Well, we did it! As of my writing this we have more than 200 subscribers to a newsletter that I started on a whim a few weeks ago. I’m planning to take some time off over the holidays (I will be back on Monday, not yet) but before that I would love to get some feedback from you on what else to do with this community of subscribers. Some thoughts from me are lower down or you can skip right to the survey.

Today we’re also talking about real estate but first, here are some links to keep you warm for the weekend:

• Prince George RCMP Supt. Shaun Wright agrees with the independent report on crime in the city calling for more officers. Then again, hard to imagine police not using crime stats to get more funding.

• Somebody won $1 million. That’s still enough to buy a house here, but maybe not two of them, anymore.

• Just as it did for COVID-19, the Northern Health region is lagging behind the rest of the province in flu vaccinations.

• One of the founding members of the Prince George Farmer’s Market, dubbed ‘The Prince George Potato King’ has passed away.

• Miniseries featuring northern B.C. musicians to be filmed in Prince George.

• An albino porcupine has been taken in at the Northern Lights Wildlife Shelter. Yes, there’s a video.

• Herd of moose spotted at Prince George airport. Yes, there’s a video.

• This looks like a good novel.

• Love me a big hole.

• A relevant read: What happened when a northern Ontario mayor fought for secession

• Will it snow this Christmas? is an interactive piece on winter and climate change that is different depending on which postal code you put in. For Prince George, we hear from Joseph Shea of UNBC about how our winters are changing.

• Here are some photos of the frost:

I’m gonna miss Twitter for this reason.

Last week I wrote about my inability to find the Tourism Prince George campaign being run in Tuscon, Arizona digital markets. Well, I was alerted that the campaign is now viewable — here’s what it looks like:

Our real estate market has cooled but prices aren’t dropping, much

In the olden days of 2021 I wrote about the red-hot Canadian housing market but centred the story in Prince George where, at the time, bidding wars and houses being sold day-of above asking price was pretty normal. Things have cooled down since then but apparently not to the same degree as in the rest of the province. While the B.C. Real Estate Board reports November home sales dropped 42 per cent since last year, and things are slow, prices aren’t seeing a similar decline:

I mean, it’s still the cheapest part of the province overall. And it’s also worth noting the sales report is for the entire region, not just Prince George. Anyways, here’s a chart:

Prices are down but only compared to an all-time high. We’re still above 2021 levels and are nearly twice as high as where things were a decade ago.

What comes next for Northern Capital News?

Here’s another chart that’s going up:

That’s how many of you have subscribed to this newsletter since I launched on something of a whim just before Halloween. I’d been thinking about it and then some ~Twitter stuff~ happened and I decided to pull the trigger. Here’s part of what I wrote at the time:

Well, as it turned out I have been doing daily updates — 35 of them, by my count, one every weekday for one-and-a-half months. And it’s been a blast. I love having a place to talk about what’s going on the city in an informal way that lets me tackle anything from budget policy to what the mayor is currently reading to Christmas movies filmed in Prince George to dives into weird flags appearing outside a nightclub.

But here’s what’s missing: You.

Some of you have written in, which is awesome and encouraged, but I’m also wondering if there might be some value into opening up a bit more of two-way dialogue here or, better yet, one that let’s us all talk to each other at once. I think Twitter is on its way out and I’m eager to find/foster a space that captures some of that at its best. So I’m opening up a survey for you to share some thoughts on whether you’d be interested in such a space and what that might look like. If there’s enough interest… awesome, I’ll see what I can do — and if not, that’s cool, too, I’m happy to keep writing. The survey is here.

And on that note: The holidays are almost here and I will be taking some time off. I will have at least a couple more newsletters next week but sometime before the weekend I’ll be taking a week or two off from for sure the daily update and possibly more, depending on both where I’m at and the level of news that happens I want to talk about. But I will absolutely be back in the new year because there are definitely going to be some things for us to get into.

That’s it for this week, talk to you on Monday.

Northern Capital News is a free, daily newsletter about life in Prince George. Please consider subscribing or, if you have, sharing with someone else.