In Europe, cycling caught on in a big way this year as COVID-19 discouraged cars and crowded public transit. Some cities' leaders hope to make the habit permanent and make congestion a thing of the past.
One of my heroes is a minor socialist politician you’ve never heard of – Miguel Anxo Fernández Lores.
He’s the mayor of Pontevedra, Spain, and he has a spiritual loathing for cars. He ended his city’s status as a “car warehouse” – his words – more than 20 years ago, and the results were spectacular. Pontevedra is cleaner, safer and thriving like never before.
Vancouver’s climate-emergency response plan relies too much on new fees for average residents and on expensive regulation for buildings, says a public policy professor who is a member of provincial and national groups working on solutions to climate change.
As part of a series highlighting the work of young people in addressing the climate crisis, writer Patricia Lane interviews Victoria Coun. Sharmarke Dubow.
The 1990s were personally tough for me. I spent the decade immersed in action based on climate catastrophe science, trying, and by all accounts failing, to stem the tide. Hardest of all, death and dementia came to my family.
Back in 2006, when George W. Bush was president and the Paris Agreement was still a decade away, the city of Tucson, Arizona, made a modest plan to do something about climate change. It set a goal to reduce city-wide greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels, and gave itself a generous 14 years to do it.
In December 2019, Vancouver City Council passed a unanimous motion to support tying rent control to units in Vancouver’s lowest income rental stock, Single Room Occupancy (SRO) Hotels. Now we need to make sure they do that. SROs, which are 100 sq-ft rooms without kitchen or washroom facilities, are Vancouver’s housing of last resort, and rising rents there are pushing Vancouverites into homelessness.
Canada's housing shortage is almost at a "crisis level," said the CEO of an investment firm that owns dozens of B.C. apartment buildings. "The good news for investors is there is no easy solution in sight.”
In early March, Mark Goodman flew to Toronto to meet with CEOs of six of that city’s seven biggest institutional investors in multi-family residential real estate.