Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

The Federal version of the municipal proposal to take over failed housing projects and convert them to subsidized housing . This feels timely not just because of the urgent need for affordable housing but because there's government will to spend for this purpose.

Like the micro-farms Food Security pilot proposal , this is an attempt to tackle several problems with a single proposal. With Canada-wide willingness to spend money on affordable housing, now seems the best time to tackle: Affordable housing, by making rent a fixed percentage of income (e.g., 30%) Failed construction projects that not only lie dormant for a long time but tend to restart as even more expensive housing Preventing people from falling into worse situations and requiring even more social services And in doing so the government incidentally gets ownership to more property instead of repurposing or buying property. Compared to 2023 when residential tower projects might end up in receivership maybe one a month, nowadays it's around one a week as of 2025 in Metro Vancouver. There's no shortage of projects to choose from instead of allowing them to sit idle. The idea for this proposal began when I asked ChatGPT to tell me about Vienna's Social Housing where apparent...

I didn't end up sending this out but after the Food Security Pilot proposal  had been emailed, it occurred to me who else also had big lawns of grass drinking water especially when hot summers demand more prudent use of water.

Burnaby recently had a housing initiative where homeowners could apply for grants to help them modify their homes to have rental suites or laneway homes. While I'm sure this will increase the amount of rental inventory available, I felt that for the average person, the barriers to participation were too high, primarily: Not even knowing how to get started evaluating whether they could add a rental suite or laneway home. The cost of doing so even with the grant. I wondered how homeowners could use their properties to help Burnaby in an extremely simple way, and with GROK AI we came up with the idea of micro-farms. It addresses climate change, water conservation (or at least better water usage than grass), and food security. And all the homeowner needs to do is sign up and not interfere. No access to their home would be necessary, just access to their lawn and external power and water outlets. I'm sure the implementation will end up more complicated than we imagined, but I hope a...