the trump tutelage posted:

this is all u really n eed you rigpig filth

JawKnee posted:

Smart cars are going full-retard in the other direction

e: I had to push some stranger out of 2 inches of snow because his Smart Car2Go had gotten stuck there last month lol

EvilJoven posted:

and just use a company owned vehicle.

Powershift posted:

he wouldn'ta gotten stuck if he had a truck.

Also, in canada, the smart car is now electric only, and car2go is switching to mercedes CLA/GLAs

quote:

...a pickup truck can project strength, practicality and a touch of luxury simultaneously. “You don’t have to explain yourself,” Karwel says.

quote:

Vancouver mayor emphasizes new approach to create affordable housing

The mayor of this wildly expensive city says he is setting his team on a path to create affordable housing by going into single-family neighbourhoods, developing city land and maximizing every site available around transit and arterial roads.

Mayor Gregor Robertson, in an unusually activist speech Wednesday to a group of planners, architects and developers, said the city’s high-end, empty neighbourhoods are a sign of a “failing city.”

“The warning bells are ringing about the emptying out of our single-family neighbourhoods,” he said.

He emphasized Vancouver is going to take a new approach with a revamped housing plan this year, in part because he has been hearing from so many young people demanding that city council find a way for them to continue living in the city.

The message from those young, frustrated Vancouverites has started to change the tone of the usual argument in the city about development, which has been marked for decades by virulent resident opposition and NIMBYs, said the mayor.

“There are people that don’t want to see change. Historically, the NIMBY voice is loud … and then everyone else is quiet,” said Mr. Robertson, stressing he wants to preserve the essence of those old neighbourhoods.

But, he said, he’s less worried now about backlash from that group than about backlash from young people demanding that he find them room in the city.

Mr. Robertson, who has four children, said he has two living outside the city now and isn’t sure they will be able to move back when they want to.

He acknowledged that people are “feeling betrayed and let down by every level of government, including ours.”

The city’s new approach will mean planners will have to look at ways to create new housing everywhere, including the single-family neighbourhoods where a lot of effort has been focused recently on how to preserve the older houses that are being torn down and redeveloped into new mansions.

“A neighbourhood that’s made up of perfect, character $5-million homes is not healthy if there’s no kids there,” Mr. Robertson said at a keynote address to the Urban Land Institute. To make his case, he cited statistics from the recent census indicating that the population of Kerrisdale dropped by 800 people between 2011 and 2016, of Arbutus Ridge by 700 and of Dunbar by 300.

Besides looking at ways to introduce new, less expensive housing into those pricey west-side neighbourhoods and others, he also said the city would maximize the considerable amount of land it owns to create affordable housing.

Mr. Robertson said 3,000 homes could be created on just six important city sites. And he said planners will look at how to maximize housing around transit stations, along arterials, and in the city’s apartment zones, which have been frozen almost unchanged for more than a decade after council put in a moratorium on demolition and redevelopment.

Vancouver has undergone a phenomenal building boom since the early 1990s, with the downtown population more than doubling in size to 110,000 by last year.

But many people have worried that far too much of what’s being built is either luxury condos – the Westbank Vancouver House next to the Granville Bridge being just the latest example – or tiny studios and one-bedrooms that investors buy to rent out. And people have particularly worried that investors from mainland China, who are flooding the world with real estate purchases, are a big part of what’s driving real estate development.

That, in turn, has led to many criticisms that the Vision council let itself be too guided by developers, its major contributors, who built what was the easiest and most profitable to sell.

Mr. Robertson emphasized that planners will focus on getting the private market to build the kind of housing that people living in the city actually need.

“We don’t want more supply that’s just going to sit empty. In past years, the market was more focused on commodification than accommodation.”

In recent years, Mr. Robertson’s Vision council has moved to try to shape supply more by encouraging rental or, just last year, by insisting that developers had to build a certain number of two- and three-bedroom units in projects. However, the city has struggled to make those affordable even though developers are getting significant incentives to build them.

Mr. Robertson’s speech largely focused on housing for middle-income earners, though he did say that it’s possible that non-profit groups can create some deeply subsidized apartments if the city helps with free land. And he reiterated a frequent message that the city can only provide really low-cost housing with the help of the federal and provincial governments.

As is his custom, he shied away from blaming foreign investors for Vancouver’s huge housing-cost increases the past five years.

Instead, he said Vancouver, like other attractive global cities, is seeing the effects of “the biggest migration in the world” of people into urban areas.

quote:

City unveils multi-faceted housing plan to tackle affordability

The city has unveiled a multi-faceted housing plan aimed at tackling the affordability crisis in Vancouver that creates thousands of more rentals, allows for a better mix of homes and develops units that will be tied to a person’s income.

Without a shift in its current housing strategy, city officials warned at a news conference Thursday that only those people with above average incomes could afford the 47,800 homes projected to be built in Vancouver over the next 10 years.

“What we’ve been hearing is that young people and families are not able to find affordable rental opportunities and they’re also not able to find places that they would like to buy and stay in,” said Kathleen Llewelyn-Thomas, the city’s general manager of community services, at a news conference at city hall Thursday. “Our statistics are showing that families and young people are leaving Vancouver at a very high rate – an alarming rate, 20 per cent since the last census.”

Of the 47,800 new homes projected to be built, the city estimated 26,800 will be rental units. But only 2,600 of those will be affordable for single people earning less than $50,000 per year; affordability is based on a person paying no more than 30 per cent of income on housing.

Families who rent and earn under $80,000 also face a severe gap in rental housing, with 4,250 homes projected to be built in 10 years – half of what is needed, according to a city staff report on the housing plan that goes before city council next Tuesday.

The report showed a steep decline – between 2006 and 2011 -- in the proportion of young households aged 25 to 39 living in Vancouver. During the same period, numbers of young children born in Vancouver also declined once they reached school age, likely reflecting a departure of growing families in search of affordable, family-sized housing, the report said.

The city’s housing plan, which still needs more public input and staff work before being finalized by council in July, focuses on building “the right supply” of housing to meet income levels of new families and keep young people from leaving the city.

That “right supply” includes townhomes, row houses, duplexes and housing that would be legally tied to a person’s income, as worked out in a covenant between the city, the developer and tenant or buyer of a home. The target age group for such housing is people between the ages of 20 and 44, the so-called “missing middle.”

“There’s a whole toolkit of things within the land use arena and within the housing policy and financial arenas that we need to leverage, and mix and match, so there’s not a single answer there,” said Gil Kelley, the city’s chief planner, when asked how incomes could be tied to housing.

But, Kelley said, the city could choose to set a standard amount of “inclusionary housing” on any project rather than negotiating with a developer on a site-by-site basis. He said many cities in the United States adopted the approach, which ties affordable housing to a new development. Offering density bonuses to developers for a certain amount of longterm affordable housing is another option, he added.

Other initiatives proposed by city staff include launching a one-year experiment to speed up the production of affordable housing by expediting build permits, develop 1,000 affordable housing units on eight city properties, expand the city’s Rental 100 program that provides incentives to developers to build rental housing, and build more rentals around transit stations.

The city report shows that in 2006, a young single person aged 20 to 35 earning $35,000 a year could afford the average one-bedroom rent of $868 per month in Vancouver. Rent today for that same apartment has increased 46 per cent to $1,268, which requires an income of $51,000 per year.

For families, the income required to own an East Side townhouse in 2006 was $90,000. Today, an 88 per cent increase in housing prices means a household income of more than $150,000 is needed to buy the same home.

In 2011, more than 46,000 renter households in Vancouver were spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. The majority of the households were in lower income brackets, the city report said.

The rent and housing increases have skyrocketed despite new housing starts – i.e. more supply to meet demand – averaging 5,000 units per year over the past decade. Vancouver saw a record year in 2016 with 9,800 new housing starts, which accounted for 35 per cent of all starts in Metro Vancouver.

“When it comes to the affordability and the tenure of housing that will come out of the supply in the next 10 years, it’s just not going to match what the community is needing,” said Llewelyn-Thomas on the reason for the city’s new housing plan.

Earlier this month, Mayor Gregor Robertson said in a speech to a crowd of about 300 developers and business people the “time is right to advance a conversation” about how the city can create more affordable housing while still preserving the essence of single-family neighbourhoods.

“We want to make sure we do this very carefully,” the mayor said in a 45-minute speech to guests and members of the B.C. chapter of the Urban Land Institute. “But at this point, we need to see change, we need to see new homes, new supply in our single-family home neighbourhoods.”

EvilJoven posted:

You can't possibly tow a twin axle dump trailer with electric brakes beh--

Powershift posted:

"vancouver snow"

Hah, gently caress off.

EvilJoven posted:

You can't possibly tow a twin axle dump trailer with electric brakes behind any of those things. We can only afford to own one vehicle while maintaining some semblance of fiscal responsibility and a lot of the time it needs to have that capability.



This is the small one. When we need to tow the much bigger one we use a much bigger truck but it's rare enough that we manage to avoid owning a vehicle that large and just use a company owned vehicle.

Powershift posted:

Also, in canada, the smart car is now electric only, and car2go is switching to mercedes CLA/GLAs

the trump tutelage posted:

GUESS AGAIN

EvilJoven posted:

You can't possibly tow a twin axle dump trailer with electric brakes behind any of those things. We can only afford to own one vehicle while maintaining some semblance of fiscal responsibility and a lot of the time it needs to have that capability.



This is the small one. When we need to tow the much bigger one we use a much bigger truck but it's rare enough that we manage to avoid owning a vehicle that large and just use a company owned vehicle.

RBC posted:

lol wait, you use your personal vehicle for work for an employer? I was assuming these were bullshit side jobs you were doing as an individual contractor.

Hope you're getting at least $2/km, lmao.

JawKnee posted:

why not just do this always for hauling stuff for, you know, work?

EvilJoven posted:

Just admit that there are legitimate reasons for people to own pickup trucks and I'll stop.

EvilJoven posted:

Powershift posted:

It always amazes me how universally, goons turn into drooling morons every time the pickup truck comes up. Like they're completely unable to comprehend the utility of having a vehicle you can curb, that's not completely hosed by potholes formed by canadian winters, that you can throw something dirty or smelly into the box without having to hose out your trunk.

Even if you have to use the box once or twice a week, it probably doesn't make sense to have a second vehicle, and driving around with an empty box the other 5 days a week MAKES GOONS SO GOD drat ANGRY ARRRRRRRRGH.

Powershift posted:

It always amazes me how universally, goons turn into drooling morons every time the pickup truck comes up. Like they're completely unable to comprehend the utility of having a vehicle you can curb, that's not completely hosed by potholes formed by canadian winters, that you can throw something dirty or smelly into the box without having to hose out your trunk.

Even if you have to use the box once or twice a week, it probably doesn't make sense to have a second vehicle, and driving around with an empty box the other 5 days a week MAKES GOONS SO GOD drat ANGRY ARRRRRRRRGH.

namaste faggots posted:

Driving a truck has nothing to do with utility and everything to do with pride of ownership and penis measuring

JawKnee posted:

Who's mad? I'd say if you're not using something all that often, then it's not the person being critical of you that needs to comprehend how utility factors into owning mah truuuck

OSI bean dip posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IocCC1-jeTY

Look at how the trucks are promoted. EvilJoven is just a slave to marketing and exploitation by his employers.

Powershift posted:

You can't turn your car into a truck for the time you need a truck. A truck functions perfectly well as a car without something in the bed. Better in most of canada where we call "vancouver snow" rain.

EvilJoven posted:

And when you need a truck to do truck things almost half the time you take it on the road yourself and when you take it on the road for work you're getting a stipend and handed a company credit card for gas?

The Butcher posted:

Hopefully small trucks are in vogue again when it dies eventually. Don't know what I'd replace it with now.

JawKnee posted:

Smart cars are going full-retard in the other direction

e: I had to push some stranger out of 2 inches of snow because his Smart Car2Go had gotten stuck there last month lol

EvilJoven posted:

And when you need a truck to do truck things almost half the time you take it on the road yourself and when you take it on the road for work you're getting a stipend and handed a company credit card for gas?

EvilJoven posted:

Just admit that there are legitimate reasons for people to own pickup trucks and I'll stop.

EvilJoven posted:

Most cars depreciate just as fast if not faster than a truck.

EvilJoven posted:

Most cars depreciate just as fast if not faster than a truck. We still do need a personal vehicle unfortunately, we just don't live a lifestyle in an area where we could go 100% car free.

JawKnee posted:

The only time I've ever needed a truck (ie: not buying timber, or building supplies, or for camping because I do all those in my sedan just fine) was for moving - and a pickup was less useful than a moving truck for that. But even if it weren't, a once-in-a-very-long-while occasion to need a bed for ~whatever~ is not a justification for owning one (ie: does not fulfil that 'utility' requirement), when the tradeoff is the extra cost of owning one (ie: fuel). Better off just renting one for the day when you need it.