Archive for September, 2006

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Ownership hits 62% of median income

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Market enters ‘uncharted waters’ as affordability plummets, RBC says

Derrick Penner
Sun

The cost of owning an average bungalow in Vancouver would eat up 62 per cent of the median income, a figure that exists in “uncharted waters” in terms of real estate unaffordability.

The finding is in RBC Economics’ latest Housing Affordability Index report, which found that B.C. and Alberta posted the sharpest declines in the affordability of housing.

“B.C.’s housing affordability continued to erode in every housing segment,” Derek Holt, RBC’s assistant chief economist said in a statement on Tuesday.

RBC said surging prices, which have far outpaced a healthy 4.6-per-cent growth in B.C. incomes over the past year, are to blame.

“Bungalow and townhome markets are setting new records while condos and standard two-storey homes lie close to 1990 records as the province’s housing market enters uncharted waters,” Holt added.

The RBC affordability index measures costs of owning condominiums, townhouses, bungalows and two-storey detached houses as a proportion of the pre-tax, median income. It assumes buyers make a 25-per-cent down payment with 25-year amortization.

On that measure, condominiums are the most affordable, consuming almost one-third of the median Vancouver income, townhouses would take up 46 per cent, and a two-storey detached home would require 67 per cent of that pre-tax pay.

The measure essentially means that median-income earners have been priced out of the single-family-home market in Vancouver.

Kevin Lutz, RBC’s B.C. mortgage manager, noted that banks would only approve mortgages to borrowers at a maximum of 32 per cent of their income as long as their total debt did not exceed 40 per cent.

Lutz added that if prices keep going up at current rates, or interest rates rise, the continual erosion of the affordability measure will knock more buyers out of the market.

“You always have a certain amount of people shopping for homes at the limit of their financing,” Lutz said.

If prices keep going up, he added, the laws of supply and demand will take hold and “more and more people will be forced to sit on the sidelines.”

“Then naturally, you’re going to have price adjustments, because less and less people will be able to afford [homes] and prices will go down.”

RBC’s findings echo the observations Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. has made over recent months, said CMHC market analyst Cameron Muir.

Earlier this month, Muir reported that the average mortgage payment in Vancouver hit $2,322, its highest level in 12 years and heights not seen since the last two housing-market peaks in 1994 and 1989.

Lutz said there is some measure of relief for buyers in sight in a levelling out of prices.

Muir said sales in recent months have fallen and inventories have risen, though those factors are “not enough evidence to identify a trend.”

“There will be a point at which homebuyers will be unwilling to continue buying homes immediately at the asking price,” Muir added, “and that will have a moderating impact on pricing.”

He expects that to be sometime in 2007, at which point price increases will be more in line with the rate of inflation.

Lutz said for now, the market still shows signs of strength. RBC’s mortgage approvals are exceeding rates that the bank saw last year.

He added that recently approved 30 and 35-year mortgage amortizations are helping to keep buyers within the affordable range as well. Lutz noted that the current posted rate of 6.75 per cent for a five-year mortgage is still less than one percentage point off the 40-year low recorded three years ago.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

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Developer, city clash over Olympic Village

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Plans for a ‘green’ project with West Coast design still in haggling stages

Frances Bula
Sun

False Creek is busy with building work, but plans for the Olympic village are unsettled with construction to start in six months. Photograph by : Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER – It is supposed to be a symbol of Vancouver: Cutting-edge environmentally; unique West Coast design; an inclusive place for this multi-faceted city.

But the Olympic village and first phase of housing in southeast False Creek are currently undergoing a turbulent ride with an as-yet uncertain outcome.

For two months the city and Millennium Properties, the developer that paid a record $193 million for the land, have been wrestling to balance economics, marketing, environmental design, an attempt at affordable housing and incredibly high expectations — while facing a looming deadline for a project that will ultimately cover eight city blocks. Construction has to start in six months.

IN THE MEANTIME:

– Experts say it will be a miracle if any of the market housing can be sold for less than $1,000 a square foot — the current price of luxury condos in Coal Harbour.

– The city and the developer are coming to difficult grips with the design. The city wants something that says Vancouver and sustainability. Millennium is anxious to have something it can sell for top dollar in the international market and doesn’t want something that has sustainability “painted on the side,” according to one of its architects at a painful and, at moments, explosive meeting last week.

– It could set a new standard in Vancouver and perhaps North America for an environmentally planned neighbourhood. Millennium has committed to everything the city required and a LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) gold standard. But the city’s head of sustainability, Tom Osdoba, says it still remains to be seen whether Millennium is going to throw itself into the last phase as aggressively as it could.

And, says Tom Osdoba, the city has had to repeatedly prod the developer, whose architects don’t have the expertise in green buildings that some other firms in town do, to bring in a stronger team of experts on sustainability. Millennium has done that, but questions remain about how that’s going to translate into the final design.

As for the “modest market” housing, the one-third of housing that was supposed to be for Vancouver’s middle-income residents, it’s not going to be one-third. And the 100-150 units out of the 1,100 are only going to happen because because city staff are preparing to ask council to allow an extra 90,000 square feet of density — worth close to $20 million at the price Millennium paid — to make it economically possible to build them. That’s in spite of what everyone agrees is an all-out Millennium effort to find creative solutions and to kick in some of its own profit. That potential deal got only narrow approval from the urban design panel, in a 4-3 vote, and is raising concern from some critics that it will mean altering the feel of the development as more density is shoehorned in.

Millennium’s team says all of this is to be expected in a project of this significance and magnitude.

“When we trust someone to make that much of an impact, there’s always controversy,” says Bob Rennie, who is planning the sales of the market condos for Millennium. “But in 17 years with Millennium, they’ve always taken the high road.”

The city’s southeast False Creek project manager, Jody Andrews, agrees the last two months have been filled with passion and debate.

“I think it’s actually very healthy. There’s been so much action and so much debate,” he said.

And he emphasizes that Millennium has met the city’s requirements for a “green” project and is now looking at ways to exceed those standards.

Meanwhile, city staff, the design panel that has to give approval to the project before it can go ahead, and politicians are waiting to see if Millennium is going to meet the high expectations.

This site has been debated and discussed for 10 years as Vancouver’s world-leading model of how to build a sustainable neighbourhood.

“There’s a general feeling that even with all the difficulties, we’re ultimately going to get there. The question is how painful will it be,” says Osdoba. “But in order for this to be a great project, the developer really has to embrace pushing very hard on sustainability. That still remains to be seen.”

Millennium representatives say they’ve gone beyond the call of duty in sustainability and they’re perplexed by the attitude that they haven’t gone quite far enough. They’ve brought in green experts from Seattle and Victoria, as the city had suggested, and incorporated sustainable elements that are way beyond simple green roofs or recycled building materials, they say.

“It’s been complex, but we feel like we’re basically there,” said Hank Jasper, Millennium’s project manager.

The biggest debate at the moment is over the design.

At last week’s urban design panel meeting, the city’s senior urban designer, Scot Hein, told Millennium’s architectural team that he and the panel need a clear idea about how the look of the buildings is going to express contemporary Vancouver and the project’s leading-edge environmental aspects.

“We are seeking buildings that promote sustainability in their architectural response,” said Hein, adding that the city is also looking for buildings that are “true to place” and reflect the city’s West Coast architecture, “specifically our tradition of responding to special light, view and landscape opportunities.”

Panel member after panel member commented that they couldn’t see how the buildings’ designs were reflecting environmental ideas.

“The character sketches we’ve seen, they’re divorced from the sustainability,” said architect John Wall.

“They are divorced,” responded Roger Bayley with Merrick Architecture, one of three firms that will build the 12 residential buildings in the project. “Our client wants a product he can market. He doesn’t believe sustainability has to be painted on the outside of the buildings.”

Project manager Jasper echoed that in an interview Sunday.

“You can mix sustainability and great design. You don’t need sod walls and 30-foot trees on the roof to make it sustainable.”

That’s why the architect Millennium has chosen for its most prominent building on the waterfront is Robert A.M. Stern, a New York-based architect with an international reputation. The buildings he has done here for Millennium, like City in the Park in Burnaby, and in New York for others are generally neo-classical looking and aimed at a very high-end market. In this week’s New York Times magazine, a penthouse in the 15 Central Park West building his firm designed is advertised for $20 million US.

Hein says Stern’s style is going to be a tough sell to the city and the urban design panel.

“That character is not expressive of sustainability in Vancouver. And if you try to marry sustainability to another style, that’s a tough marriage.”

Hein said it’s part of the city’s job to work with Millennium on recognizing that it can sell buildings that say “green.”

“I just think Millennium needs to get their heads around West Coast and expressive green buildings and do their version. We need to demonstrate that they can achieve high-quality buildings but also express sustainability ethics.”

He would like to see Millennium make more use of Vancouver’s pre-eminent architect, Arthur Erickson, who is currently slated to design only the community centre. Millennium is committed to using Stern as the architect for the waterfront residential building.

How that fundamental difference of opinion between the city and Millennium is going to be worked out is anyone’s guess at this point.

But, as architect Peter Wreglesworth commented at the end of last week’s urban design panel meeting: “Let’s just get the elephant on the table and we’ll take our licks. If your client wants to do something that is going to be a problem, let’s get it on the table.”

He acknowledged that everyone on the panel understands what Millennium’s dilemma is.

“I think we all know there are huge economic challenges to this project. I don’t think there will be a square foot that will be on sale for less than a thousand dollars.”

FACTS:

WHAT’S BEING DEVELOPED:

An Olympic athletes’ village of 250 units that will become social housing, along with about 750 high-end market units and about 100-150 “modest market” units.

Where: The centre portion of what’s known as southeast False Creek, a parcel of 20 hectares of city-owned land and five hectares of private land that stretches from Science World to the Cambie Bridge. Millennium is developing what’s called 2A, which is six hectares.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

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Device sticks it to would-be burglars

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Jim Jamieson
Province

Windowstick inventor Robert Allen demonstrates the use of his patented home-alarm device.

Robert Allen had a great idea one day in 2001 when he was driving away from a jobsite near Qualicum Beach.

It occurred to the construction contractor that he could tell from a distance which patio doors and windows weren’t locked and they would be easy pickings if he were a burglar.

“All it takes is one unopened window that a guy can see from the street to be the sole reason your house is burgled,” said Allen, who’s based in Parksville.

Allen’s great idea was to design and market a sophisticated type of “stick” that would do the same job as the piece of wood his customers often asked him to cut for them, to fit in the window or door’s metal channel and act as a low-tech burglar deterrent.

Five years later, Allen and his business partners — his wife, Jackie, and Ray Therrien — have invested more than a half-million dollars in the three-person company and now have their WindowStick device sold in 207 Wal-Mart stores across Canada.

The company got its first big break last fall when Wal-Mart OK’d demos in five of its stores.

The WindowStick (www.windowstick.com), which retails for $25 to $30, adjusts to fit any size sliding door or window and gives off a 110-decibel alarm when someone tries to dislodge it.

“Sales are great, better than anticipated,” said Allen, 47, who couldn’t disclose numbers.

WindowStick also is being sold at independently-owned stores. Allen said he’s about to receive delivery of his third 15,000-unit shipment from his Chinese manufacturer — three months ahead of schedule — to satisfy demand.

Turning an idea into a product on store shelves was challenging.

“We started in 2001 defining the product, going through the patent process, making it affordable, sourcing out manufacturing, setting up the company, doing test markets,” he said.

Allen tried to keep his contracting business going, but had to quit to work on his new venture full time.

“I’ve got more than one mortgage on my house now, you give up holidays, you give up a lot to build the dream,” he said.

© The Vancouver Province 2006

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Digital Internet VOIP Phones on an increase

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

With the advent of Internet phone service, customers have a huge and confusing choice — and it doesn’t yet include Telus

Peter Wilson
Sun

Shaw’s Corey Mandryk installs a digital phone that uses VoIP technology. Photograph by : Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun

Mike Jagger of Provident Security warns using a VoIP phone without a backup could compromise your security system. Photograph by : Peter Battistoni, Vancouver Sun

Getting a home phone used to be simple. You went with Telus and tried to get the best deal you could for the extras like voice mail and call forwarding.

Then you hoped you had its best deal for long-distance calling.

If you were more adventurous, you could sign up with a separate service for your long distance. Or you could try a separate phone company with lower rates — even though that service still worked over Telus lines.

Now, with the advent of Internet phone service you have a huge and confusing choice — which doesn’t yet include Telus, which is waiting for the digital dust to settle a bit.

According to Telus representative Jim Johannssen, the company is watching the consumer VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) market very carefully, and will launch its product when the company believes the time is right.

“We don’t need to be in that market right now,” he said.

In other words, Telus is likely waiting until the price wars have fizzled out and large numbers of the present combatants are history before it marches in with its product.

That decision leaves the field clear for the more than 90 companies in the market. These range from the mom and pop shop and specialty firms to eBay’s Skype offering to the likes of Vonage and Primus to cable providers like Shaw.

And they all promise something cheaper than you can get from Telus.

The biggest draws are free long distance in Canada and the United States, Shaw’s 1,000 free minutes of overseas calling to select markets in Europe and Asia, and, in some cases, extras like call waiting and call forwarding bundled in with low pricing.

Shaw’s president Peter Bissonnette — whose company brags it is adding a subscriber every 96 seconds (or about 900 a day) — said in an interview that one of the reasons Shaw is doing so well is that its 1,000 free minutes of overseas calling has resonated with Vancouver customers

“When we launched in downtown Vancouver, in the West End and that sort of thing, we were surprised that it wasn’t going as fast as we thought,” said Bissonnette. “The reason we added the 1,000 minutes of international calling was frankly because of the Vancouver market. People there tended to make more international calls than North American calls and so we’ve done that and now it’s really picked up.”

So enticing has been the lure of alternative phone technology that various pundits are predicting more than 20 per cent of the Canadian market will be using VoIP (but don’t tell Shaw it offers a VoIP service) by 2009.

So what’s a consumer to do when faced with all this confusion?

Well, the first thing would be to read everything you can find from any Voice over IP service you’re considering (down to the very last asterisk in the very last print or online promotion) and make sure you understand completely what you’re getting.

Subscribers can start with Skype, a free online software-based service for all of North America. There are umpteen bells and whistles — including phones — to go with this, so you’re not just sitting there at your PC with a headset on anymore.

Then come the most basic of modem-based services which offer nothing more than a local phone line hooked up to your high speed modem.

After you can go on to the more elaborate deals from the people at companies like those listed in our chart, which include extras. Some also offer wireless phone sets, so you’re not stuck with a single phone attached to your modem.

Then there are offerings like Shaw Digital Phone. Installers connect this service to your home phone wiring and jacks. It then uses a separate dedicated network (not the open Internet, although it still uses VoIP technology) to carry your calls until they reach the telephone lines.

One confusing element to begin with is that, in a marketing attempt to separate itself from its competitors, Shaw is saying in its advertising that its service is not VoIP (voice over Internet protocol).

“We don’t consider ours an Internet phone system,” said Bissonnette. “It’s on a separate network and so it doesn’t contend at all with any Internet traffic as opposed to a VoIP service which does.

“So there’s a distinct difference and that difference is important because it cost us a lot of money to build our own network.”

Rogers Home Phone in Vancouver, despite the fact that it seems to be in the same game as Shaw, is not actually a VoIP service at all. It leases Telus telephone lines and connects to the phone network in a local telephone office or wire centre.

In Ontario and New Brunswick, where Rogers is a cable provider, it operates like Shaw.

So, if your definition of VoIP is a phone system that goes over the open Internet and competes with all the traffic flowing there then, yep, Shaw is not VoIP.

However, Shaw does use VoIP technology, just as Telus does for parts of its telephone system.

Another area of debate is over 911 service.

Shaw, for example, says its 911 service is superior because calls to it are routed to the nearest emergency response centre and the call-back number and street address are also automatically provided to the emergency dispatcher.

Other services may have 911 calls routed to their own phone rooms before they get to an emergency service.

It would be best, if this worries you, to check with any of the VoIP services you’re considering as to exactly what their 911 service level is in your particular area.

Another major VoIP consideration is whether various services will work quickly with your home alarm system.

Shaw’s Bissonnette insists there’s no problem with alarm systems and Shaw even tells potential subscribers to its phone service that it will give them the name of an alarm company that will set it up if their alarm company balks.

“I have an alarm system and I’ve had our Shaw phone for a year and a half now and it works just fine,” said Bissonnette.

And Rogers said that where its calls flow over an IP network in Eastern Canada, its phones are “fully compatible with home alarm systems.”

On the other hand, there are those like Michael Jagger, president of Vancouver-based Provident Security, who say no one can provide a guarantee that current alarm technology will work with VoIP.

“I think people are confused a lot by Shaw’s marketing when they talk about it,” said Jagger. “They pretty much say directly that the service is not voice over IP. Well it is.”

Jagger said there is non-facilitated and facilitated VoIP and that facilitated VoIP, which Shaw has, is clearly superior.

Even so, Jagger, whose company guarantees an on-the-scene response time of five minutes, suggests anyone with a VoIP service go with a backup to their burglar and fire alarm system, such as wireless or radio.

“We’re not telling people not to get Shaw,” said Jagger. “Our biggest issue with the security that we’ve seen is that it’s just not consistent.

“The fact that you get a signal working once doesn’t mean that its going to work the second time.”

Jagger said his company has done a lot of research on the matter.

“And I’ve spoken with all the guys that are the forefront of the packet cable technology, which is what Shaw is using and just the bottom line is it’s just not there yet,” said Jagger.

“They would be love to be able to certify the equipment. People have got to know it’s still a risk and it’s not as simple as saying, ‘Well, it can work.'”

Jagger said that while the system manufacturers may, within a year or so, guarantee that their alarms will work consistently over VoIP, they don’t do so now.

“The technology will just mature.”

Jagger said the cost of a cellular backup system is $400 for installation and then $20 a month after that.

“That means you’re wiping out some of the cost savings of going with VoIP.”

[email protected]

– – –

THE FINE PRINT

Recently, Bell Canada estimated there were more than 90 companies offering Internet telephone service in Canada. Many are tiny and obscure, but there are a number with a large amount of public awareness. The following is an alphabetical listing of some of these and their rates.

Comwave:

Comwave’s iBasic phone service offers unlimited local calls with free iPhone to iPhone calling and caller ID block. $9.95 a month on a two-year deal or $14.95 on month-by-month.

iPhone Enhanced, which offeres enhanced 911 services, has eight extra services such as caller ID, call waiting, voice mail and Turbo speed dial: $14.95 a month on a two-year deal or $19.95 a month.

iPhone One Rate comes with same services as iPhone Enhanced plus unlimited Canada and U.S. calling. $29.95 a month.

Primus:

The Primus TalkBroadband Basic Service is local phone service over the Internet: $15.95 a month.

Talk Broadband Ultimate Bundle, including extra services such as call answer, caller ID block release, call display, visual call waiting, five-way calling, call forward, call hold: $19.95

Long distance plans are extra:

Five Anytime: five cents a minute to anywhere in Canada and the U.S., the U.K. and Hong Kong with other rates for other countries.

1000 Canada/US minutes. Call anywhere in Canada and the U.S. any time of day: $10 a month.

“I think people are confused a lot by Shaw’s marketing when they talk about it,” said Jagger. “They pretty much say directly that the service is not voice over IP. Well it is.”

Jagger said there is non-facilitated and facilitated VoIP and that facilitated VoIP, which Shaw has, is clearly superior.

Even so, Jagger, whose company guarantees an on-the-scene response time of five minutes, suggests anyone with a VoIP service go with a backup to their burglar and fire alarm system, such as wireless or radio.

“We’re not telling people not to get Shaw,” said Jagger. “Our biggest issue with the security that we’ve seen is that it’s just not consistent.

“The fact that you get a signal working once doesn’t mean that its going to work the second time.”

Jagger said his company has done a lot of research on the matter.

“And I’ve spoken with all the guys that are the forefront of the packet cable technology, which is what Shaw is using and just the bottom line is it’s just not there yet,” said Jagger.

“They would be love to be able to certify the equipment. People have got to know it’s still a risk and it’s not as simple as saying, ‘Well, it can work.'”

Jagger said that while the system manufacturers may, within a year or so, guarantee that their alarms will work consistently over VoIP, they don’t do so now.

“The technology will just mature.”

Jagger said the cost of a cellular backup system is $400 for installation and then $20 a month after that.

“That means you’re wiping out some of the cost savings of going with VoIP.”

THE FINE PRINT

Recently, Bell Canada estimated there were more than 90 companies offering Internet telephone service in Canada. Many are tiny and obscure, but there are a number with a large amount of public awareness. The following is an alphabetical listing of some of these and their rates.

Comwave:

Comwave’s iBasic phone service offers unlimited local calls with free iPhone to iPhone calling and caller ID block. $9.95 a month on a two-year deal or $14.95 on month-by-month.

iPhone Enhanced, which offeres enhanced 911 services, has eight extra services such as caller ID, call waiting, voice mail and Turbo speed dial: $14.95 a month on a two-year deal or $19.95 a month.

iPhone One Rate comes with same services as iPhone Enhanced plus unlimited Canada and U.S. calling. $29.95 a month.

Primus:

The Primus TalkBroadband Basic Service is local phone service over the Internet: $15.95 a month.

Talk Broadband Ultimate Bundle, including extra services such as call answer, caller ID block release, call display, visual call waiting, five-way calling, call forward, call hold: $19.95

Long distance plans are extra:

Five Anytime: five cents a minute to anywhere in Canada and the U.S., the U.K. and Hong Kong with other rates for other countries.

1000 Canada/US minutes. Call anywhere in Canada and the U.S. any time of day: $10 a month.

400 overseas minutes: Make long distance calls to 30 countries overseas: $10 a month.

Rogers Home Phone:

We’ve included Rogers in this list because there may be some confusion as to exactly what is being offered. In British Columbia, this service is not VoIP at all. It flows over telephone lines leased from Telus and then onto the telephone network.

It does, however, have similar offerings to Internet phones (likely because it does have such a service through its cable system in Eastern Canada).

Rogers’ service with one feature is $27.95 a month. This rises progressively until you have four to six features for $39.95. Unlimited North American calling is an additional $19.95 a month. Unlimited calling to Europe and Asia is another $34.95.

Shaw:

This uses VoIP technology, but within a private network that is connected to the telephone system. Never flows over the open Internet, according to Shaw, which has launched a major advertising campaign to distinguish itself from other services.

Attaches to your existing phone lines within your home.

Includes unlimited North American long distance and 1,000 free minutes of international calling to specified markets in Europe and Asia: $29.95 for first three months, after that $55 a month bundled with other Shaw services, $65 a month on its own.

Skype:

Canadian users of Skype, a software based service, get free calling — using a headset or a phone designed for the service — to anywhere in North America or to another Skype user around the world.

If you want to call outside North America to a landline, you pay the Skypeout rates, which can vary. For example, to Hong Kong, Russia and Britain you would pay 2.4 cents a minute. Calls to wireless phones are more.

You can also get a regular phone number from Skype through its SkypeIn service, which costs about $43 annually. With this, you get free voice mail.

Vonage:

Vonage’s Basic 500 plan offers 500 free minutes including free North American long distance and unlimited incoming calls. Calls outside North America are extra: $19.99 per month.

The Vonage Premium Unlimited package offers unlimited calling including free North American long distance: $39.99 per month, with calls outside the continent extra.

V-Phone service from your PC or laptop: Choice of the two accounts above with same pricing.

All services include voicemail plus, caller ID with name, call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling.

Yak WorldCity:

YakForFree offers a free virtual phone that you place on your computer and, like Skype, allows you to make free calls with a headset to any other Yak member around the world. Users can upgrade to YaktoAnyone and talk to any phone in Canada and the U.S. for two cents a minute.

Yak Unlimited offers free calling up to 3,000 minutes a month to North America, a public telephone number and a secondary number as well as three-way calling, caller ID, caller ID blocking, call forwarding, call waiting, call hold and call transfer, unified voice mail and messaging. Video phone calling. Low international calling rates: $29.95.

Please note: These are just outlines of what is offered and do not include everything any individual service can do for you. Go online and read services’ information thoroughly and make sure you understand exactly what you’ll be getting.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

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Tories pushed over leaky condos

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

Group wants to make sure PM will honour vow

Peter O’Neil
Sun

OTTAWA – A group representing some of B.C.’s estimated 65,000 victims in the $1.5-billion leaky condo crisis is giving Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government a deadline to prove it intends to honour its vow to review the government’s role and possible culpability in the disaster.

A representative of Human Resources Minister Diane Finley said earlier Monday that a new option has emerged since the minister wrote to victims in July saying the government couldn’t even “consider” a review while the government is being sued by some owners.

“We’re currently studying options as to how we can proceed without compromising current legal proceedings, as we have recently learned that there may exist review options that will not interfere in these proceedings,” Colleen Cameron, Finley’s press secretary, wrote in an e-mail to The Sun on Monday.

“Unfortunately, I can not provide detail about these options at this time, only assure you that we remain committed to a review.”

The president of a B.C. advocacy group said Monday she has asked the government to clarify its position by Sept. 30.

The tight deadline, she said, is intended to show whether the Harper government is sincere or just putting up “a smokescreen.”

“What is clear [is that] our society does not want owners of leaky homes to be re-victimized with false hopes and used for election purposes,” Carmen Maretic, president of Consumer Advocacy and Support for Homeowners, wrote in an e-mail to The Vancouver Sun.

B.C. Conservative MP John Cummins, meanwhile, has written to one leaky condo owner assuring him Harper will keep his Dec. 17, 2005 campaign promise.

“His commitment to carry out a review of the federal government’s involvement or contribution to the leaky condo disaster was an integral part of his platform to clean up government and restore accountability,” Cummins (Delta-Richmond East) wrote in a letter sent last week to Dan Healey.

“A commitment made by this prime minister can be relied upon. I have found Mr. Harper to be a man of his word,” wrote Cummins in the letter provided to The Sun by Healey.

Finley sent a letter on July 17 to CASH, a consumer group established to seek compensation for the thousands of B.C. residents whose homes and property values were devastated by moisture damage.

“As I’m sure you can appreciate, it would not be appropriate for me to comment or to consider initiating a review into leaky condo issues while these matters are before the courts,” she wrote.

CASH president Maretic, noting that leaky condo court cases were underway before the election promise, responded last week by accusing the government of breaking its commitment to voters.

Harper vowed during the election to “review CMHC’s handling of construction regulations and ‘leaky condos.'”

A press release accompanying the platform boasted that Conservative MPs pushed CMHC “to investigate how it failed to warn homeowners about potential problems with ‘leaky condos.'”

In an exclusive interview with The Vancouver Sun after the announcement, Harper said he’d consider compensation for condo owners following the review.

Cummins told Healey he has already advised the government on options to fulfil the promise.

“It is time to get this matter settled through a competent and credible transparent review process,” Cummins wrote to Healey.

“Any review, if it is to be credible, must be public and clearly independent of” the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), a federal agency.

Healey also released a letter Cummins sent to Finley in April that called on the government to strike a formal inquiry under the federal Inquiries Act.

The MP, whose research uncovered federal documents from the early 1980s warning of a potential housing disaster in coastal areas due to new federal housing regulations, said the condo disaster could very well repeat itself.

“All the factors that were in place in the late ’70s are in place again,” Cummins wrote, citing rising energy prices and growing pressure to build energy-efficient housing.

“Finding out what went wrong in Vancouver and the federal government’s role in it may turn out to be an extraordinarily important work and have significant impact on the future.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2006

 

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Bert’s house on the block

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

: Six bedroom, seven bathrooms in MacKenzie Heights

Damian Inwood
Province

Todd Bertuzzi’s gone to Florida and his Vancouver house is for sale. Photograph by : Wayne Leidenfrost, The Province

Canuck fans with deep pockets could get a chance to relax in the rec room where Bert and Nazzy used to play indoor hockey.

For just under $2 million, the Vancouver house that Todd Bertuzzi lived in during his last season can be yours.

“They had it set up with a couple of hockey nets and there were some Naslund-Bertuzzi games going on in here using those squishy balls,” realtor Elizabeth McQueen chuckled yesterday.

“They also had a foosball table and great big oversize furniture.”

The 4,500-square-foot MacKenzie Heights home boasts six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, radiant floor heating, inlaid marble foyer and basement sauna.

The four-car detached garage is “big enough for a couple of Hummers,” said McQueen.

When Bertuzzi was traded to the Florida Panthers, he left his furniture at the house until he moved into a new pad in an enclave with other hockey-star homes near West Palm Beach.

Now the house, on the market for two months, stands empty on a 60-by-132-foot lot at the corner of West 36th Avenue and MacKenzie.

The price has been reduced by $100,000 and McQueen expects it to sell in the next 30 days.

She’s carved out a niche market since 1998 as the realtor for many of the Canucks players.

“On average, I probably help 95 per cent of players on the team,” she said. “I just came back from training camp. When they’re not skating, there’s time to talk about their accommodation needs.”

McQueen said Bertuzzi’s den once housed a big-screen TV and a massage chair where the power forward would go for his pre-game nap.

She said that Bertuzzi and his wife Julie were sorry to leave the home with their daughter Jaden, and son Tag.

“It was a great family house,” she said. “One bedroom was set up like a little princess room and the young boy’s was set up with NHL and Canuck stuff all over the place.”

© The Vancouver Province 2006

 

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Business Tools, Small And Smart

Monday, September 18th, 2006

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Steve’s simple solution

Monday, September 18th, 2006

Michael Urlocker
Other

Inventors tackle big hairy problems. Successful innovators somehow keep it simple. Management consultant Michael Urlocker shows how Apple’s co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs keeps the balance.

Dozens of Web, telecom and broadcast companies have their eyes on the TV market. There is a sense of opportunity among Web startups and a feeling of escalating concern among broadcasters that something is about to change.

We can see the signs:

– YouTube, a Web startup that lets consumers load their favorite video clips onto the Net, is attracting more than 100 million free downloads daily;

– NBC Universal said it would make all its new Fall shows available free on the Net;

– Telephone companies including Telus are dabbling in new TV distribution systems as an alternative to cable-TV at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in new infrastructure;

– Cell-phone companies, including BlackBerry and Mobi-TV are offering short video clips in partnership with content suppliers.

It is not clear how the broadcast business will evolve or which, if any, of these initiatives will be sufficiently profitable to sustain itself.

But last week, Apple Computer Inc. showed a sneak preview of a new living-room device that, like many of Apple’s big hits, is surprisingly simple and may be the big winner. Apple’s iTV is a small box that sits beside and plugs directly into a TV, like a DVD player.

It allows consumers to watch on their large screen TV any video that they buy from Apple’s new iTunes movie service or hundreds of amateur video podcasts. No direct connection to a PC is required; that link can be wireless to a computer in another room. The $300-iTV is operated with a small remote control.

The iTV is not the first device to allow TVs to be wirelessly connected to a PC: Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and others have made so-called media extenders in recent years. Apple’s device has its limitations: iTV movies will be near-DVD quality, which may not be good enough for large-screen TVs.

Microsoft’s efforts in television are interesting because its two biggest projects have been duds: One was WebTV (Imagine watching 24, then clicking on screen to buy Jack Bauer’s suede jacket … Apparently only Microsoft engineers imagine such things) the other was the all-singing, all-dancing Media Center PC (introduce all the hassles of Windows into your living room).

What Apple does, and does well, is to streamline technical issues, making it painless for non-technical people to use technologies.

A lot of engineers and managers involved in new products want to emulate Apple for its “cool-factor” or its ability to wow consumers.

The idea that new services and products must be easy for consumers to use is well understood, but getting there is very difficult. In many cases engineers and executives get caught up larding-on multiple features or functions without accepting that each one pushes the goal of simplicity further away.

If we look at Apple’s new iTV device and the company’s earlier disruptive innovations, the iPod and the Macintosh computer, the following can be observed:

– Limited-functionality: not the swiss-army-knife approach;

– Apple integrated standard hardware and controlled the software;

– Apple innovated on the most important parts of the experience that were not good enough for users. In the case of iPod, it was simplifying and legitimizing what had been until then largely an illegal process of downloading. In the case of the Mac, Apple focused on simplifying the PC command system using a mouse and menus. For iTV, Apple is shielding consumers from all the hassles of PC (operating system, software, configuration, etc.) to allow them to do one thing: watch movies.

Is Apple’s iTV the right approach? We probably won’t know for two years, but we can observe that it fits the pattern of how people watch TV: People plug their DVD players in and they click the play button. More importantly, iTV fits with how people are using iPods and what they pay for: Apple has sold more than 1.5 billion downloaded songs and 60 million iPods. In less than a year, Apple has sold 45 million TV episodes.

Since co-founding Apple 30 years ago, Steven Jobs has shown himself to be a serial-disruptor. Apple, the company, has not fared as well, suffering severe volatility in its fortunes and a few near-death experiences. Not many companies can depend on a genius CEO to save them the way Apple has. But companies can follow Mr. Job’s strategy of:

– Focusing on what users actually do and pay for rather than what engineers think they might do;

– Zeroing in on only the part of the user experience that needs to be improved.

Radio stations are starting to blame a decline in audience and some station closings to the proliferation of iPods. Satellite radio broadcasters XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. are reporting slower growth and steep losses as consumers weigh the iPod as an alternative to radio in their cars, causing share prices for the two companies to crash more than 40% in the past year.

Apple boasted last week that 70% of U.S. 2007 car models will allow easy iPod connectivity, which will likely accelerate the harsh trend for radio broadcasters.

An important question arises for TV broadcasters and cable companies: How will they prepare for the iPod’s impact on TV?

Michael Urlocker is a chartered financial analyst and chief executive of Toronto-based OnDisruption, a management consulting firm. Innovators, check your Disruption Score at www.OnDisruption.com

© National Post 2006

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Teachers speak out of turn

Monday, September 18th, 2006

Greg Toppo
USA Today

By Julie Hunter for USA TODAY Lisa Cooper, a fourth-grade teacher at Villa Rica (Ga.) Elementary, has had 5,600 hits since February on her blog, History is Elementary.

Thought process: Cooper uses he husband’s laptop from home at day’s end to update her site.

When the fed-up young teacher decided to quit her job in rural North Carolina in June, her resignation letter was brief — three lines. But she had more to say.

So she spoke her mind online, in an anonymous, 1,000-word Internet posting to her principal that recounted in grim detail racist teachers, obligatory prayers at faculty meetings, “What would Jesus do?” lectures and a “terrible” vice principal who “tries to sleep with the coaches.”

Although all names, including those of the school and city, were withheld, the letter was widely read. For three years, the thirtysomething teacher had been writing a popular Internet weblog, or blog, under the pseudonym First Year Teacher.

She’s one of hundreds of teachers who blog these days, uploading details from their daily lives for a firsthand look at the maddening, exhilarating, often heartbreaking world of the modern public school.

Perhaps because they are so raw and unscripted, teacher blogs — often written anonymously for fear of reprisal — are finding an audience.

Blog tracking website Technorati.com lists 848 teacher blogs; a few boast thousands of hits a week. Bloggers say readers include state or local education officials — even gubernatorial and congressional aides. College education professors have added blogs to aspiring teachers’ reading lists. And, when a school is identified or otherwise known, parents, students and colleagues read them to find out what’s really going on.

“It’s the equivalent of a dispatch from the front lines or a letter written in a foxhole,” says Alexander Russo, a former teacher and congressional education adviser who tracks the trend in his own blog, This Week in Education.

But free speech can get messy. In Winona, Minn., in March, school administrators blocked in-school access to a blog that let teachers and administrators criticize, among others, their superintendent.

A young teacher in Arkansas lost his job after blogging about having to teach wood shop without any equipment.

Another, at Chicago’s Fenger High School, began posting an anonymous blog with unflattering details about the school, including accounts of chaos after kids pulled fire alarms. The pandemonium included vandalism, fistfights, “textbooks, chalk, erasers and people being thrown out of windows” and students smoking pot while leaning against the assistant principal’s car.

Over spring break, students figured out who he was and, fearing for his own safety, he resigned.

But most other blogs are less corrosive affairs.

Lisa Cooper, 44, a teacher in Atlanta who blogs under “elementaryhistoryteacher,” says her blog helps her gather her thoughts and speak for herself.

“As a teacher, I feel like people don’t listen to me. Parents don’t listen to me, politicians don’t listen to me, the media doesn’t listen to me — but everybody tries to tell me how to do my job.”

Like hers, most teacher blogs are little more than personal journals, written as reflections on a tough day, a difficult student or parent or, perchance, a thrilling lesson.

Bloggers post ideas and inspirations — and commiserate when good lessons go bad.

“I read some of these blog posts and I feel like this sort of opens a door for me that would otherwise be shut,” says blogger Joanne Jacobs, author of the 2005 book Our School. She likens bloggers to embedded war correspondents: “They don’t see the whole war, but they see one part very intensely.”

Most blithely mix the personal with the professional. One Tuesday in July, Cooper celebrated her 100th posting — and her husband’s birthday. Her next posting carried a brief tribute to her mother, who had died the previous morning after a lengthy illness.

In that sense, teacher blogs are not unique. A study in July by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 77% of bloggers keep blogs to express themselves creatively, with 37% citing their lives and experiences as their primary topic. An estimated 8% of Internet users, or 12 million U.S. adults, keep a blog, the study said; 55% blog under a pseudonym.

First Year Teacher, who has since moved to Oregon and who still blogs anonymously, says she started her blog to keep up with friends from Teach For America, the elite program that places college graduates in teaching jobs.

First Year Teacher’s blog soon grew into a way to respond to people who had simplistic views about teaching — she says she was disappointed that parents expected, in her words, “the Michelle Pfeiffer version” of a teacher: perky, tenacious, happy-go-lucky.

“You do have moments of wonderful things happening, but it’s a difficult job,” she says.

Her blog is generally cranky, but with moments of humor: “I am on a million committees because that is what English teachers do.”

Jay Bullock, 31, an English teacher in Milwaukee who writes rambles and rants at folkbum.blogspot.com, blogged anonymously for six months beginning in 2003 but ended up going public. “I have a pretty strong union, so I’m not worried about reprisal,” he says.

He blogs to defend public education in general and teachers specifically. “So much of the criticism of education that I read is from people who don’t actually have a good sense of what goes on day-to-day in the classroom,” he says.

Joe Thomas, 37, a high school history teacher in Mesa, Ariz., writes Shut Up and Teach. He calls it “therapeutic” and rarely writes about his classroom. He often writes simply to defend teachers. “Public education does a really good job,” he says. “Warts and all, it’s one of the best things government has ever done.”

But a few teachers write “warts and all” accounts of what goes on in schools — and it isn’t pretty.

In Get Lost, Mr. Chips, Matt Lotti, 25, a substitute teacher in Lehigh Valley, Pa., visits a new school each day and writes about out-of-control teachers and military recruiters following high schoolers through lunch lines. “I feel like I’m in Alice in Wonderland,” he says. “Nobody uses their heads.”

But that approach is dangerous, says blogger Dennis Fermoyle, 55, a Warroad, Minn., history teacher who writes the blog From the Trenches of Public Ed.

“I think sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot. If you’re in public education, you’ve got to understand that when you do things like that you’re really adding to the load against us. Bad things happen, there’s no question, but a lot of good things happen, too.”

They may make good reading, but do blogs make schools better?

The blogosphere split over that question last spring, when the anonymous teacher-blogger at Chicago’s Fenger High posted a series of rambling, caustic narratives titled Fast Times at Regnef (Fenger spelled backward). He painted a picture of a dangerous, chaotic school where students showed up stoned, skipped class to sell drugs, trashed teachers’ cars and had sex in the hallways.

As it turned out, the blogger, who quit after students learned his identity, was a history teacher who had helped a group of students make it to the county finals of a mock trial competition.

“A lot of kids liked him,” Fenger principal William Johnson says. “He was a popular guy. “

Johnson says that about a third of what was said was true but that he “just tore down a lot of bridges and embarrassed a lot of people.”

In the end, though, the attention “forced us all to take a look at ourselves.” Fenger’s student council started a peer jury for discipline proceedings, and students voted to adopt uniforms for fall semester.

Although Johnson says he doesn’t agree with what the teacher did, “he got the attention of the school community.”

 

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Science of autism gets to the basics

Monday, September 18th, 2006

Kathleen Fackelmann
USA Today

One step at a time: Ethan takes a homework break with his father, curt Meeder. Research has suggested that autism affects more regions of the brain than prviously thought, and complex or rapic-fire instructions can cause the child to freeze or “tune out.”

A steady pace: Ethan does best when he is not bombarded with too many instructions.

When Ethan Meeder doesn’t follow directions at school, it’s not because he’s stubborn.

The 13-year-old seventh-grader from the Pittsburgh area has a brain that shuts down when he has to process too much at one time. For example, last spring Meeder’s teacher gave him four commands, one right after the other. “He just melted down,” says his mother, Cindy Meeder.

Ethan has an average I.Q., yet he has trouble with things that most people take for granted, such as following directions. “He tests like he should be able to do these things, but he can’t,” Cindy Meeder says.

Ethan has autism, an incurable brain disorder that afflicts about 300,000 school-age children in the USA, according to Los Angeles-based Cure Autism Now.

Studies released in July and August have helped increase scientists’ understanding of how autism affects the brain. The studies fit with other research that suggests that autism is not limited to a few brain regions as once thought, but instead is a global disorder that affects reasoning, memory, balance, multitasking and other skills.

Simple instructions

In the past, scientists believed autism was confined to the brain areas that controlled social interaction, language and behavior. But the new findings indicate that autism affects many parts of the brain and possibly the wiring that connects one brain region to another.

Though some children with autism are mentally retarded, University of Pittsburgh researcher Nancy Minshew and colleagues studied 56 children with autism who had an I.Q. of at least 80, close to the average I.Q. of 100.

The Pittsburgh team gave the children a battery of tests that assessed memory, attention and other skills. The team found that those with autism had no trouble with basic tasks. Many of these children were proficient at spelling and had a good command of grammar, says co-author Diane Williams, also of the University of Pittsburgh.

But the study did find that children with autism faltered when asked to do more complex tasks. While they’re good at details, such children have trouble piecing words together to get the meaning of an entire paragraph or story. They also had difficulty understanding complex figures of speech such as idioms and metaphors. If you tell a child with autism to “hop to it,” he might literally start to hop around the room, Minshew says.

The study, which appears in the August issue of Child Neuropsychology, suggests that children with autism have trouble processing complex information. When a teacher or parent gives a series of rapid-fire commands, the child with autism might get confused and then freeze, Minshew says.

The research suggests kids such as Ethan do better in school with simple instructions given one at a time. “If you give them more detail, they tune it out or they freak out,” Minshew says.

Abnormal wiring?

A second study suggests a biological explanation for the difficulty: A study published online in the journal Cerebral Cortex indicates that the corpus callosum, which connects one part of the brain to another, may be abnormal in autistic people. In this study, people with autism were asked to complete a computer task that requires two parts of the brain to work together.

Brain scans showed that people with autism relied mostly on one brain area to solve the computer puzzle, says Marcel Just, lead author of the study and director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University. The findings suggest that people with autism don’t have an efficient way to transfer information from one brain region to another, he says.

The findings add to the emerging picture of autism, but researchers have yet to pinpoint the basic flaws in the brain, says Alice Kau, an autism expert at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

“We still have a lot to learn when it comes to autism,” Kau says.

While everyone waits for the answers that may one day lead to better treatments, Just says parents can take steps now to help their children.

Cindy Meeder is doing just that: With the help of the Pittsburgh research staff, she’s working with Ethan to better negotiate his world.

Every day after school, Cindy Meeder tells Ethan to check his agenda book. She tells him to open his textbook to the right page and then has him go through his homework step by step.

That will help get Ethan through middle school, but Cindy Meeder sometimes wonders about what lies ahead: “We just have to figure out how to get Ethan to do as well as he can.”

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