with former diplomat — and independent council candidate in Vancouver’s recent election — Rob McDowell.  A professional adjudicator and mediator, Rob talks about his entry into the political world over three decades ago, his decision to run for council for a third time, first as an independent, and the challenges to come for the city’s divided leadership.

Plus, her take on the issue of the day — fulfilling the housing needs of the ‘missing middle’. What does she think about prior Council decision on duplexes? How can neighbourhood voices help guide land use decisions? What role will Council play with — and what will inform — the forthcoming city-wide planning process?

A great discussion — with more from Councillor Dominato and other leaders in the region in future episodes.

The main segment features a housing discussion between Josh Gordon, Assistant Professor at the School of Public Policy at SFU, and Tom Davidoff, Associate Professor of the Strategy and Business Economics Division at UBC Sauder School of Business, hosted by Price Tags Managing Editor Colin Stein.

Harm reduction and Downtown Eastside activist Sarah Blyth, affordable housing and transit advocate Adrian Crook, Musqueam First Nation community leader Wade Grant, and health sector mediator Rob McDowell chat about what happened, what they’re watching with the current council, issues of representation in our public institutions, and whether they’ll run again.

And if so, would they run again as independents…or perhaps a new party?

In this debut episode of Price Talks, Gordon sits down with Tom Davidoff, Associate Professor of the Strategy and Business Economics Division at UBC Sauder School of Business to talk about the region’s housing affordability crisis.