The Law and Grace, or How a Dollar Store Clerk one-ups Immigration Canada

Sometimes people need a little help. Sometimes people need to be forgiven. And sometimes they need to go to jail. And that is a very tricky thing on my part... making that call. I mean, the law is the law. And heck if I'm gonna break it. You can forgive someone. Well, that's the tough part. What can we forgive? Tough part of the job. Tough part of walking down the street. Jim Kurring, Magnolia (1999)

Well, my Christmas vacation from writing took a little longer than I originally planned.  Let’s return with a story.

A few nights back I was at our church for an evening event.  An ad hoc dinner table formed as a few of us wandered in with our take-out prior to the event, including a two of our pastors.  As we tucked into our IGA sweet and sour pork and McDonalds fries, Pastor Aaron (all names changed) told us a recent story from our shelter. 

Our church runs an overnight shelter once a week where people can come and have a hot meal and warm place to sleep.  Jason, a tall, stout man with a friendly laugh, has been coming for nearly 15 years.   Jason has a significant other – Erica.  Erica is a little frail and a lot clingy – for all those 15 years she’s been inseparable from Jason.  She relies on him to take care of her. 

Jason’s laugh is the outward expression of his heart – he loves and cares for his Erica, and has tended to her, cared for her, the whole time they’ve been around.  The two were a unit – it was impossible to consider one without the other. 

Until a few weeks ago.  Murray came into the shelter with no Erica.  Aaron went right to him to ask about her.  My heart stopped here – when I hear these stories of the marginalized, the homeless, the mentally ill my mind goes straight to the worst.  I knew Aaron was going to tell us how Erica had died, leaving Jason to himself. 

But Erica did not die.  After living here for 15 years with Jason, immigration officers took her into custody and deported her to the United States.  Now she is wandering around some strange city without her lover, her caretaker.  No one to help her, no one to guide her, no one to support her.  Alone. 

This is just bullshit.  Absolute fucking bullshit.  I’m a calm person by nature – it takes a lot to get me angry. But this makes me so freaking livid I’m shaking just writing this days later.

Perhaps ironically, when it comes to immigration, law and order, etc., I’m pretty conservative.  Follow the rules or suffer the consequences.  We have immigration and refugee processes.  They’re ugly, they’re slow, but they generally work. Follow them and welcome to Canada.  Don’t, and we’ll send you back.  A borderless world?  I’m sure it’s a nice feature of your hippie utopia, but I want some controls on who comes into our country.    

So in theory, I should be all for this.  An illegal immigrant living off the generosity of our community, and quite likely off the government? This is the exact thing people are talking about when complaining about illegal immigrants.  A drain on our resources, criminals, yadda yadda yadda, kick the bums out.  And maybe under different circumstances I would be less offended by this.  No doubt immigration kicks other people out of the country I am glad to have gone. 

Why does Erica’s story bother me?  Part of it is the timeframe.  Seriously, 15 years later?  At some point in time have we not de facto accepted Erica as a part of our country?  I realize there are moral hazards in setting time limits on immigration enforcement, but perhaps that would provide an incentive for our system to deal with cases in a timelier manner. 

But time is just a part of it.  As a terrible Christian, the question that really bothers me here is where is the grace?  Not just in Erica’s case, but where does grace fit into our justice system as a whole?

The official sources are not much help.  I read the BC Policing Plan.  I searched for grace, forgive, and a dozen other synonyms.  How many did I find? 

Zero.

Looking at the courts, I found information aplenty on how the courts work, but almost none on what their goal is, or where grace, forgiveness and similar values fit in.  We can see bits of it poking through – things like absolute (and to an extent conditional) discharges, amnesties, and certain prison programs show we want to move on and bring people who broke the law back into the family of Canada.  Officers can of course show discretion as the deal with their cases. 

The justice system is supposed to consider things like

• Seriousness of the crime
• Deterring the accused and others from committing the crime
• Rehabilitation of the accused

when determining how to deal with a convict.  I believe we need to be going beyond that.  I believe we need to start considering how we give more to the people who have broken our rules, who have hurt our society.  We as a country and as individuals need to show the people bearing the burden of the justice system that we love them and value them as citizens and members of our communities.  We need to welcome them in, be generous with them.  We need to forgive them. 

What specifically can we do to show grace?  Lots of small things. 

For people in or coming out of prison -

• We can have someone tell them we as a country forgive them and welcome them back
• We can give them a bus or train ticket to anywhere in the country they want to go
• We can give them a good set of clothes
• We can give them better facilities (cue the cries of “prison resorts” now)

For people interacting with law officers –

• We can take suspected criminals into services rather than jails
• We can help them right their wrongs immediately instead of through the courts
• We can just let it go

Would the people falling into the justice system take any of this seriously?  Some would, some wouldn’t.  Are we opening ourselves up to be taken advantage of?  Absolutely.  But somewhere in the middle of absolute grace in all cases and hard-core justice in all cases is a tension we need to find.   I would love to hear from front-line officials (law officers, judicial members, etc.) perspectives’ on how grace fits into their work. 

I went into a dollar store several months back.  The typical seasonal displays were up.  The typical seasonal line-ups were long.  The typical seasonal music was being accompanied by a hysterical wailing coming from the back. 

I couldn’t see what was causing the noise.  No one appeared to be freaking out, so I threaded my way through the aisles to get what I needed.  Eventually I ended up at the back and came upon the source of the wail. 

A gaunt faced woman was screaming, crying, yelling about how she can’t go to jail.  A store clerk was calmly talking to her.  “I’m not going to call the police.  I’m just going to look through your bags.  I’ll give you back anything that’s yours.” 

More screaming. 

The clerk went into two plastic shopping bags with ratty blankets on top.  Predictably, underneath was dozens of dollar store goods.  The clerk put the blankets down and told the lady those were hers, and then went through every item in the bags, one by one, keeping the store goods, but giving back the few items that did belong to the lady.

The whole time the clerk was very calm, very patient, very respectful in dealing with the lady – firm, but gentle.  Over time the lady calmed down significantly.  The clerk finished with the bags, told the lady to take her things and leave, and reiterated she would not call the police.  The lady started to cry again as she took her bags and left. 

Grace.  Did she deserve it?  No – that’s the point.  

Carnarvon Gardens, or Is That an Echo Down Here?

On November 18^th, I received an invitation to an open house regarding a development at 813-823 Carnarvon Street.  Top Vision Developments is proposing to develop a 25ish story mixed use development at the site.  Unfortunately I was unable to make the open house, so as usual I am spouting off on things I found on the internets. 

The current buildings on site are:

• Couzie’s on Carnarvon Cafe (whose owner graciously let my then recently toilet trained son use their bathroom after closing one time)
• Two old auto repair/sales shops that appear vacant
• Dollarama at what was formerly the Centre for Integration

Couzie’s and Dollarama are the only places that appear active, but I haven’t got a sense of what will happen to them after the development.  There will be street front retail but I haven’t seen anything indicating if they will have a right of return or not. 

While this looks like a generally good idea, there are a number of concerns with the proposal, some of which council and staff are dealing with to various degrees, and one they are not. 

The Grand Canyon of Carnarvon

This part of Carnarvon is getting quite dense with towers, and tall frontages that are very close to the street.  On top of the ground level retail will be three stories of offices fronting parking, and fifth story of above ground parking set back two-three feet in an effort to make things prettier. 

While I appreciate the efforts council and planning staff are making on this, setting back the fifth level parking one additional foot is not going to make Carnarvon less of a canyon.  Even fronting offices on the street, while making things somewhat more pleasant to look at, will still contribute to the canyon effect.  When you have a vertical wall 40-50 feet high straddling both sides of a street with narrow sidewalks, concessions like this are practically futile.  The problem on Carnarvon is less visible parkades and more being barely able to fit a stroller or wheelchair around a lamppost without falling into traffic.

Canyon environments can be pedestrian friendly, but they need room for people to breathe.  The place that does this best in my mind is the pedestrian malls in Perth, Australia. The streets have a definite canyon-like feel to them, but with no cars, dynamic storefronts and being able to walk without being pushed into traffic it’s a pleasant experience.  Walking down the sidewalk on Carnarvon feels like the big city pushing down on you, and adjusting setbacks and changing concrete for glass isn’t going to fundamentally alter this. 

Top Vision Development

Top Vision’s website is rather sparse.  They apparently have more than “20 combined years of construction and engineering experience,” and have dealt with single home through high-rise construction.  Their previous projects show two large homes in Metro Vancouver, and two high-rise projects in China.  City records show they have done a number of large suburban houses in Richmond as well.  Top Vision appears to share offices with related businesses including:

• Yuan Heng Construction
• Lu Tang Architecture – the archictects for this project
• Top Vision Realty – also provides strata management services, and presumably will for this project
• Giant Environmental Technology – no idea if this is related or not
• Carnarvon Garden Development – the project specific company and New West Chamber of Commerce member

Their record appears decent, but part of that may be their recency.  The BBB has them rated A- with no complaints, but they registered in November, 2012.  Stratawatch gave Top Vision Realty good rating, but there is absolutely no transparency on how that rating is generated. I found some more photos and information on the MINI Impression project.  It appears to be a similar scale to what is proposed here, and has some interesting features if google translate is to be believed. 

However, building a tower in Metro Vancouver is vastly different than building a suburban mansion, and quite different than building a tower in Dalian, China.  Does Top Vision have the necessary experience or partners involved to ensure a safe, durable building suitable for our environment is designed and constructed?  Codes set a minimum, but this tower is expected to last 50 to 100 years. We want to be sure whoever is developing it has a good idea what they're doing. 

Parking

As usual, the development is requesting to come up short on parking spaces.  Now that the Front Street Parkade is definitely going (hooray!) we can’t be cutting downtown parking, especially given a significant commercial space will be included in the development.  Give credit where it’s due – proximity to the skytrain, any features they include to reduce traffic demand, but don’t let this create spillover problems into the rest of the area.  Council appears to be holding fairly firm here. 

Commercial Space

One of the proposals from the developer to address the parking visibility concern was to eliminate the top level of parking and expand the parking on the levels below.  This comes with a price, though, elimination of half of the original 23,500 square feet of office space. 

That price is too high to pay.  All of Metro Vancouver has been focused on building out condos as prices have flown into the stratosphere.  It’s quick, (relatively) easy money for the developers, and then they get to go away and leave any problems down the road for the individual unit buyers.  Creating living space but no working space makes an unbalanced community – a suburb built vertically instead of horizontally.  

The land around the skytrain stations is high value, and very limited.  We need to use it to its full potential.  Making a space where people come as well as people go.  The Anvil Centre is a start, and this development will follow with some needed new office space in New West.  I’m glad to see Council holding firm here as well.

Overall, I think this project brings a lot of potential good to the area.  However, it needs to be executed well to deliver that.  If not, it will bring decades of eyesore and grief to the city.  Take the time to get it right now – we’ll be stuck with it for a long time. 

Back Alley Expropriation, or This Land is Your Land - sort of

Read this News Leader article.  Then, if you have the same reaction I did, read it again to make sure you’re reading it right.  Basically, the city is asking demanding owners of certain properties grant a statutory right-of-way for a potential back lane before issuing a building permit. 

 “In the past we certainly have missed opportunities to obtain statutory rights of ways. In terms of getting it, we try to do it more opportunistically, we’re not trying to disturb a home,” said Wat. “It minimizes the impact on the owner’s ability to build, it doesn’t affect square footage. They still retain the ability to build, they just cannot build on that part.”

One: they don’t retain the ability to build anything unless they agree to the city’s demands since the city won’t issue a permit.  Two: they do not retain the ability to build if their building plans require the use of that land. 

This just pisses me off.  The city is not taking your property, not paying you for it (in fact you’ll still need to pay property tax on it) or negotiating it’s use, just preventing you from doing anything on it on the chance they may or may not build a lane at some unspecified time in the future. 

All that said, I understand and appreciate the goal.  This is just an absolute garbage way to go about it.  The city has mechanisms to claim land for building roads, lanes, civic centres, etc.  If they want to claim the land to build a lane, use them – don’t blackmail owners into submission by preventing them from using their property. It's not fair or just to hold people hostage now for the city's lack of foresight or planning in the past. 

What’s not clear is if any of the applications were going to build in the claimed right-of-way.  I can see people getting pissed off if they built a shed at the back of their property only to have it demolished for a lane a year later.  But this is solved through openness and communication, not blackmail.  Responding “we are happy to grant your permit, but be aware the city intends to expropriate some of that land for a lane in the next year or two, proceed at your own risk,” is the polite way to do this.  Asking affected property owners nicely for them to grant a right-of-way, whether they are building something or not, is appropriate.  Bonus points for offering compensation for the loss of use of their land. 

What is wrong is to prevent them from building on their property, whether in the affected area or not, unless they agree to grant said right-of-way.  And in addition to being wrong, it may well be illegal.  See: Bylaw, Building, No. 6897.

Specifically, see section 14. 

14.1 A building official shall issue the permit for which the application is made, when:

Note that shall is government speak for must – if all the requirements specified are met, the city cannot withhold a building permit.  What are the requirements?

14.1.1 a completed application including all required supporting documentation has been submitted;

14.1.2 the proposed work set out in the application conforms with the Building Code, this bylaw and all other applicable bylaws and enactments;

14.1.3 the owner or their representative has paid all applicable fees prescribed by this bylaw;

14.1.4 the owner or their representative has paid all charges and met all requirements imposed by any other enactment or bylaw;

14.1.5 no enactment, covenant, agreement, or regulation in favour of the City authorizes the permit to be withheld;

14.1.6 the owner has retained a professional engineer or geoscientist if required by the provisions of the Engineers and Geoscientists Act;

14.1.7 the owner has retained an architect if required by the provisions of the Architects Act; and

14.1.8 the owner or signing officer if the owner is a corporation and the coordinating professional, if applicable, have signed the permit.

14.1.2 does refer to any other enactments or bylaws, so there could be a bylaw sitting somewhere allowing the city to withhold a permit unless the owners grant a right-of-way, but I have my doubts something like that exists.  Most of the provisions I found for withholding a building permit were related to Heritage buildings.  I have asked a Councillor what authority they are using to withhold the permits.

As mentioned in the article, builder Brian Lowka intends to address city council on this issue in February – I intend to see what comes of this and my requests for information from council.  If you are interested in hearing the outcome from the meeting or my discussions, watch the meeting in February or sign up for my email newsletter on the right.  The newsletter is where I put all my little ditties and follow-ups that don’t warrant a full blog post, and I don't send them out that often.  If the city is going to expropriate land or rights of way from property owners, let's make sure they do it properly.  

Queensborough Ferries, or If You Believe That I've Got a Bridge to Sell You

Ahh, the pedestrian bridge to Queensborough.  The final rabbit to be pulled from the casino grant hat.  With reconfigured plans for development east of the Fraser River Discovery Centre, linking Westminster Pier Park to Quayside and potentially all the way up to Sapperton Landing, we will only be missing one link – Lulu Island to the mainland without resorting to the Queensborough Bridge. 

Much has and will be said about the eventual bridge.  It’s still many years off.  What I, and apparently a few others have wondered, is if we need to wait until the sun goes supernova before we see it, why not use a ferry for the interim?

As is usual for these sorts of things, the answer comes down to money.  Just for fun, I did an electronic paper napkin business plan for one (yes dreaming up business ideas and spreadsheeting them death is fun for me). 

The obvious analogy and comparison comes from those cute little ferries running across False Creek.  However, the operation conditions for False Creek and New West are substantially different.  For one thing we don’t have 100,000 people living within walking distance of our docks.  Secondly, we have a river to contend with and larger distances between places people actually want to go than Vancouver. 

But first of all, to run a ferry we need a boat.  From what I can tell, a 12 passenger ferry is the largest one that can be handled by one crew – more than 12 passengers you get into a whole different world of rules.  Just in case you thought otherwise – the Canada Marine Act and Regulations are hard.  I can’t believe how much time I spent just trying to figure out how many crew members you need on a ship of a given passenger capacity, and I never did find a definitive answer.  As best I can tell, Transport Canada’s answer is “show us your ship and we’ll tell you.”  So one of these, with a hardtop and in a brighter colour should do nicely.

Next we need somewhere to go.  Being the one in charge of this fiction, I demand the route traverse the following points:

• River Market
• Quayside
• Port Royal
• Queensborough Landing

Let’s assume everyone involved is being generous and giving a dock to use at their location.  The distances as the sturgeon swims are roughly

• River Market to Quayside:  1.0 km
• Quayside to Port Royal: 0.4 km
• Port Royal to Shopping: 2.2 km

Assumption time!

• Boat cruises at 15 knots (mixing units FTW)
• Boat burns 8 gph at cruise and 2 gph at idle (let’s throw a few more in there for fun)
• Fuel costs $1.60 per litre (you thought I was kidding)
• Captain’s rate of $20 per hour, all in (how do you cancel out Captains?)
• Said Captain is also our clerk, deckhand, cashier, janitor, seasickness bag dispenser, first aid attendant, and overall superman
• Maintenance costs are equal to half the fuel costs
• We run 12 hours per day, every day

If you plug all that into a calculator, it will yell at you for doing science wrong.  Then it will show you that it is possible to make one round trip per hour, and your operating costs are about $62 per hour, or about $5 per seat per hour.  However, that doesn’t include overhead, depreciation, operating expenses that are non-revenue generating, and days lost due to ice on the Fraser.

Ice on the Fraser River – December 9^th, 2013 - photo by James Crosty 

Throw all that crap in there and you’re talking $7 per seat per hour to break even, and that’s not paying off the boat or paying you unless you are the superhero captain (yarrr). 

To make a real business of it you would really need to be generating about $8-10 per seat per hour. What does that mean?  It gets tricky as it depends on both fares charged and how many people are travelling, but an example might be $4 to go from the North Fraser to Port Royal, and $7 to Queensborough Landing.  With those fares, and a mix of 80% Port Royal Passengers and 20% Queensborough Landing Passengers, you would need to run the boat 100% all the time to make money.  And you have zero upside – there’s no way to run more passengers and make more money. 

The Queensborough Landing leg is long, expensive and risky in terms of passenger attraction. What if we chop that off, move the dock so it’s centrally located between the River Market and Quayside, and do a simple shuttle back and forth to Port Royal.  Now we can increase service to four to six round trips per hour instead of one.  Let’s say we do four, so a trip every 15 minutes.  And let’s assume with the shorter crossing we can manage with a less powerful boat that burns less fuel. 

That cuts our operating expenses down - $47 instead of $62 per hour.  Overheads don’t change, so we’re only reducing revenue requirements by $1.25 per seat per hour.  So we still need $7ish per seat per hour to make this worth our while.  Let’s say we charge $3 per trip – to make money we need to average 28-32 passengers per hour, 12 hours a day. 350 people per day, 7 days a week.  That’s only 33% of capacity, so we have the ability to make money, but are there enough people to carry?  And are they willing to pay?

I’m no marketing expert, but I struggle to believe a Queensborough ferry service would get that kind of demand at this point in time.  According to thecommunity plan in 2011 there were 7,155 people living in Queensborough.  There's some 9,000 at Quayside, but if you don't go to Queensborough Landing, there's not a huge draw for them on the island.  Even at the 2040 estimate of nearly 15,000 people in Queensborough I have a hard time believe you would average 350 people per day.

I’m not aware that anyone has done a market study of demand for a ferry service.  So this is going to be the first one, right here.  If anyone is reading this besides my wife, I would love to hear from you either in the comments or @lifeinnewwest on twitter. 

1. Would you use a River Market/Quayside to Queensborough ferry?
2. Where would you want it to go?
3. How often would you take it?
4. How much would you be willing to pay?

I can’t remember where I saw it, but someone on council said the city is supportive of a ferry, but isn’t willing to run one itself (politician speak for “Good luck, kiddo”).  If we sum all the expenses, it would cost in the neighbourhood of $400,000 per year to run the ferry.  The cost of a pedestrian bridge is estimated between $5 and $10 million depending on the whether they staple it to the rail bridge or build it completely independent.

 

$5 million would fund a ferry for just over 12 years, assuming no revenue and no savings on overhead from sharing with the city instead of being an independent venture.  If you can get the cost down to $350,000 per year, and revenue of $100,000 per year from fares (90 passengers a day at $3 per trip), advertising and the like, $5 million would run the ferry for 20 years.  Even better, take the $5 million and stick it in some bank preferred shares at 5% - the interest alone would pay for the ferry and you wouldn't need to touch the principal.  

Then there are other possibilities to promote it and encourage ridership.  You could integrate with Translink so one fare carries you from the ferry to a bus or skytrain.  You don’t need to run to Queensborough Landing every run, but set up a deal with the shopping centre to make less frequent runs down there.  Maybe the casino too.  If the winter demand is that friggen awful, run it seasonally.

But even with none of that, a small investment could let the money we already have for the pedestrian bridge pay for a ferry until it’s time to build the bridge. Maybe it’s time for the city to take a deeper look at running a ferry to Queensborough.  

How Many Degrees to pay off a Student Loan?

One of the hot topics of the day is employment for young people.  Are people coming out of university today over-entitled hipsters who are unwilling to take entry level work and expect to be Director of Basket Weaving right out of school?  Or is it a shift in economics that is holding them back, forcing them into slave labour where they work themselves to death.

My personal experience: I fall somewhere in the gap between Gen X and Gen Y.  I graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and partially completed a Masters in Mining Engineering (making potential employers bow down at my feet and sacrifice virgins in my name according to the news these days) and when I came out of school the recession was flirting heavily with us, but not ready for hot, sweaty sex just yet.  From there I worked myself into a niche where there are only a few jobs, but even fewer people who know how to do it well.  That is to say I have been blessed with continuous, gainful employment and I thank God for it. 

A major reason I got there was because I went to university.  My parents recommended demanded it.  I think I’m typical of my generation in this regard.  My parents’ generation largely did not go to university (8-12% had a Bachelor’s or higher in their time. They saw a significant difference in the lifestyle of those who had vs. those who had not.  That is borne out by the statistics from back in the day. 

	Overall		High School		Bachelors+
Year	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female
1991	23,686	11,580	21,546	10,818	$39,803	23,627

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/ Table P-16.  My earnings in 1991 were$52. 

Side note – most all of this data is American – it’s a lot easier to find, I’m taking talking trends that are broadly similar in Canada, and for all the NSA folks reading this GO ‘MURICA!!!

So it made sense for my parents to be flogging me on that path (and I’m grateful they did).  It seems most parents of that generation said the same thing as the percentage of people with a Bachelor’s Degree has been steadily climbing.  

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/pdf/women_workforce_slides.pdf

Given the veritable flood of ivory tower elitists compared to yesteryear, supply and demand (it’s the law, doncha know), and all the bitching and whining about no one being able to find a job after university I was expecting to see the wage gap between high school and a Bachelor’s degree shrink from 1991 to today. 

	Overall		High School		Bachelors+		Difference
Year	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female
1991	$23,686	$11,580	$21,546	$10,818	$39,803	$23,627	84%	118%
2001	$32,494	$18,549	$28,343	$15,665	$54,069	$33,842	91%	116%
2012	$38,428	$23,946	$31,064	$18,213	$63,272	$42,027	104%	131%

Median Earnings by Education and Year, or Stay in School, yo.

Well shit, that didn’t work.  Admittedly, I smoothed things out considerably by looking at only three years out of 20, but generally the wage premium for a degree has remained fairly steady for the last 20 years.  Maybe we need to dig deeper into the data.  Supposedly some degrees are worth more than others.  Much of this has been ballyhooed about in the news.  Get a degree in

• Engineering
• Advertising
• Pharmacy
• Accounting

and you will be rich, famous and sexy when naked.  Get a degree in

• Arts
• Psychology
• Education
• Social Science

and the stairway down from your convocation goes directly into debtor’s prison. 

That’s all good to know, if not terribly surprising.  Not many people expect to get a Physicist’s salary after their degree in Film History.  It’s nice to know what the employment and salary prospects are for various degrees.  Less for selection purposes (people choose degrees in line with their gifts, abilities and interests more than money – not everyone is meant to be a teacher or an accountant), but more so you can answer the question of whether it will be you or your children that pay off your student loan.  

Universities are complicit in this.  They sell you on the general (People with degrees make more money and are sexier when naked), but don’t get into the specifics (those Advertising majors are smokin’ but avert your eyes from the basket weavers).  Their objective is to….well, that’s a good question worth its own discussion. 

Here’s the annoying thing about all this.  Governments, business, lobbyists, and disgruntled bloggers can spit out all the statistical meanderings we want.  Yes, it can guide policy to an extent (what are the values of our country, our province, and how does our post-secondary education system encourage and support that).  But it doesn't mean jack to anyone individually.  Looking at this data and saying “hey, everything is alright,” doesn't help my friend with his teaching degree find a position in Vancouver when there are none. 

Looking at the data and saying “there’s way too many new teachers, let’s cut the number of education grads in half,” doesn't help a First Nations school hire a teacher when none are willing to go there.  Problems are local and personal.  Knowing engineering pays more than film school doesn't help the kid who made 50 short films in high school that created a YouTube cult following, but can’t for his life pass remedial Math 9. 

I struggled for a long time to find a conclusion to this post.  And to leave it here just seemed whiny and bitchy.  Overall, a Bachelor’s degree is still a great investment.  Some maybe more so than others.  Parents, discuss this with your kids.  Encourage post-secondary, but don’t just leave it at that: help them map out where their choices in post-secondary lead them five, ten years down the road. 

And don’t forget non-degree options as well.  Trades can offer as good or better money and lifestyle (again it’s specific and local – Heavy Duty Mechanics and Welders are currently hot, carpenters less so.  It will change before your kids graduate).  None of this is to force them down one road or another, but so they at least know the consequences of the choices they’re making.  Then when you have to bail out their $100,000 student loan for their degree in Post-Modern Latvian Chamber Pots you can say I told you so.  

Family Friendly Cities or Why Can't I Find a 3rd Bedroom Out Here?

As a family renting in Vancouver you get a constant sense of dread that you will never ever ever be able to afford to buy a home.  Despite earning good money and being reasonably diligent (but far from perfect - we really need to tithe more) with it, we constantly felt that dread, particularly with home prices rising incessantly for the last five years.  So it was a bit of a surprise at the beginning of 2013 when we looked at our finances and realized - hey, we could potentially afford something that would work for us.

Our challenge was we were fairly specific in what we wanted.
- Walking distance to the skytrain (we don't have a car)
- Walking distance to grocer and other common stores (we still don't have a car)
- At least 3 Bedrooms, preferably with a den (3 kids and 3 adults gets crowded quickly)
- At least 1250 square feet (still crowded)
- At least 2 bathrooms (it's the only way)
- Under $400,000 (at pre-approval our banker offered a much larger sum. I asked if he was sane.)
- North of the Fraser (we've done Surrey and will not be doing it again)

If you search for this at mls.ca you will find very little - a few condos in Downtown/Quayside New West, and a few south of Lougheed Mall.  So we checked out the neighbourhoods.  I wasn't a big fan of the Lougheed area - it's crazy with the highway there, and a lot more mall than anything else.  We also looked a bit around Port Moody where the Evergreen Line is going.  The neighbourhood was nice, but it was getting a bit far out and the units available in our price range weren't that impressive.

So that left Quayside.  I loved New West in from when we lived in Uptown, but among other things that neighbourhood was too far away from the trains for us.  Quayside offered a remedy to that.  It's an easy walk to the skytrain.  Quayside Drive, despite being all multi-family units, is very quiet and feels nicely residential.  With the New West station development and River Market, most of our daily needs are easily walkable. There are three playgrounds within easy walking distance. There were some nicely sized units available in our price range.  And (I don't know why but this constantly slips my mind) it is literally across the street from the Fraser River.

We poked into an open house at Quayside the spring and were quite impressed with the unit.  The building had some great amenities for the whole family.  Also surprising us was how friendly everyone in the building was.  So we did some more research on the neighbourhood, hung out at it several times, investigated the building, looked into schools, all the usual stuff. We found a few things wanting:

1. The units we were looking at were facing directly over the rail yard.
2. It's a hike to the elementary school (John Robson.  That is a BIG hill)
3. The building was built mid-nineties and uses an Exterior Insulated Finishing System (technical speak for it has the potential to turn into a leaky condo.  Or a pumpkin after midnight)
4. Certain amenities are farther away than we would like (swimming, skating, library)

But those seemed manageable given the positives.  We weren't ready to buy that spring, but come fall we were in position and it became a waiting game.  A unit we had noticed previously got relisted at price that looked good to us, so we jumped on it.  (totally random - it was owned by the parents of a girl we knew at our church.  Small worlds).  We've been there just over a month now, and are still very happy with it.  The train noise doesn't bother us (though an explosion might), the strata is well managed and on top of building maintenance, I get some exercise taking the kids to school, and we can all fit inside the place at once without feeling like we're in a clown car.

All that is a long winded way to say we bought a home at Quayside because it is family friendly to us.  It has the mix of a good size home near the things we need to live, eat, work and play. And it has the bonus of being a unique neighbourhood on a river and relatively affordable.

At the December 2nd Committee of the Whole meeting, Council received a report with a title longer than my post - the Child and Youth Friendly Community Strategy and Family-Friendly Housing Policy for New Westminster. This report was developed out of a partnership with the Society for Children and Youth of BC to help with their initiative on developing strategies for creating child and youth friendly communities. The report identified a few things.

1. New West has a low percentage of children and youth compared to the rest of Metro Vancouver
2. The percentage of children relative to the city population is decreasing
3. Compared to the rest of Metro Vancouver, New West has a higher percentage of 2-bedroom housing and much lower percentage of 3+ bedroom housing and ground oriented housing.

The report is effectively calling for a Family Strategy, along the lines of what cities like Surrey and Burnaby have already developed.  The intent of the strategy is to inform development of neighbourhoods to meet the needs of children and families in an effort to attract and retain families in New West.  It will look at several areas (Employment, Housing, Childcare, Education, Belonging (I have specific questions around this), Transport, Parks and Rec, Participation and Inclusion (and this))

The goals are typically governmental wishy-wash, but a few concrete things are in there, primarily get input from families and children, develop a family housing policy, and develop a draft overall policy.

Most of the discussion on the report (and I apologize, I didn't catch the name of the staff member who presented it - he did a great job) was around housing.  That's understandable, as it is a major concern and something which the city has a lot more influence over.  It's also a peeve of mine - look at all the new development going on in Metro Vancouver, and see how much of it is 3+ bedroom.  Even when you can find a unit with 3 bedrooms, the overall size is still tiny, or as Councillor Cote pointed out, a penthouse unit and not necessarily family oriented.  I am totally in favour of driving more family oriented housing as part of the development deals/variance bribes/community amenity deals we make on new buildings, as Councillor Puchmayr (it took me three tries to get your name right) proposed.

The issue appears quite neighbourhood specific as well.  Queensborough has relatively more families, but it has relatively more ground oriented high bedroom housing.  Councillor McIntosh said she saw lots of families moving in, taking over their parents homes in Sapperton.  Great for those families with parents who own houses in Sapperton, but doesn't help anyone else.  The intent is to look at the ratios of children and families at a neighbourhood level.  This will be needed to drive specific requirements in each area.

As my extended-cut edition of our house buying process showed, family-friendliness is more than just housing and this was discussed.  Many tangibles and intangibles come into deciding whether a family will move to a home, a neighbourhood, a city.  The eight items listed above all play into it, and cover much of what is needed.

The report identified three descriptions of success for the sustainability implications of moving this direction.

1. Opportunities for residents of all age to engage with the community and be valued for it:  Absolutely. Why isn't this the case already?
2. Few children being driven to school: 100% agree.  So why are we replacing one giant high school for 60,000 people at the edge of town with a second giant high school for 70,000 people at the edge of town?  NWSS needs a serious rethink in terms of this objective.  Councillor McIntosh made a good point on this where schools now offer special programming, which parents from all over town want to enroll their children in.  This leads to far more kids being driven to school and cross-boundary enrollment than a common curriculum would.
3. Affordable quality child care that enables parent to work and contribute to the local economy:  50% agree.  Not all parents want to work and contribute to the local economy.  Some want to stay home with their kids or pursue opportunities that are not work but are still valuable to the community.  How do we encourage and support those families?

Overall, I would like to thank Council for taking this report and encourage them to move forward with it.   Stronger families make for stronger communities - my vision for this blog and all I do in the city is to make New West a place that helps build stronger families.  If you value that too, please let Council know you support this initiative.