by Sean Orr | LAPping it up: City’s plan gets most things right, but market should be allowed to do its work. “I arrived in Vancouver in 1968 and the DTES was an issue then,” writes Michael A. Goldberg, a professor and dean emeritus at UBC’s Sauder School of Business. Hmm, was the issue then that the market was not allowed to do its work? Why did the market abandon the area in the first place? This was before crack cocaine, right, and before the de-institutionalization of Riverview. Was the “issue” simply that poor people lived there? Maybe they should have just stopped being poor, right?

Meanwhile, what happens when a snowboarder bro armed with (self-admitted) ignorance and a fish-eye lens starts managing a 35 unit SRO? Kickstarter – The Last Two Weeks. OMG, you poor bastard! You had to live in the DTES for a whole SIX MONTHS! How very “gnar”! I imagine the following will be absent from their “unbiased perspective from every angle, especially on the gentrification issue”: Manager Assaults Community Activists. The fact that they paint themselves as unwilling victims is laughable, but that anyone can just walk into a building and start managing it with no experience underscores a much bigger problem. And that they think filming this misadventure would achieve some lofty goal is even worse. But what about using it as a Kickstarter campaign to fund a national tour to promote a snowboarding website? That’s entertainment.

We don’t need more debate or awareness. We just need action. Also: 20 ways to not be a gentrifier.

We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Insight into Insite (scroll down). “PHS may not be faultless. But it has stepped up to house the hardest to house, many in 100-year-old buildings with failing infrastructure, often with inadequate funding for support staff”. Again, when there is a vacuum, created in part by market forces, you can’t blame the people who fill it or the organizations that represent them.

Speaking of people who are supposed to represent us: Peter MacKay apologizes for throwing documents about murdered, missing Aboriginal women.

Citizens will gather around former Downtown Eastside cop shop to campaign for public meeting. Somehow, astroturfing comes to mind. Why? The spokesperson is a planner with ties to the Jim Green Foundation.

Why can’t they be more like us? Chinese international students aren’t bringing democracy home. “Record numbers of Chinese students are studying in the West, but they aren’t proving a political threat to the authoritarian regime when they return”. Total number of current Chinese international students interviewed: 1. Also, if you can afford to go to school in a foreign country, you’re probably an elite.

This week in inculcation: Oilsands companies could get a say in new Alberta curriculum. I believe this is the appropriate reaction.

100 measles cases reported in Fraser Valley outbreak. “We respect the beliefs of religious groups”. Well, maybe it’s time you stopped that.

Bonus: In five years’ time, all news articles will be a single coloured icon that fires out info-nuggets.