I’ve decided to describe my recent trip to Vancouver, British Columbia in the context of four one-sentence notes I wrote on my phone while I was there. But I also want to make the upfront statement that I loved Vancouver when I last visited there as a teenager, and I still love it. This is a dense, lively, wealthy, unusually international city in a serendipitous setting between the Salish Sea and steep, green, shockingly close mountains. There’s a good argument to be made that Vancouver is the finest city in North America, if you can afford it, even if it is also a place that mirrors many of the problems and excesses of other high status cities in the contemporary economy.
Journal Entry 1: “The area where we rented bikes near Stanley Park is as close to a Le Corbusier fantasy landscape as anything I’ve ever seen”
For my birthday this year my younger son gave me a new copy of Jane Jacobs’ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her paean to the “sidewalk ballet” in dense but organically evolved, not highly vertical neighborhoods was on my mind as I visited Vancouver, clearly a great Canadian city but once that has very much embraced the tower in the park style vertical development that Jacobs hated.
As this blog post by Wendell Cox on Joel Kotkin’s New Geography website points out, Canadian urban areas tend to be denser than urban areas in the US. Six of the top ten densest US and Canadian urban areas, according to government data Cox has collected, are located in Canada, with Vancouver in third place after Toronto and Los Angeles. But density doesn’t necessarily equate to verticality, and Vancouver is striking in the degree to which it has accommodated (and apparently encouraged) highly vertical, tower style development. This fact is immediately obvious just looking out the window at the cranes dotting the landscape on the Canada Line into town from the airport, and is even more obvious observing the result of former crane-required construction projects in districts near downtown, as these photos attest.
Le Corbusier’s s Fantasy Playing Out Near Stanley Park, Granville Island, and Downtown Vancouver
Now that I’ve had a chance to come back home to Sacramento and read my birthday present, I was struck by this quotation from Jane Jacobs:
“LeCorbusier was planning not only a physical environment, he was planning a social Utopia too. LeCorbusier’s Utopia was a condition of what he called maximum physical liberty, by which he meant not liberty to do anything much, but liberty from ordinary responsibility. In his Radiant City nobody, presumably, was going to have to be his brother’s keeper anymore. Nobody was going to be tied down.”
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961
Some aspects of this quotation from a book published in 1961 strike me as still prescient in 2024. Vancouver feels very much like the kind of city where nobody wants to be tied down, and its tower in the park neighborhoods are an expression of this rootless ethos. Jacobs, an American who moved to Toronto in opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam war and stayed there, would have almost certainly disliked much of modern Vancouver.
But even though I didn’t love them and found myself wondering how they would wear over time, Vancouver’s tower in the park districts struck me as a clean and successful way to house high income people without large families. It’s worth noting too that Jacobs’ book came at the tail end of a period of high housing production and high government investment. She was writing in opposition to the worst excesses of this Keynesian period, as manifested in urban renewal programs. Having just lived through the subsequent neoliberal period of catastrophically low housing production and low public investment, it’s refreshing to see so much housing getting built in a dense city like Vancouver, long term neighborhood sustainability worries aside.
But with all this said about residential tower neighborhoods, the place we chose to stay in Vancouver, and felt most comfortable, was not in a tower in the park district at all. Instead, we spent most of our time in the lower-rise but still very dense Grandview-Woodland neighborhood. Time Out recently ranked Commercial Drive, which runs through the center of this neighborhood, as the 5th coolest street in the world. Maybe they’re right. We loved, loved our early morning coffees at the Prado Cafe, shopping at independent vintage and import stores like Mintage and The Only and Wander, and the whole restaurant scene, especially the elevated yet cozy vibe at Caffé La Tana with its small plates in a quiet old storefront. The smell of weed everywhere was amusing (“the scent of BC” we started to call it), and I noticed more truly beautiful, artistic, no doubt expensive tattoos on the bodies of the denizens of Grandview Woodland than I’ve seen anywhere else to date. In the evening, Commercial Drive had a true sidewalk ballet, as Jacobs might have called it, as people moved between packed bars and restaurants even on rainy, clammy June weeknights. I’m glad to have had a chance to spend time there, and to spend time in a city with such a great sense of public life.
Mornings and Murals in Grandview-Woodland Neighborhood, Vancouver BC
Journal Entry 2: “I don’t miss driving my car everywhere …”
I don’t have a lot to say about this one other than the journal entry itself. It was refreshing to be back in a city where you could get most places, or at least most places in the urban core, via easy to access train and bus options. The SkyTrain rail system was particularly fun, and revealed a diverse slice of life in a very diverse city. If I lived in Vancouver I could imagine wanting a car to be able to more easily get out to nearby natural attractions. But it sure was nice to be a place dense enough that a car isn’t actually needed.
Journal Entry 3: “The dystopia of homelessness and drug addiction on Hastings is as bad or worse as anything I’ve seen in the US …”
At around noon on our second morning in Vancouver, in the aforementioned Grandview-Woodland neighborhood, I asked a fashionably dressed clothing and gift shop employee whether the number 20 bus would be a good way to get downtown. She flashed an expression that read as a slight but distinctly pained frown, then recovered her smile and said that yes, that would work.
My wife and I soon saw the reason for the frown. Getting downtown in the direction I had guessed at required a ride along Hastings Street through the Downtown Eastside neighborhood. As the bus rolled down Hastings, we began to notice more than the small concentrations of homeless people I had seen thus far in Vancouver. As we rolled further toward downtown, blocks followed blocks thick with people living on the street in the rainy mist. Some of these people were laying down on the pavement, while others were stationed incongruously behind little folding tables, lending the slight flavor of a street market I’ve never seen near a US homeless encampment. I wondered whether there would be much to be found in such an agora besides junk and poison-laced hard drugs. Then finally, as if by magic, the bus rolled into the downtown commercial and tourist district proper, and the scene we had just witnessed disappeared almost as if it had been a bad dream.
But it wasn’t just a dream. This excellent recent Washington Post article by Amanda Coletta provides an update on the situation in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, indicating that recent attempts at drug decriminalization and a harm reduction only approach have not met with success (except along the circular logic metric of reducing penalties for possession as an end in itself). At least some of these decriminalization policies are currently being rolled back by the BC Provincial government. This mirrors similar situations in Oregon, Portugal, and elsewhere that have adopted decriminalization approaches.
While I’m not an expert in drug policy, I’ve noted in other posts that in the current era of fentanyl poisoned street drug supply, a purely demand focused approach is probably not up to the needs of vulnerable and addicted people. Instead, a balanced approach focused on both supply interdiction and demand reduction is needed. This inevitably implies a more active role for law enforcement, but I also was curious to read in the Post article about a supply-focused effort through a self-styled “drug user liberation front.” This group has procured and tested a clean drug supply for addicts to ingest in mointored indoor spaces; basically a direct action approach to deal with the fact that so many people dying consuming tainted (poisoned) street drugs. Underscoring the lethality of the drug epidemic, the Post article also cites data showing that “more than 750 people” died of drug overdose in British Columbia during the first four months of 2024.
Journal Entry 4: “The kind Uber driver from Sri Lanka can’t buy a house, and says the Vancouver economy is based on ‘dark money.’”
I’ve noticed in past travels that Uber drivers can be a font of information and insight. I vividly remember the driver of an Uber in Mexico, a charming, highly educated, middle aged Colombian man with a degree in industrial engineering, telling us he was driving an Uber because professional salaries were so low in Mexico. I also remember the ruefully admiring tone of this man’s observation that “anything goes in Mexico.” This struck me as a deep insight, for both good and bad.
One Uber driver we met on this current trip is part of the 200,000 person strong Sri Lankan diaspora to Canada. This article in Asian Pacific Post suggests our driver might, like other Canadians who hail from the island nation, have been subtly expressing frustration with the Canadian government for going too soft on the Rajapaksa clan’s attempts to hide plundered resources in Canada. There’s no way of asking him now. But this article in Mother Jones picks up directly on our driver’s theme. It describes Vancouver as a “giant safety deposit box for China’s elite,” and notes that the city is “almost as expensive as San Francisco” despite a “far less varied and robust” job market.
It would be silly, of course, to suggest that the Vancouver economy is based merely on what our driver called “dark money” (which I took to mean using real estate to park sometimes ill-gotten wealth). For instance, this fact sheet from the City of Vancouver breaks down the Vancouver economy by industry. One sign of health that struck me was that health care spending was only 6 percent of the local economy, a tiny amount compared to US figures. The fact sheet also shows that the local industrial structure is heavily concentrated around finance, insurance, and real estate, at a whopping 31 percent of the local economy in 2017, up from 24 percent in 1987. Another fact sheet through the Vancouver Economic Commission touts economic concentrations in social enterprise, natural resources, finance, life sciences, specialty apparel, and arts and culture. I can certainly attest just as a tourist that there’s a very great deal to be said for the contention that Vancouver boasts vigorous arts and culture industries.
On the other hand, when I go to Seattle, it’s obvious where all the money comes from (just think of household names like Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing and the like). The same is true for the Bay Area (think Apple, Google, and the cluster of AI companies in San Francisco). By contrast, it’s less immediately obvious how the Vancouver economy supports the extremely high housing and other costs at play throughout the city. The above mentioned fact sheet from the City of Vancouver notes that metro Vancouver had a GDP per capita of only $39,914 in 2017, described as “low compared to other major cities in Canada and the West Coast of the US.” In other words, while our Uber driver’s analysis was off the cuff, he may be on the mark about the origins of the often extreme wealth apparent throughout the Vancouver of 2024.