Five community groups have joined together to form the Strathcona Revitalization Committee and to make sure their voices are heard when the city reviews the Downtown Eastside/Oppenheimer official development plan in early 2009.

There has been a significant drop in the number of rental apartment buildings sold in Metro Vancouver in the first six months of 2008 compared with the same period last year.

Media reports from the United States routinely list a litany of horrors about the number of foreclosures. According to an August 4 New York Times report, 8.41 percent of subprime-mortgage loans from 2005 were in arrears by 90 days or more or in foreclosure in the month of June. Of subprime-mortgage loans from 2007, 16.6 percent were delinquent, according to the report.

There’s more evidence that the Lower Mainland housing market is slowing down. On August 5, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver reported that prices for detached housing fell 2.3 percent through June and July. Over the same period, prices for attached properties dropped by one percent, and apartment units by two percent. It was a front-page story in one newspaper.

On July 8, Vancouver city council approved a motion to review zoning regulations in the West End, the neighbourhood that’s the traditional home of the city’s LGBT community.

The going rate for a budget room—with shower but no view—at Vancouver’s Budget Inn Patricia Hotel on East Hastings Street is $69 per night. For the not so budget-conscious traveller, the Renaissance Vancouver Hotel Harbourside on West Hastings Street can provide more appropriate digs for $289 a night—no breakfast.

There are 460,000 individual strata units in B.C., but a homeowners group says there are several deficiencies in the provincial legislation governing condominium homeownership. In early May, the Victoria-based Vancouver Island Strata Owners Association issued a report identifying six areas that need to be addressed: strata governance, strata-management licences, disclosure, strata-development approvals, property taxation, and strata-fee equity.

Suzanne Anton wants to see a clothesline outside every new home in Vancouver. The Non-Partisan Association city councillor has one, and she said that she rarely uses her electric dryer, even in winter.

You’d think that in a region that’s running out of land for new housing, policymakers and investors would look to the water. Vancouverites have, after all, lived on the waterways since before the city was incorporated. According to one float-home real-estate agent, the demand is there but the developers are not.

As CEO of the Greater Vancouver Home Builders’ Association, Peter Simpson is understandably interested in seeing how gas prices will affect the behaviour of home buyers in the long term.

At the Union of British Columbia Municipalities convention last September, Premier Gordon Campbell promised to reward developers of green housing projects with “faster approvals”. The premier also pledged to introduce measures to allow buyers “to avoid costs for municipal services that they just won’t use”.

Two days after the NPA knifed its leader, Mayor Sam Sullivan, Vancouver city council approved his most important policy initiative. On June 10, council approved a revised EcoDensity charter and all but one of its initial actions, despite opposition from more than two dozen neighbourhood groups.

The media don’t always pay a lot of attention when Opposition MLAs or MPs introduce private member’s bills. That’s because these pieces of legislation usually don’t have a chance of becoming laws, especially when the governing party has a majority.

There’s a lot of information available out there for first-time home buyers. From tips on how to go about purchasing a house to materials proclaiming the advantages of owning a property, new buyers don’t have a shortage of print and on-line references.

More households in the Lower Mainland are facing the financial strain of home ownership, a Metro Vancouver staff report states.