Given Oak Bay‘s proximity to downtown and especially the University of Victoria, it has some of the highest pressure in the region for residential development. But the council practices very conservative zoning. I have heard Victoria politicians say that Oak Bay is not “doing its share” to accommodate the region’s growth.

So I’m not sure I get exactly what it means, but this poster is definitely amusing:

The Canadian edition of Who’s Your City? is finally out. Richard Florida has published rankings of the top Canadian cities for a few broad cohorts. But the territorial capitals (can Iqaluit actually be considered a city?) do so well it makes me think his statistical tools break down in extreme cases. And then there’s the inexplicable high scores of Toronto and Calgary…

Anyway, I’m going to go see if one of the 295 single women under 30 in Iqaluit strikes my fancy…

You may have heard through the media about this housing report that identified Vancouver and Victoria the 4th and 7th least-affordable cities in the world. The measure they used was ratio of median house price to median income.* The historic global value is 3. Vancouver was 8.4 in the third quarter of 2008.

The paper makes a compelling argument that a dramatic rise in the affordability of mortgages led to a increase in demand for housing that markets were unable to meet due to artificially constrained supply. This market failure caused a housing price bubble, which led to the mortgage meltdown, which triggered the financial crisis. The housing supply was constrained by two things:

• urban containment boundaries
• neighborhoods that, through planning or reactionary NIMBYism, prevent densification

Municipal voters and neighborhood association members are disproportionately homeowners (eg: your mom). Homeowners have a huge incentive to increase the price of their home. Therefore, they will seek policies that constrain supply both out and up.

Being a “neo-con” think-tank, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy says getting rid of urban containment boundaries is the only path to affordable housing. I’m going to talk about how we can increase densification in future posts.

* I think this is a good measure. Imagine homeowners being matched one-to-one to houses: the nth richest homeowner will probably buy close to the nth most expensive house.

BC’s police forces are known for taking a middle ground in drug enforcement: they rarely press possession charges but don’t support legalization or decriminalization. Still, I am shocked to hear Victoria’s new chief of police (transplanted from Vancouver) go on record that Victoria does not have a drug problem, drug abusers do not cause significant public disorder and hard drugs are relatively hard to acquire.

I’m expecting the Chief, the media and politicians to have a discussion about this over the next week or two. It could be true for all I know. For example, I only recently came to understand that crack and meth are the popular street drugs, not heroin as the media always told me growing up.

Unfortunately, alcohol addicts have a very high cost to society, so perhaps this is far from good news.

The argument has been made in Victoria that there are synergies when social services are clustered together that outweight the ghettoization of a neighbourhood. This argument could also be applied to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The Tyee recently ran a different, rather surprising argument:

The majority of Downtown Eastside residents have life situations that are similar to each other and different from the situations of the residents of any other neighbourhood. This congregation of difference creates a unique culture.* In particular, the culture is more community-oriented. Gentrification of the neighbourhood will destroy this unique culture.

* Testing whether this is true for language, (street) art and cultural rituals is an entire anthropology research program.

About a Boy is a story of two lone wolves, Marcus and Will, moving to build a tribe around them. This project has only started by the end of the narrative (better implied in the movie than the book, I think); here are two snippets from the final chapters:

Ali: Do you still want him to marry your mum?
Marcus: Naah. See, I don’t think that’s the right way. When people pair off it’s more insecure because they’ll split up, or go mad or something.
Will: What if we stay together forever?
Marcus: Fine. Great. Prove it. I just don’t think couples are the future.

Marcus: I feel safer than before, because I know more people.
Marcus’ Dad: They won’t be around forever.
Marcus: Some of them will, some of them won’t. You can find people. It’s like those acrobatic displays. Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn’t really matter who they are as long as they’re there and you don’t let them go away without finding someone else.

In the second quote Marcus uses a network perspective: the structure of the system is more important than the elements that make it up.

Re: The Victoria police have recently been cracking down on jaywalking.

Jaywalking is permitted on Government not because it has been deemed safe (indeed, drivers tend to drive faster on one-way streets) but to “foster a pedestrian-friendly atmosphere”. In other words, city council is willing to sacrifice a few pedestrians to try to carve a tiny area of walkability out of our car-centric city. For example, some writers have specifically mentioned the danger of jaywalking on Douglas. It is dangerous because Douglas is designed as a thoroughfare: four lanes and no left turns to move cars as fast as possible.

Every time someone jaywalks it’s a symptom of poor urban design. People are just trying to get from point A to point B: they look around and it’s harder than it should be, so they take shortcuts. As long as our city is designed for cars, you can’t blame pedestrians for trying to find their own way through. Rather than criminalizing jaywalking, we should be figuring out how to make it safer by slowing and reducing cars.

I went to a talk last night with Jim Diers, Seattle’s ex Neighborhood Czar. Here are my notes:

• The solution to neighborhood crime isn’t more policing, it’s replacing the crime with legitimate activity
• A natural consequence punishment for graffiti is painting murals (which tend to prevent tagging)
• Economic crises generate non-market economic activity
• If TV is killing community, then community must be boring
• Local activism has more easy victories than global struggles like climate change, therefore it’s easier to get people involved
• Everyone has 3 things to offer: unique knowledge, passions and skills
• Prostitutes, etc came out of our community, so a good community would see helping them as everyone’s responsibility, not just getting rid of them
• It’s often a easier to just do stuff than to get government to do it
• Soup kitchens can have clients cook the food and the benefactors join in eating it

I recently read Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment by journalist Ethan Watters, which is expanded from a NYTimes article. The book doesn’t offer an explicit definition of “urban tribe”, instead is gives an ostensive definition in the form of a case study of Watters’ tribe and anecdotes about other tribes. I’d like to attempt a more explicit definition here.

An urban tribe is a group of friends with the following characteristics:

High clustering coefficient

In graph theory, clustering coefficient is a measure of how cliquey (that’s the technical term, I’m not making this up) a network is: the relationship between two members is similar to the relationship between any two other members. The most striking consequence of this is that urban tribes can contain pairs of members who don’t really like each other but still invite each other to tribe events.

Provides family functions

Traditionally, families fulfill a number of social functions besides raising children: entertainment, emotional intimacy, etc. Young adults used to live with their families until getting married. Now they move to cities while still single and are discouraged from marrying immediately. Urban tribes exist so single young adults can receive the benefit of families without getting married or living with their parents.

Homeostatic

Cybernetics generalized the concept of biological homeostasis to describe systems that adapt to maintain their integrity. Watters’ research begins with an attempt to explain the low marriage rates in his cohort, his striking conclusion is that urban tribes discourage long-term romantic relationships, especially with people outside the tribe. This is because members with a “real” family will have no need for the tribe. This isn’t a conscious action of individual members, but an emergent behaviour of the tribe attempting to survive.

Watters says most tribes have around 8 members, but it’s not clear if there are minimum or maximum sizes.

Andrew Potter’s opinion piece in the new Maclean’s harshly criticizes Richard Florida, his Ontario in the Creative Age report, and the Ontario government for commissioning it. And so he criticizes me for buying into it.

The study bears the overwhelming greasiness of the “Creative Class” snake oil that Florida has been peddling for the past few years. The fact is, the rest of the world got wise to Florida a few years ago, and that U of T went and hired him, and that Ontario commissioned a pricey new report from him, are further evidence of just how much of an intellectual laggard the province has become.

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