Vancouver’s Chinatown: heritage site, urban village, tourist zone

February 14, 2018 By in Urban Villages Project, Vancouver, City of Tags: , Leave a comment

Gore Street at Keefer in Vancouver’s Chinatown.

Vancouver City Council voted in November 2017 to seek World Heritage Site status for the Chinatown district. This founding neighbourhood began as a segregated zone for Chinese-speaking labourers and merchants outside the railway and lumber camp that covered today’s Waterfront and Gastown areas.  It functioned for many decades as a commercial and cultural hub for Chinese-speaking immigrants, and takes a prominent place in the modern English-language literature of  the Chinese-Canadian community. The retail hub, it should be said, has been supported by apartment housing, Chinese seniors’ housing and small-lot detached housing, either in the core or in the old Strathcona neighbourhood to the east. Continue reading →

Surrey Central — Retrofitting or replacement?

January 22, 2018 By in Surrey Langley White Rock Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Rendering from the 2017 Surrey City Centre Plan, a fantasy perspective showing library (middle background), SkyTrain line, future light rail line and new towers

About 10 years ago, the term “Retrofitting Suburbia” came to describe the art or science of converting automobile-dependent sprawl into liveable urban landscape.

Coincidentally or not, it’s about 10 years since then-Mayor Dianne Watts announced her vision of a City of Surrey downtown, a focus for Surrey’s hodge-podge of malls and paved-over farmland. Simon Fraser University and the Fraser Health Authority had just moved to a new Surrey Central tower close to rapid transit; the City has since added a civic plaza with a City Hall. Residential and business towers are springing up close by. Continue reading →

Governments gamble on a minimum wage hike

January 8, 2018 By in Poverty Tags: , 3 Comments

On January 1, Ontario raised the  general minimum wage in its jurisdiction to from $11.60 per hour to $14.00. British Columbians are promised a similar jump in the near future, though the timing is subject to the work of a government-appointed commission.

Members of the Tim Hortons restaurants’ founding family reacted to the Ontario increase by taking petty revenge on their own workers, stripping them of non-wage benefits at the locations they still own directly. This triggered a brawl within the Tim Hortons organization, with the corporate head office urging franchise owners to handle the issue more discreetly. Continue reading →

Yaletown encore

December 30, 2017 By in Vancouver, City of Tags: Leave a comment

We last visited Vancouver’s Yaletown district almost five years ago, in early 2013. We noted that the Yaletown brand was so hyper-trendy that developers were making use of it across a wide swath of what used to be called the South Downtown.

With its towers, cafes and rapid transit, Yaletown is now the prototype for much recent or proposed pop-up development in Vancouver’s suburbs, for example in Coquitlam Central, the still-pending Coquitlam waterfront project, and the rumoured Metrotown 2.0. Continue reading →