As of July 1, all affected B.C. municipalities have signed on to a new 20-year policing contract with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Some local leaders remain fearful that the new deal exposes local taxpayers to surprise cost increases.
I have a different concern (predictably): could this contract have done a better job of enabling local input on policing practices? Is that option still open to us? Continue reading
In most of our cities, it’s too late to cry about the shift of commercial activity from high streets to asphalt plazas; the deed is done. If the high street is going to survive, it must function primarily as the core of an urban village, and gather new residents around it, especially seniors, within a walkable area.
Mission City is an example: a townsite in the District of Mission, a Fraser Valley municipality with a population of about 37,000. Mission grew up as a mill town, and is still home to the Cedar Shake and Shingle Bureau (“The Recognized Authority Since 1915”). The premiere shopping venue is The Junction, a plaza constructed in the 1990s. There’s a new neighbourhood shopping centre up by the high school, and another one in development on Highway 7. Continue reading
A few days ago, our friends at the South Fraser Blog published an infographic that captures some of the complexity of our system of government in the Lower Mainland.
British Columbia has five levels of government — federal, provincial, regional and local, plus First Nations territories that are building their own level of sovereignity — as well as agencies and arrangements that overlap in countless ways. Continue reading
Port Moody’s NewPort Village is evidence of a substantial market for high-density living in the suburbs of B.C.’s Lower Mainland.
Bosa, the project developer, opened NewPort’s first mixed-use buildings about 1997, squeezing them against the butt end of an existing shopping centre. The owners of the Heritage Mountain plaza clearly refused to play ball with Bosa; but NewPort’s Whistler-style streetscape, complete with cute upmarket shops, proved popular with consumers and home buyers from the start. Within a few years the village was ringed with apartment towers. Continue reading
Fraseropolis 