The top Metro civic affairs story of 2012?

As I reflect on the top civic affairs stories of 2012, in advance of today's CKNW Bill Good show, I think that the quest for affordable housing is near the top of my list...and not just because it was the topic of last year's Holiday Greeting Card!  

Here are the twelve ideas I offered for the twelve days of Christmas, many of which are now starting to be realized...including Fee-Simple rowhouses, which was made easier as a result of a May legislative change, reduced parking standards that are now being contemplated in many municipalities, laneway housing or coachhouses that are being studied in more municipalities, including West Vancouver, and more development on parking lots.

I hope you enjoy reviewing the list...

Some Quintessential BC Art!

When I arrived in Vancouver in 1974, two of my first friends were Jim and Doria Moodie. At the time Jim was Executive Assistant to Vancouver City Manager Lorne Ryan and his best friend Gordon Campbell was Executive Assistant to then Mayor Art Phillips. Jim went on to a very successful career in planning and real estate consulting, while Gordon decided to pursue other activities.

Although no one ever made Jim a Christmas Tree ornament saying he was the best real estate consultant in the world (Doria, a school teacher, often got such ornaments from her students!) his clients and colleagues knew he was very good. Some of his accomplishments included Champlain Heights and the early phases of the Fraser Lands developments. Today, Jim is helping Michael Audain create the Audain Gallery at Whistler. But this post is not about Jim.

Rather, it's about Doria since in recent years, in addition to her community and philanthropic work, and golf, she has taken up painting.  Last week I attended a show of her work at Essentia Vancouver, a WestSide art gallery and....are your ready...bed shop! Learn more about it here http://www.myessentia.com/locations/vancouver

The show is called Viewpoints from Sea to Sky and includes paintings by Doria and three friends, Andrea Moore, Lianne Gulka, and Susie Cipolla, with whom she regularly paints up at Whistler. Their work is very impressive and surprisingly affordable. While each artist has her own style, there is a common thread that runs through the show, perhaps because the four spend a lot of time painting together in a very beautiful Whistler setting. Below are a few of Doria's paintings and Susie's boat.

In writing this post, it is my hope that more people will discover what everyone at the opening thought was some exceptionally good work by relatively new artists. As one person said, it is quintessential westcoast art and the show is aptly named.

The gallery is located at 2144 West 4th Avenue at Arbutus on the south side of the street. The show is well worth the trip, especially if you enjoy west coast art or might like to buy a beautiful painting for yourself, or for someone else this holiday season.
 To see more of their work, go to their websites at http://www.doriamoodie.com,  http://susiecipollaart.com, http://www.liannegulka.com

A holiday greeting card retrospective

It's the time of year when many of us send and receive greeting cards.

In years gone by, I used to design and print cards which often took an entire weekend to personally sign and send out. My daughters would help me stuff the cards into envelopes and stick on the stamps. Rather than a pretty card with pictures of silver balls and other Christmas decorations, the cards often related to my company's development activities.
The 1989 card was a Christmas tree made from newspaper headlines from the Spetifore Lands rezoning. In 1991 both the Vancouver Courier and Province did stories on a card that ridiculed NIMBYism, following the defeat of a rezoning application to build additional rental housing at Langara Gardens. The idea came to me in the dentist's chair. Santa Clause is coming to town was playing on the radio, and I imagined him being greeted by the protestors who had organized to block the rental housing. My daughters suggested a few of the picket signs!

In 2009, I reluctantly made the switch from a printed card to an electronic card. This year, like so many of you, I decided to again send out an electronic card. However, since many of my current friends and colleagues did not know me back in 1989, I decided it was time for a 'retrospective'. After all, I became a senior citizen in 2012, so it's not entirely inappropriate to look back.

Below is this year's card. If you take a few moments to read it, I hope you will agree it tells an interesting story about real estate development and other issues of the day, including an earlier hockey lock-out, the need for an expanded convention centre, concerns over pink stucco houses, and the grand opening of the Ford Theatre! Remember the Ford Theatre? The lobby is still too small!

At the end you will find an unabashed effort to spread the word about Hollyburn Mews, a new infill development I am building in West Vancouver, which is about to come to market. Happy Holidays!

 

www.hollyburnmewshomes.com

Hollyburn Mews Update

Hollyburn Mews is now on the West Vancouver waterfront.

For the third year, Geller Properties is pleased to participate in the Dundarave Festival of Lights which includes a Christmas Tree display  by various West Vancouver businesses and community organizations on Dundarave Beach at the foot of 25th Street. The initiative is in support of the North Shore Lookout Shelter. While it is hard to believe the North Shore has a problem with homelessness, it does.
This year's tree features Christmas lights and decorations in blue and green...which to my mind are the colours of 'sustainability'. We also added some houses that were assembled by my daughters and their cousins and painted silver to cover up the mould from being out in the rain the previous two years.
This year we also attached cut-outs of the Hollyburn Mews duplex homes and coach houses since the development is well underway and will soon be going to market.

As I have noted before, Hollyburn Mews is a very modest development, especially compared with some of the developments currently underway by my development industry colleagues, and some of my earlier projects.

However, it is significant since it is the first infill development in West Vancouver to include coach houses.  Designed by my firm and Formwerks, the three coach houses at Hollyburn Mews are quite different from Vancouver's Laneway Housing, in that they are each for sale, and with 1810 square feet over three levels, substantially larger than the laneway houses.

The project also includes six duplex units within three structures designed to look like larger single family houses, in keeping with the existing neighbourhood character. While the development seems somewhat benign, it attracted a letter of opposition from West Vancouver's Jimmy Pattison.  Really!

This 'pocket neighbourhood' has been created for West Vancouver households who are ready to downsize, but not downgrade!

Construction at Hollyburn Mews is being carried out by Trasolini Chetner, one of Vancouver's better quality custom homebuilders. Ironically, while I am normally urging contractors to finish as quickly as possible, in the case of Hollyburn Mews we delayed the construction start and will likely take a couple of extra months to complete so that sales can close once the HST is removed on April 1st, 2013. The construcition program under the direction of Paolo Trasolini and Geoff Gillies is therefore scheduled to finish at the end of March with some landscaping and site works likely taking a bit longer due to weather conditions.

The sales program will formally get underway in early 2013. However, the Disclosure Statement is being filed this Monday by my longstanding lawyers Parolin and Company, and discussions are now taking place with a number of people who have been following the development over the past year or so, and asked to be put on a priority list.

Sales are being handled by Elaine Biggan and Tony Breen of the Prudential Sussex office in Dundarave, which I believe is the largest real estate office on the north shore.

If you would like to read more about the development and see the plans, please go to www.hollyburnmewshomes.com  The website would have been simply Hollyburn Mews but someone reserved this name as soon as the project was approved at Public Hearing, and either forgot or decided not to try and sell me the web domain!

What I hope you'll agree is an easy to navigate website was developed by Opacity Designs who do a lot of real estate marketing work in Metro.