In what should be a surprise to no one, Concord Pacific Group has bought half a block of Hastings Street very near to the Woodwards Development.

Bob Rennie, the condo king who sold all 536 Woodwards condos in a single day, is moving his office to Chinatown. Rennie laments there is no land left downtown on which to erect and sell the visually vacuous residential edifices which have made him a very rich man.

“The urban core,” says Elvin Wyly, chair of UBC’s urban studies department, “is becoming a truly elite market.”

Pivot Society lawyer and housing activist, David Eby, who is not one to mince words, wonders if Concord cares about people as well as profits. Mark Townsend of the Portland Hotel Society thinks they do, and Wendy Pedersen of the Carnegie Community Action Project thinks they don’t. But Concord has cared and will continue to care, providing that any care they dispense makes sense to their single bottom line.

Everyone knows the Downtown Eastside has got to change, preferably into a vibrant, mixed-income neighbourhood, and not Coal Harbour East. But how are we going to house all the people that revitalization will displace?

Last March, the Inner City Inclusive Housing Table, under the auspices of VANOC, published a report that contained 24 recommendations to end homelessness by 2010. Participants at the table included David Eby, Salient Group developer Robert Fung, City of Vancouver housing guru Cameron Gray, and the Greater Vancouver Home Builders Association’s Peter Simpson.

The Housing Table’s report recommendations have been endorsed by more than 100 organizations. Economist Marc Lee’s article in the Tyee demonstrates that it would be feasible to construct 3,200 units of affordable housing in the next 1,000 days.

But we all know it probably won’t happen. Despite the city’s participation on the Housing Table, the NPA-dominated council voted to accept the recommendations with reservations and political posturing about “provincial funding constraints.” Funding constraints, just like the poor, are always with us, but where there is political will, there is almost always a way.

Councillor Kim Capri says she doesn’t know if the city could, or should be doing more on housing. But no one is really sure whether the city is doing anything but spinning and spamming.

I’d heard rumours, after the 9/11 fallout, that Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two US presidents, was a fascist, or at least a nazi sympathizer. It seems these rumours might be true.

BBC Radio has developed a documentary about coup plotted in 1933 that was “aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.”

More information about the plot and the documentary is available here from Harper’s columnist, Scott Horton.

I wonder whose policies the lizard brains will want to adopt after the next great depression has its way with us?

Mr. V. and I went to Anducci’s with a bit of curiosity and few expectations. Mr. V. was in the mood for pasta, and I had read that Anducci’s served a gluten-free (aka rice) variety, which would suit my most recent dietary experiment. One can only eat so much risotto.

We arrived at their Hastings Street location around 7pm last Friday, to find a mostly empty restaurant. The walk from the parking lot to the main entrance requires a stroll past a collection of statuary—eight are reproductions of Roman gods and goddesses—the ninth is a reproduction of the Hebrew King, David, whose reproduced package is unsubtly positioned at eye level.

Our experience more or less plateaued from there. We declined a seat on the statue-lined outdoor patio overlooking busy Hastings Street, and were seated by an open patio door that afforded us a great view of Venus’ comely and no doubt carb-free derrière.

Anducci’s food is not inexpensive, although they attempt to create the pretense that it is by serving it in huge heaps.

I ordered the Chicken Basilico, which was described as a rose sauce with roasted chicken, pesto, artichoke hearts, red peppers, pumpkin seeds, and marscapone. They were all in there somewhere, hiding in the mountain of rice noodles. In the end, I found two quarters of a canned artichoke heart and several chunks of what was clearly processed chicken.

Mr. V. ordered some sort of rotini concoction that came with chicken, snap peas, and bits of fluorescent pink sausage that tasted like slices from a dime store pepperoni. His pasta, at least, was properly cooked.

Neither of us were impressed enough to consider a second visit to this fun house, despite their efforts to accommodate dietary restrictions. Huge portions do not substitute for high quality.

Anducci’s is a forced and contrived facsimile of the Italian kitchen, much as KFC is a facsimile of the kitchens of the Deep South, except Anducci’s is a sit down place, decorated to manufacture fun.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the ladies’ restroom. The commodes are elegant, and the tiled walls are quite lovely. One cannot help but notice, however, the blown up black and white homo-erotica: Tighty-whities and six packs, even one image of a gentleman in a studded collar and daddy hat. It was tasteful enough, but too “in your face” and the “nudge nudge, wink wink” got old really fast.

Mr. V. was not impressed enough by my description of the ladies’ room to find out what treats were in store for gentlemen.

Those of any gender who are hung up on political correctness might find the restrooms objectionable. Likewise parents of young children.

If you are an emerging adult, however, living out in the suburbs, and you don’t want to take the bus all the way into Gastown for dinner at the Spaghetti Factory, Anducci’s just might be ideal for you.

Anducci’s Cucina
6011 East Hastings Street
Burnaby

This post isn’t about the civic strike or the smell of uncollected garbage that is about to pervade our fair city.

Doug Struck at the Washington Post has written a spot on article about Winter2010 goings on, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and unfulfilled Olympic housing promises.

Just in case you aren’t on the Think City email list, this arrived in my inbox this morning:

Since 2002 , Think City has been working to foster civic engagement and citizen participation in Vancouver. We’ve hosted conferences, convened panels, conducted surveys and published the twice monthly Think City Minute.

Now we want to take it up a notch, so mark your calendars for Sunday, October 21 and plan to attend our Dream Vancouver conference.

Think City believes that all of us can help shape Vancouver’s future by promoting public participation in the development of new ideas and proposals – for housing, transportation, the environment, culture and the health of our neighbourhoods.

At Dream Vancouver, Think City will bring citizens together to network and share ideas on the most pressing challenges facing the City of Vancouver. This full-day program features internationally renowned speaker and facilitator Bliss Browne from Imagine Chicago, and former City of Vancouver Co-Director of Planning Larry Beasley. The conference is intended to launch a year-long development of an inclusive Citizen’s Agenda for Vancouver leading up to the next municipal election

Mr. V. and I are leaving for the Island early tomorrow for our friend Lornna’s wedding. It’s the wedding of the decade because that’s about how often anyone we know ties the connubial knot these days. We are all praying it doesn’t rain in Saxe Point Park, where the service will be held regardless of what the weather gods decide.

I’ll be bringing a laptop, but it’s unlikely I’ll be posting until the middle of next week. Happy sunny weekend.

Can Canadians trust the Canadian Medical Association to represent the interests of the public health care system?

The CMA’s president-elect, Dr. Brian Day, who is CEO of the privately-owned Cambie Surgical Centre in Vancouver, says we can.

Michael McBane, writing in the Tyee, says we can’t.

Of the 6.5 billion human omnivores on the planet, probably less than a billion of us are fortunate enough to be picky about the provenance of the food on our plates. This is a book for privileged eaters, for whom eating is complex–rife with questions about ethics, aesthetics, sustainability, and health that transcend the struggles for subsistence and survival.

Although no one, including Pollan, can give us definitive answers to these questions, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is remarkable for its breadth and the quality of its writing. It won the 2007 James Beard Foundation’s award for the best food writing.

Sub-titled A Naural History of Four Meals, Pollan’s book travels four food production chains–conventional argribusiness, organic agribusiness, local grass-based farm, and hunter-gatherer–to the creation and consumption of meals from MacDonald’s, Whole Foods, Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms, and hunting and foraging in and around Sonoma, California.

Admittedly, the final meal, which included morels Pollan had foraged with a chef who had worked at Chez Panisse, a wild pig he killed with the assistance of Sicilian food lover, blacksmith, and cook, Angelo Garro, bread he baked with wild yeast caught in his rarified neighbourhood, and cherry galette made by hand with fruit scavenged from Fulton Street trees, was a bit of an elitist conceit, but this was not glossed over by Pollan.

This meal was also a tribute, prepared for and shared with those who had taken him on his hunting and foraging journeys, and more complex than the other three meals.

The description of these journeys was the most revelatory part of the book for me; hunting, gathering, and preparing food took up much of our distant and not so distant ancestors’ time, often in demanding and dangerous circumstances; other living things must die if we are to go on living. Pollan is a journalist, and his book was descriptive, not prescriptive, encouraging us to continue asking questions and making better choices about food, food politics, and food systems:

“…imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we’re eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost…we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more than the body of the world.”

In my inbox tonight:

Time is running out to tell the CRTC that media choice is important to you. A handful of corporations already control much of what Canadians see on TV, hear on the radio and read in our daily newspapers.

That means less local and regional content, less analysis of the events that shape our lives, less representation of minority communities and fewer jobs for Canadian media workers. It’s time to let decision-makers in Ottawa know that Canadians care about media choice. Canadians expect a diversity of voices on our TVs and radios and in our newspapers.

Because ownership matters, we need rules to limit how many outlets a single company can own. We also need more support for public, independent and community-based media. The CRTC is accepting letters until Wednesday July 18. Please act today.

Link to send letters to the chair of the CRTC: http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/CRTC_diversity/id8ks5erywk8eb7?

Russia has refused to cooperate with British efforts to arrest Andrei Lugovoi, chief suspect in the radiation-poisoning murder of former KGB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, in Britain last year. In retaliation, Britain has expelled four Russian diplomats from their London embassy.

Meanwhile, Vladmir Putin, who is expected to step down from the Russian presidency in the near future, has been messing about with some interesting weapons–missiles that are apparently too fast and too accurate to be detected by existing missile defense systems.

Fed up with U.S. hegemony, Putin has made friends with petroleum-rich Iran, Qatar, and Venezuela.

As the world’s balance of power subtly shifts, George Bush, who still thinks he has Putin eating out of his hand, spent a few days with him last week eating Maine lobster and playing with dogs and speed boats. Oh, and backpedalling on American plans for missile interceptors in Poland.

Interesting times ahead.