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Vancouver’s future economic success hinges as much on increasing the supply of affordable housing as it does on competitive taxes, the executive director of the Vancouver Economic Development Commission told council Tuesday.

It could also be more critical than a “rendering farm,” the massive computer hardware installation that makes data-heavy industries like digital special effects firms happy to be here. (The VEDC is working on one of those as well.)

Lee Malleau, who was unveiling the VEDC’s Economic Action Strategy, said Vancouver is emerging as a key hub of the video and digital special effects sector, along with Los Angeles and London. But unlike those two cities, Vancouver lacks reasonably-priced housing.

Creating that housing will be essential, Malleau said, if the city is to continue to attract international talent, whose wages will go much further in cities with cheaper homes.

With Vancouver city planning staff expecting to bring a report to council before summer on options for the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts, Seattle is well into the $3 billion project to replace its tottering Alaska Way Viaduct with a bored tunnel.

One mile of the Seattle Viaduct came down in nine days last October, without the chaos drivers always anticipate on such occasions. Latest updates from Seattle show the city is moving ahead with new traffic patterns to clear the way for the tunnel, which will ensure good connections remain to the port and other arterials.

But city after city is putting a freeway on death row.

The Seattle project is just one of a wave of removals right across America, homeland of the car. According to this update in Atlantic Cities, the battle is moving to the neighbourhood level, where more and more communities are debating the shape of their future. If a freeway can come down, why not an overpass? Well, in fact, it can.

When UK authorities began charging thousands of young people within hours of that country’s widespread August rioting, BC commentators wanted to know why Vancouver’s police had yet to do the same for our June Stanley Cup trouble-makers.

Now the sentences are flowing from those UK arrests and the jail terms are staggering. Young lives are undoubtedly being ruined as punishment for a few moments of stupidity.

One mother of two, who slept through the riots but accepted a looted pair of shorts from a friend, is facing five months in prison. Another young woman who briefly took two left-foot running shoes, then left them behind: ten months.

Then there was the pair of young men who organized a Facebook page urging a riot, which they didn’t attend and which didn’t occur: four years!

It will interesting to see how BC courts respond. Community service, anyone?

Just as the civic election campaign was reaching peak intensity on Nov. 5, World Planning Day, the Planning Institute of BC made former union activist, social housing developer and city councillor Jim Green an honorary member, someone who “shaped the city.”

Former city planner Nathan Edelson did a remarkable job of summarizing Jim’s planning career, one of several major careers he’s had so far, for the audience at the award ceremony. To his credit, Edelson reported the controversies as well as the achievements. His conclusion:

“In my view and that of so many others in the Downtown Eastside, throughout the city of Vancouver and indeed across Canada, Jim Green is seen as an incredible community builder who makes efforts – sometimes extraordinary efforts as with the Woodward public process – to engage local residents in decision making, but who at the end of the day gives  priority to concrete results.”

Read the full text of Edelson’s tribute here.