"While strengthening local government is an admirable goal, I do not believe that preserving local control over land use is more important than building homes." Good faith discussion of strategies and stakes in housing shortage vs. local control debates (mostly California content, but BC-relevant!)

42% of residents and 37% of businesses surveyed supported a 5% property tax increase in order to maintain the current level of services in the city of Vancouver but wait there’s more a lot more 1/? council.vancouver.ca/20251112/doc...

Nice piece most prominently featuring First Nation-led projects in BC but also touching on others across Canada, as well as talking to those who've moved into the lower-cost leasehold arrangements! www.cbc.ca/radio/costof...

Loved this simple image from @tomflood.bsky.social set behind the panel at the Life After Cars event hosted by @visionzerovancouver.ca. Happy to join @thewaroncars.bsky.social and happy my City Councillor @lucymaloney.bsky.social was up on stage too.

Pretty consistent pattern where Yaletown and Coal Harbour run much more Conservative than the rest of Downtown Vancouver, but still a good year for Hedy Fry. (note: it's always a good year for Hedy Fry).

"...if there is something to be taken from this decision, it is just to remember that the concept of Aboriginal title isn’t going to go away... it’s something that the province needs to deal with and that the best way to deal with that is through a nation to nation negotiation process."

Fascinating how the "median single-family home" gets picked up as the easy basis for tax comparison here, despite lack of representativeness overall. e.g. note that's a distribution reflecting only ~15% households in Vancouver - skewed toward wealthiest - compared to closer to ~40% in PoCo.

Vancouver recently adopted a plan to create simplified apartment zones in parts of the city (broadway and cambie mostly). We've started looking at what might be possible with single-stair buildings. Here's an R3 zoned site comprised of two 33x100 lots. The zoning allows ~2.2FSR and six storeys.

No luck capturing the Super Moon before the clouds rolled in, but I did witness a murder! So have some crows enjoying the sights of the City prior to the evening commute.

Hot takes on climate implications of the 2025 Cdn budget. On one hand, lots of emphasis on investment in the low-carbon economy of the future, and using GHG reductions/$ as a standard for public investments. On the other, embrace of and subsidies for LNG as clean energy. \1

Ok, lots to sort through with the budget. But I'm going to go ahead and endorse Canada joining Eurovision

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

Someone in my neighborhood got FED. UP.

Pumpkin testing... 1... 2... 3... pumpkin testing...

Everyone who makes money on housing understands that strict zoning and politicized permitting is good for landlords and bad for tenants.

An example of Small-Scale Neighbour Opposition more easily overcome with help from the province's Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing (SSMUH) requirements. Chuckling at the staffer's "YES, this developer will put in sidewalks for THEIR lot, but you misers still need to pay for the REST of the sidewalk!"

Good writeup of how the Trump administration has used housing as one of the justifications for their deportations, and how that fits into a history of US anti-immigrant housing policy. Someone should write a paper on Housing Nationalism…

I wish there was a way to convey how much of a big deal this is to me, I wish you could feel it. Our work on housing policy, condensed in a single report, has finally been translated to English. You can download it here: carrefour.vivreenville.org/publication/... (Click "Télécharger le PDF")

This is actually an interesting dive into BC Assessment practices (and lack of update since 1986!) But also, and hear me out, what if in addition to a tax on property we also had something crazy like a tax on carbon emissions to draw on for revenue? www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Crow surveys the morning

New Lewis Center at UCLA report by Paavo Monkkonen on French social housing. Is the cost rental and financing model upstream of France’s ability to build large number of units without deep subsidies? escholarship.org/content/qt8d...

"Conceptualizing and provisioning what people need is a far less abstract task than somehow ascertaining what each person deserves, and giving it to them." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-utopiani...

To people looking for a home today, writes @dannyoleksiuk.bsky.social, it matters a great deal whether that home is built next year, or in ten. Re-legalizing small apartment buildings throughout our cities would create more homes faster. www.sightline.org/2025/10/28/t...

Late evening sun on the tulip trees of W. 10th, decked out in their finest Fall regalia

Do young people face higher shelter costs than their older compatriots? @lausterna.bsky.social and I look into this question and the underlying mechanisms that can lead to age disparities in shelter costs.

Some standards are arbitrary & indefensible & make housing more expensive than it should be (e.g. those preventing sharing). Other standards are very defensible, but also quite expensive (e.g. no more lead pipes). Regulatory reform = sorting out our standards. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Is late Monday morning a good time to play around with new housing metrics? Trick question! It's always a good time to play around with new housing metrics. @jensvb.bsky.social and I have a look at Shelter Cost per Room (as opposed to sqft) in relation to age. homefreesociology.com/2025/10/25/a...

'Tis the Season for Amanita Muscaria! Also the name of a great @csecooney.bsky.social character from Saint Death's Daughter. Both perfectly capable of providing nightmares before christmas.

The Liberals promised to end boil water advisories on First Nations. They didn’t. Auditor General Karen Hogan says the government's record on water was the most disappointing failure she found in her audit. Hear the full discussion on the latest APTN Nation to Nation: youtu.be/xQ9LvNMVf7s?...

Woolly worm! Forecasting, let's see, a kinda long-ish Winter, maybe? After a short Fall, or something? And also 38 more hours until the next BC Conservative Party defections.

Useful to pair these two CBC pieces: On the Conservative polling turn toward anti-immigrant sentiment www.cbc.ca/news/politic... On what sure looks a prominent Conservative pol leading a "You Kids Should Blame the Immigrants" tour... www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

The short lived BC Conservative Party. We watched it come from nowhere in the 2025 BC election and now we get to watch it implode into oblivion as the legislature starts its business. Good thing this doesn’t entail another 2025 BC election. Dodged one there!

Sunrise over Vancouver giving us a lovely send off this morning, like "see you in a few days, good luck with your little atmospheric river thing!"

Kissing canopy of Norway Maples at 13th & Wallace

Big news out of Vancouver council: a proposal Ken Sim has long championed to create a city-owned business to develop sites for market rental housing has FAILED. It required two-thirds majority because it involved selling land, but failed to get the support of the four opposition councillors.

Good coverage of the on-going 105 Keefer (now 570 Columbia) saga. Especially appreciate how Mike Howell provides an in-article link to the 2022 court decision!

TFW you think you've stumbled on spicy political commentary about a "puppet party" in researching historical Heritage Designation processes through digital archives... ...only to find your old newspaper column is just located adjacent to column on crafts for children.

Canadian edition of "why don't people just apply to stay here legally?" www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

"Mayor Mike Hurley says the city is listening to residents and not just caving to NIMBYism." vs. "It's true that [I'm] a 'NIMBY'" quote by Kathy Corrigan (resident & fmr MLA & fmr mayoral spouse) But good take from @lanefab.com anyway! www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

FERTILITY RATES ARE NOT PERCENTS

Finally got around to playing with TransLink realtime GTFS data. Kind of fun. Transit in Vancouver is looking pretty good, especially considering this is an hour midday on a holiday weekend, with some lines not running (hello 44) and not all buses reporting real-time information.

The Chicago story, as many have noted, rhymes an awful lot with some pretty terrible history. But evidence also reminds me of the Aurora, CO, landlord who really amped up the Venezuelan gang story at his buildings seemingly to get out of code violations. www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/c429982...

Announcement from PM Carney moments ago and this is good news. I've been working on this issue with @saulschwartz.bsky.social and @agenestgregoire.bsky.social for years. We've documented how many Canadians don't file and miss out on or loose benefits, .. 1/3

September data was released today. The drop in absolute number of travellers is a bit lower than in the (higher volume) summer months, but year over year percentage change drop held fairly steady.

Delighted that I've only read one of these so far, leaving me with a glorious list of future reads. (The West Passage was really fun. Like reading a version of the movie Labyrinth that dispensed with the extraneous outsider and cranked up the weirdness x10)

This seems promising (if perhaps overdue)... looks like BC is putting together stronger minimum standards and enforcement mechanisms for municipal implementation of Small-Scale Multi-Unit Housing requirements. news.gov.bc.ca/releases/202...

Riding the Point Grey Road bikeway during the election was such a hoot. All of those cyclists negatively polarized by passing billionaires posting their drunk uncle dinner table rants out front... almost feel bad about the $600 lack of self-awareness www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

states and political structures and such are there to serve humanity, not the other way around. nationalism is a lie and should be rejected. we need to be pretty clear about this.

This is brilliant. More broadly, would love a scholarly consideration of how politicians prioritizing speedy travel - perhaps due to work demands, but also maybe oversized egos - leads to so much bad policy, from disabling speed enforcement to lack of taking air travel seriously as climate problem.