This speaker disclosed that they themselves live in a $2M home. And yet they came to Council to say that a laneway home for someone else is a "monstrosity."

Burnaby had allowed up to four storey "multiplexes," with up to 50% lot coverage. They are rolling that back to appease this opposition.

other thoughts:

crazy Paris is further up on this list than Rotterdam

why is ghent on this list

Their bikeshare system also blew everything else I've experienced out of the water: almost 100% reliability (no broken bikes)

as someone who thinks north shore skytrain is a pretty marginal priority, I'm in favour of a Downtown-PNE-Metrotown project

my favorite strong mayor system is when the mayor has a gym next door

okay time to log off

I'd go further, I don't think upzoning was or is a salient issue in provincial elections

It's salient in the hyper-local municipal politics world but people seem to care more about a bunch of other issues when it comes time to vote for MLAs

(This is why Vancouver has a terrible multiplex bylaw that does not conform to provincial requirements)

Should have just written up a province-wide minimum zoning bylaw that acts as a backstop, superseding whatever restrictions city planners impose

SSMU was also badly drafted and I blame the lawyers; my headcannon is that they were told to "abolish single-family zoning", and they took this too literally by crafting a definition of SFH-only zoning and making it illegal, without requiring cities with bad multiplex bylaws to update as well

Their instinct to force cities to upzone through several different "attack vectors" (TOD, SSMU, "proactive planning", housing targets) was right and has compensated for this somewhat, but still fundamentally requires another round of serious iteration, not just very minor tweaks

The other issue is that Eby either did not learn, or lost the appetite to implement, the key lesson from California: upzoning is hard to get right on the first try, and requires a few rounds of iteration year after year as you respond to hostile or apathetic cities

"Expensive parking" is a push for people to sell their cars, not the reverse?

Sure, we should just as matter of principle, but also I don't think projecting less investment income for next year than for this year is suspicious given the state of the economy. I'd be more concerned if it was the other way around tbh

not sure if this is sarcasm but if not, cities aren't legally allowed to hold crypto