EQ Journal

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Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame Acceptance Speech

By: Bruce M Firestone, Founder, Ottawa Senators Date: June 6, 2012 Thank you for inviting me here tonight. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be here with my family, friends, colleagues, Sens fans and executives as well as Board of Directors from the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame. I got word that [...]

Want Higher Density Communities?

Then First Build Out not Up (This is an article I wrote in 2003 concerning the policy direction of then Kanata Councillor, Peggy Feltmate who continued in a long line of municipal politicians to oppose building the City outwards in the mistaken belief that this would prevent building upwards. Her goal and mine were the [...]

Rent Curves

How Developers can Make More Money and Urban Design can Improve by Exploiting Vertical Rent Curves It has always amazed me that many developers, those veritable profit maximizers, don’t understand that neo-urbanist principles* can improve their returns while at the same time making them better city-builders and I suppose better corporate citizens. For example, most [...]

Livable Cities Versus Mono Cultured Suburbs

This article was originally written for the Conference on Social Harmony, Ottawa Public Library, December 4, 2001 It wasn’t long after my wife and I and our five kids moved to a western suburb of Ottawa in the late 1980s before a group of our neighbors circulated a petition in the neighborhood. They were concerned [...]

Highest and Best Use

A Guiding Philosophy for Neo-Urbanist Designers Why Nimby’ites are Wrong to Oppose Higher Densities and Mixed Use Negative Property Taxes Urban Catalysts/Anti-Catalysts Highest and Best Use “Highest and best use for a property is achieved when the value created by its development for a specific set of physically possible, permitted uses (its functional program) and [...]

Why Not to Work From Home

I tried working from a home office for 14 months. Just so you know, at the time we had five kids, a nanny plus my mother-in-law there so it was not the best test case ever. Still, even if there was no one at home, I would not be tempted to try again because: 1. [...]

Protecting Your IP by Suing (A Cop)

Is Probably a Bad Idea Years ago, a friend of mine, a sign maker in southern California, came up with the concept of a stalking horse* for traffic cops. (* This post was originally a Postscript I wrote to another article on ‘stalking horse marketing’: http://www.eqjournalblog.com/?p=1868.) He designed a full size sign that looked just [...]

Go Green! Live Closer to Where You Work!

A while ago, I was watching TV with my eldest daughter, Rachel, and we caught a Rick Mercer commercial called the “One Tonne Challenge”. Rachel turned to me after the commercial and asked: “How do I personally go about reducing my carbon footprint, Dad?” That is one of the problems with well-meaning initiatives like this—they [...]

Why Scotiabank Place Is Where It Is (Part 2)

I was asked recently on a local radio show about why Scotiabank Place (SBP) is where it is and why it isn’t at Lansdowne Park. My comments on the show were part of a 20-year record of mine explaining the rationale behind the location of the arena where the Sens play. I also summarized it [...]