by Sean Orr | We’re not a ghost town! Vancouver’s vacant home rates in line with other cities, report says. Just so you know, the cleaning lady turning on a light once a week doesn’t make a house occupied. Also, “(University of British Columbia business professor Tom Davidoff) said it was hard to tell the extent of that situation because the report did not indicate how many homes were vacant for 10 or 11 months a year”. That’s a pretty important metric. I wonder if there was a way to correlate this with… “The number of temporary visas Canada has issued to Chinese residents has soared from about 82,000 in 2012 to 337,000 in 2014”. Wow!

It’s almost like this report just used census data from 2011: Vancouver’s vacancy study, the ‘key finding’ it didn’t find and the vacant homes it didn’t count.

The claim that Vancouver’s vacancy rate was in line with other cities was based entirely upon a previous study of 2011 census data, produced by the Urban Futures Institute.

Housing market = debt market: Housing without debt. As I’ve been saying for years, any discussion of Vancouver’s housing market without mentioning the CMHC is incomplete:

So in a way, even land is not the real market. Land scarcity is just the baseline economic condition within which the real market emerges. That market is not selling us the land itself, but the means of access to that land: debt.

B.C. government moves to end shadow flipping. Wherein the Globe & Mail takes credit even though Andrew Weaver brought it up 2 years ago.

Feeling uncool? Now you too can rent a room in the hip Strathcona neighbourhood in a barely renovated SRO for the low-low price of $800-$1050. Not a joke: Hip-O Urban Micro Living. Bonus: electrical outlets!

Don’t say Granville Street, don’t say Granville Street. B.C. considers allowing booze in public. Damn, it feels good to be a populist!

Speaking of populism: Trudeau stuns environmentalists with dubious LNG plant approval. Stuart Parker has an alternative headline: “Environmentalists stunned by their own willful blindness and wishful thinking…”

Suburbs of the day: Maple Ridge residents rally against planned homeless shelter. Make Maple Ridge Great Again!

Well, it was only a matter of time before Trump’s mouth-breathing demagoguery found a sympathetic ear in the Conservative Party: Conservative MP: Donald Trump has “restored freedom of speech to America”.

Because we need a wall to keep out these sombrero-wearing weirdoes:

#Surrey #RCMP receiving an erratic driving complaint in the area of 16900 Fraser Hwy. Male driver is wearing a sombrero.

— ScanBC (@ScanBC) March 20, 2016

Skateboarding is no longer a crime in Victoria. I see a young Andrew Morrison rejoicing.

The other Vancouver: Thousands show up for Bernie Sanders in Vancouver: ‘All I can say is, WHOA!’.

Art of the day: Was Indigenous Art Better in the 1980s and Early ’90s?.