After some weeks of saving our pennies, my neighbour Claus Andrup and I have printed another 50 copies of Aesthetic Maple Ridge, an illustrated booklet about our home town. I sold two copies from my doorstep this afternoon, and dropped off two more copies at the Fraser Valley Regional Library. A runaway success! Continue reading
They’re spending money in Downtown Abbotsford
Abbotsford is the largest city in the Fraser Valley Regional District. It’s the product of a series of mergers, the latest being with the District of Matsqui in 1995.
The old Village of Abbotsford, like Cloverdale and Aldergrove, also described in this series, 
was a stop on the vanished Interurban commuter rail line. It’s been renamed Downtown Abbotsford, and the city government has taken steps to dress it up and attract customers… Continue reading
It’s cheaper to buy in the suburbs
My recent and enthusiastic West End Vancouver blog post generated a Facebook comment from our friend Jackie Chow. She labelled the West End urban villages in one word: “expensive.”
For renters, the West End is so close to downtown Vancouver jobs that you can ditch your vehicle and save enough money to cover the extra rent costs. But if someone wants to buy in the West End, and that someone has two or more children, what then? There’s not much available at any price, other than small condo apartments in towers. From this point of view, it’s fair to say that West End Vancouver ranks low on the livability scale for some potential residents. There are townhomes and low-rise options in Kitsilano across the bridge, but the purchase costs are very high. Continue reading
The textbook urban village: Vancouver’s West End
This is the oldest big-city neighbourhood in British Columbia; construction of the tight pattern of residential towers began in 1957. People said it was the most densely-populated patch of ground in the Commonwealth outside of Hong Kong. More than 40,000 people live here now; more than half of these get by without a motor vehicle.
40,000 makes for a big urban village — maybe it’s two villages, or three, but the entire area feels like a single walkable piece to me, once you move away from Burrard or Georgia, which form the eastern and northern boundaries of the West End. Continue reading
Fraseropolis 