Harnessing the power of shame1  TREVOR BODDY
From Friday's Globe and Mail

Vancouver's city-building over the past year has been dominated by two  intertwined issues: housing the homeless, and affordability for the rest  of us. These are dual manifestations of the same problem: the inability,  to date, of our political, bureaucratic and development leaders to deliver more housing at lower prices to the Lower Mainland.

While house, and especially condo, prices are expected to recede here somewhat next year, Vancouver is stuck with a problem that could be its undoing as a metropolis: we pay Canada's highest housing prices on significantly less than Canada's highest salaries.

Paying our nation's highest ratio of incomes for housing is no more a minor bother — some inevitable West Coast eccentricity — than is this city's worsening drug problem. Last July saw Statistics Canada's publication of Head Office Employment in Canada, 1999-2005, a deeply sobering analysis of this city's track record in creating good jobs compared with our urban competitors.

• 1. ref: http://mail.architexturez.net/+/In-Enaction/archive/msg02422.shtml