The holiday season is upon us. For VanRamblings that means spending time with friends and family (as I suspect is the case with most of us), and a level of busyness that is unusual for us — given that much of our life is given over to the creative endeavour of writing on VanRamblings, which entails a dozen hours or more each day sitting in front of our computer composing the posts that you read from time to time, on this blog of ours.
From April 20th on of this year — six months out from the 2018 Vancouver municipal election — there was a raison d’être for VanRamblings: to introduce you to the candidates we felt were worthy and deserving of your vote. To that end, we wrote as many as 2500 words each day about the 2018 Vancouver municipal election, the issues we felt were important for candidates to address, and who we felt best were most capable of creating the city we need, a fairer and more just city for all.
While it remains our intention to continue our coverage of Vancouver City Council, School Board and Park Board, we are not quite so obsessed with civic governance and all that occurs each day with the process of decision-making that will lead to creating a city for all of us. In Vancouver, we’ve elected our Mayor, Kennedy Stewart, and a pretty darn fine group of City Councillors, School Board trustees and Park Board Commissioners — we’re prepared to let them get on with the job sans the obsessive coverage that has come to define VanRamblings these past almost eight months.
Damara, our new 3-year-old kitty, soon to be our companion as we write each day.
Here’s our plan for VanRamblings, then, going forward, which, of course, is subject to change — we’re planning on writing about politics once or twice a week this month. We have a column on Janet Fraser, Chairperson of the Vancouver School Board, that we’re intending to write, with likely publication this upcoming week (for the record, we consider Dr. Fraser to be a transformative political figure, and believe we should all be grateful for the gift of her presence on Vancouver’s political scene). We’ve also got a column on Vancouver International Film Festival programmer Tom Charity’s Best of 2018, which it is our current intention to publish next Friday.
In fact, VanRamblings will publish a great many columns on film this month — because we love film, considering it to be the art of our age, and during the April through October period we forfeited our love of film in favour of covering the election — where the majority of candidates we endorsed were elected to office, as well as a few we failed to endorse, but should have.
As far as is possible, in addition to our once or twice a week political coverage, we’ll keep up our Arts Friday coverage — which will be given over to film for the foreseeable future, but within which we plan to expand our coverage into other facets of Vancouver’s arts scene. We’ll continue our Stories of a Life feature — no such posting this week, or last, but next week we promise — and our Music Sunday feature, which tomorrow oughta emerge as a sort of Story of a Life when, and if, it actually comes to fruition. Tuesdays and Thursdays may be fallow days, or given over to tech coverage — we have a column for Apple iPhone SE, 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus, and X users we’ll publish this upcoming Tuesday.
In the new year, VanRamblings will finally write about our cancer journey — which “story” will begin 10 months prior to our official cancer diagnosis. We’ll introduce you to those who made a difference in our life, and who are — we believe — the reason we are here today, enabling you to read those words on the screen in front of you (there’ll be a great many political folks who will find their way into our reporting out, as our “life savers”).
Thank you for hanging in with us.
Going forward, it is our intention to remain relentlessly positive about pretty much darn near everyone and everything, while focusing on change for the better, and a better life for everyone in all aspects of our lives.
Harland Bartholomew (September 14, 1889 – December 2, 1989) was an American urban planner. Although a civil engineer by training & disposition, from 1911 through until the mid-1950s, Mr. Bartholomew emerged as the most influential urban planner of the first half of the 20th century, his considerable influence now thought to have had a profoundly negative impact on city development, administrative evil masked as “moral good”.
During the course of his lifetime, Mr. Bartholomew created comprehensive city plans for urban centres across North America, including …
1911-1915 Newark, New Jersey;
1916-1920 St.Louis, Missouri;
1920 Memphis, Tennessee;
1920-1921 Lansing, Michigan;
1921-1922 Wichita, Kansas;
1926-1930 Vancouver, BC;
1930 San Antonio, Texas;
1930-1934 St.Louis, Missouri;
1932 Louisville, Kentucky The Negro Housing Problem;
1953-1959 Washington, DC.
Before, during and after WWII, Mr. Bartholomew was appointed to the United States’ Federal Planning Committee by three Presidents, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1952, President Eisenhower appointed Mr. Bartholomew chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, a position he held for seven years.
Mr. Bartholomew was an early advocate of slum clearance & city planning, serving on the U.S. Slum Clearance Advisory Committee. His ideas helped shape the Housing Act of 1937 & the Housing Act of 1949, and had a profound effect on the segregation of city neighbourhoods, ensuring that immigrants and the urban poor would be designated to one blighted city neighbourhood — including in Vancouver, skid row (now called the Downtown Eastside), the urban planning handiwork of Mr. Bartholomew.
In his June 17, 2017 essay on Vancouver’s Abundant Housingwebsite, urbanist Reilly Wood records the following …
“When Bartholomew asked what abuses he should consider in the interim zoning by-law of 1927 he was preparing, the chairman replied that ‘the only serious abuse… is the intrusion of undesirable apartment houses into residential districts'” (Zoning and the Single-Family Landscape, p. 60)
Recently, at the November 13th meeting of Vancouver City Council, newly-elected OneCity Vancouver Councillor Christine Boyle moved an amendment to a motion calling for an updated City Plan that would have included in its mandate “a city for all, such that all neighbourhoods in Vancouver would include all types of housing, rental, co-and-co-op housing, and social housing.” Councillor Boyle’s amendment was supported only by Mayor Kennedy Stewart and COPE City Councillor Jean Swanson.
Old ideas die hard, it would seem, and the legacy of Harland Bartholomew looms large in the planning process within the City of Vancouver.
Nonetheless, VanRamblings believes that as a new, inclusive and neighbourhood sensitive City Plan is developed, the intent of Councillor Boyle’s heartening and necessary amendment will carry the day, with the near unanimous consent of the Mayor & her fellow City Councillors, persons of conscience, grit & integrity to their core, who mean well for our city, not just over the course of the next four years, but for generations to come. How did Harland Bartholomew’s Ideas Shape Vancouver?
“Few cities possess such a combination of nearby natural resources, a splendid harbour, a terrain ideally suited for urban use, an equable climate and a setting of great natural beauty.
Vancouver is the most important Pacific port of a great country. Here, if anywhere, should develop a great city. Circumstances of such character call for a city plan of substantial scale.”
From the outset, Harland Bartholomew was clear in stating his preference for single-family homes throughout the city, with Vancouver Town Planning Commission chairman Arthur Smith setting the tone by praising Point Grey’s early bylaw, explicitly segregating Vancouver by class, and noting the retention of single-family homes as a major goal …
“The wise foresight which Point Grey has used in planning at an early stage of its growth should provide Vancouver with one of the most desirable residential districts possessed by any city on the Continent, and those who have to gain their livelihood by manual labor should find in Hastings Townsite, and in a replanned South Vancouver, a place where they can build up modest homes which should differ only in size from that of the more opulent employers. The retention of Vancouver as a city of single family homes has always been close to the heart of those engaged in the preparation of this plan.” (A Plan for the City of Vancouver, p. 26)
Bartholomew further clarified his preference for single-family homes …
“As has been mentioned, Vancouver is largely a city of one-family homes and is surrounded by similar development in the adjoining municipalities. Large areas are now available for such development, though a considerable proportion has yet to be served by utilities. That the one-family dwelling is the desirable unit for happy living is the general concensus (sic) of opinion of all authorities. (A Plan for the City of Vancouver, p. 233-234)
Bartholomew was keen to keep stores out of residential neighbourhoods …
“The scattering of stores promiscuously throughout residence districts has done considerable damage to the city’s appearance. The nearly universal custom of building stores out to the street line has hurt the appearance of a good many residence streets and at the same time has injured adjoining lots by making them less desirable for living purposes and reducing their saleable value. The zoning by-law will remedy this condition and tend to prevent residence districts from becoming blighted.” (A Plan for the City of Vancouver, p. 247)
As Reilly Wood writes in his Abundant Housing essay …
“The contrast with modern-day Vancouver is remarkable, given that neighbourhood stores built before Bartholomew’s Plan are now many neighbourhoods’ most cherished jewels. Who would prefer the East Side without the Marché St. George, or the West Side without Arbutus Coffee? Bartholomew sought to completely eradicate small-scale retailers and meeting places from residential neighbourhoods, without questioning whether people might want to live near such amenities.”
Bartholomew advocated for and succeeded in creating exclusionary neighbourhoods, imposing extravagantly large minimum lot sizes and yards, and as Wood writes could “be more accurately described as a suburban plan, designed by a man with a profoundly anti-urban bias. It would be laughable if we weren’t still living in its shadow.”
Franklin Avenue looking East from 9th, 1928. Landmarks Association of St Louis.
“City planner Harland Bartholomew rose in prominence along with the popularity of scientific city-efficient planning during the early to mid-twentieth century. In the pursuit of solutions to urban problems, Bartholomew concluded that the most efficient way to revitalize St. Louis, Missouri, was through the clearing of slums. In an attempt to solve the city’s economic and demographic problems, slum clearance destroyed and displaced Black neighborhoods whose 70,000 residents were seen as detrimental to the city’s success.”
In fact, as Dan Chapman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writes …
“The region’s psychic scars run deeper. St. Louis once was the nation’s fourth most populated city, a manufacturing and transportation colossus. It was the proud Gateway to the West, idealized by the soaring steel Arch along the banks of the Mississippi River.
A century ago, city fathers realized that blight, traffic, poverty, and fragmented government threatened St. Louis’ success. They hired a city planner in 1916 who, a year later, published the “Problems of St. Louis.” The city was at a critical juncture, an inflection point where long-term success might be guaranteed if the right civic decisions were made.
Harland Bartholomew, the planner, hoped that his report would “ultimately result in some action and action is St. Louis’ greatest need.” Action ensued, but not always the right kind.
St. Louis today ranks 27th in population and 45th in job growth among the top 50 metro areas. In hindsight, few imagined that the year 1916 would figure so prominently. Bartholomew’s embrace of urban renewal and highways-to-the-suburbs fueled the exodus from St. Louis as well as the region’s fragmentation and racism.
A residential segregation law passed that year established an ongoing pattern of racial separateness. The law was overturned, but the scars remain. Ferguson, for example, is two-thirds black, yet at the time of the shooting the mayor and five of six council members were white.
“Ferguson affirms that we in St. Louis are in the geographic and cultural heart of America with all its issues and foibles,” said the Rev. Starsky Wilson, pastor of St. John’s United Church of Christ in St. Louis. “These are American problems.”
Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood was developed with narrow lots before Harland Bartholomew’s ideas were adopted. UBC urban geography professor Patrick Condon wants it known that in the 1960s, consequent of a state-sponsored urban renewal initiative, government sought to declare Strathcona a “slum”. David Gibson wants it known that “Strathcona was saved by the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants’ Association (SPOTA), The Electors’ Action Movement (T.E.A.M.) Council of the early 1970s, supplemented by federal Opportunities for Youth (OFY) & Local Initiatives Projects (LIP) grants, “such that Strathcona continues to thrive to this day.
Blatantly racist development policy, intolerance, exclusive neighbourhoods where the working poor, persons with disabilities, seniors, those on social assistance, immigrants and refugees are all but forbidden from residence, and a blighted downtown neighbourhood riven with crime, hopelessness and an opioid crisis that is killing our city’s residents by the thousands — these are the critical challenges faced by our new Mayor and City Council.
A good place to start?
Undo and reverse the legacy of Harland Bartholomew, and begin anew.
The glorious, thrilling and edifying 30-day orientation for the members of our new Vancouver City Council continues first thing this morning.
Clearly, Vancouver Non-Partisan Association Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung and OneCity Vancouver Councillor Christine Boyle have proven to be the best communicators among our new crop of electeds — their social media feeds informative and an absolute delight to follow, with first-rate reportage to the tens of thousands of you who voted them into office. Good on them.
If you’re not already following Councillor Christine Boyle on Twitter, you can do so at @christineboyle, while the incredibly wonderful Sarah Kirby-Yung at @sarahkirby_yung is another must follow — which you ought to do.
Buy Nothing Day is an international day of protest against consumerism.
Founded in September 1992 by Vancouver-based artist Ted Dave, and subsequently promoted annually by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz, the founders of Adbusters magazine, Buy Nothing Day was designed as a means to examine the issue of overconsumption.
Early on, a decision was taken to hold Buy Nothing Day on Black Friday, the Friday of the American Thanksgiving long weekend, one of the ten busiest shopping days across North America, the day that signals the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the day when retailers across North America discount consumer goods by 50% or more.
Although Black Friday is not an official holiday, many American states designate Black Friday as a holiday for state government employees. For many non-retail employees and schools who will celebrate the Thanksgiving long weekend (Thanksgiving in the United States is a more important holiday down south than Christmas), since 1952 Black Friday has marked the beginning of a four-day Thanksgiving weekend — the net result: to both increase the number of potential shoppers and boost the economy.
If you’re like me, your social media feeds are likely rife with posts imploring you to not to buy anything this upcoming weekend, to boycott Black Friday, and not give in to consumerism. God knows we’re a society of waste, we focus far too much on acquisition of consumer goods over building community, and our landfills are laden high with perfectly well-functioning consumer items that have been discarded for no reason other than waste.
Still and all, if you’re a pauper like me, a senior living on a fixed income of under $20,000 annually, or if you’re a minimum wage worker just barely getting by, yet you’ve had your heart set on finally buying the much-talked, and indispensableInstant Pot (on sale all over town at around $65, rather than its usual price of $130), or if you’re looking to make your first foray into Smart Home technology — because, why should the Smart Home be just the preserve of the wealthy? — or if there’s a sweater or a jacket that you see discounted at 70% off that you’ve had your eye on, would it really be an offense against God and all that is right and proper to treat yourself to a consumer good that you have long desired and can now afford.
Not being a particular follower of fashion, and as much as we agree with the principle behind Buy Nothing Day, we also see that there’s a class issue involved. All well and good if you’re earning the average $65,000 median wage for those resident in Metro Vancouver, and whether you pay $129.99 (plus tax) for the Instant Pot, or the one-day Black Friday sale price of $64.99 (plus tax) makes no never mind to you, for seniors and others living on a fixed income, or for the working poor, the $72.80 (including sales tax) saving for the most popular Instant Pot model, the 6-quart Duo, or if you’ve got a large family, the $102.03 (including sales tax) saving on the 8-quart Instant Pot model, that’s a chunk of change in savings for those who’ve been waiting for the Instant Pot to go on sale — and the only day that happens is, you guessed it, Black Friday, in 2018 … on November 23rd.
Word to the wise: if you want that Instant Pot at the sale price, there are some conditions that have to be met. Whether it’s Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Walmart or Real Canadian Superstore, Instant Pots at the sale price are in short supply — retailers bring in only 100 Instant Pots to each store, which means that if you want one, you’re going to have to line up no later than 6am to get one, cuz let us assure you, there’ll be a great many folks waiting in line to purchase their new Instant Pot at a 50% or better saving.
The Breville Smart Oven Pro Convection Toaster Oven, on sale at Best Buy at $240 (a $134.39 saving, including tax), reliable, long lasting, great for seniors and singles, a virtual replacement for your oven & a kitchen appliance people swear by, including me.
Now, we’ve written at length about the Instant Pot, and why it has become an essential kitchen tool — we feel the same way about our Breville Smart Oven Pro Convection Toaster Oven — which, by the way, is on sale for $126 off (including tax) its regular price, at Best Buy, the best deal in town for the Breville, the virtues of which one customer extols here.
Do you remember how we were writing about the Smart Home above?
Well, the Google Home Mini is on saleBlack Friday, all over town for only $35, rather than at its regular $80 price — which makes for a pretty skookum $50.40 in savings (including tax), if your looking to tech enhance your life. Not bad. The Google Home Mini does all the same things the Google Home pictured in the ad above does, and much, much more (because more functionality is added each and every month by Google).
At $40 (last year, on sale), we bought a Google Home Mini during the holiday season — partly because we’re a tech-y guy, partly out of curiosity, and partly because it was on sale, and we are a parsimonious guy.
So, what do we use our Google Home Mini for?
To turn the lights off and on. When we’re away, using the Google Home app to turn up the thermostat while we’re on our way home, and to turn on the lights in our sensuous hovel just prior to opening the door to our home. We listen to BBC News, news from the American networks, CBC news and podcasts, and all of our other favourite podcasts, to check on the temperature and the weather forecast, as an alarm, and to listen to our favourite music or be introduced to new music.
In the holiday season, we use the Google Home Mini to automatically turn our balcony holiday light display on at 4pm, and off again at 8am. We use it as an aide when we’re cooking — and, if we were of a mind, to turn on our 4K TV to the Netflix, or the channel we want to watch or record.
Could we live without our Google Home Mini? Yes. Do we want to? No.
The Sharp 55″ 4K Smart TV, at $450, at the Real Canadian Superstore (also on sale at Visions Electronics, for $448) seems like a pretty sweet deal, if you’re in the market for a 4K Smart TV. Here’s an even-handed review.
Now, we’re not saying that you should purchase items that you don’t need — we’re a firm believer in the stripped down, simple life. Still and all, if you’ve got your heart set on something, and you either need it, or really, really want to have it, and you’ve saved up your sheckles to buy it (we don’t buy anything on credit ourselves), we’re saying “why deny yourself”?
Damara, our new 3-year-old kitty, soon to be our companion as we write each day.
