Metro Vancouver is rife with chaos. My dad was right when he said last night that “land assemblies’ are accelerating , not slowing down. The Railway Club is closing forever and going to be bulldozed. Another place for live music and people to get together…gone. A big blow to the local music industry, specifically, and for entertainment generally.
Combine this with so many other things going on around Metro Vancouver, it is hard to maintain one’s cool…because it’s a sweeping transformation on several fronts.
Income inequality is worsening. And our attitudes towards the vulnerable & disadvantaged have collapsed. We are okay with walking by people sleeping on the cold hard concrete sidewalk… without even a piece of cardboard. We are okay with seniors getting little or no discounts anymore. We need to rush to the beach by 11 am in the summer, because after that, there’s no parking, and no more spots on the beach. Going out to a favoured restaurant, nightspot, or movie theatre? If you’re not stuck in a long queue, you are very lucky. It does happen, sure, but it’s not the norm.
When I’m in “town” every couple weeks, I see the changes. THAT’S HOW FAST THE CITY IS CHANGING.
The via-ducts will be torn out and filled up with towers. Crazy redevelopment all along the major streets. Oakridge Mall awaits a total makeover with towers rivalling those of Metrotown in Burnaby. The entire block within 57th to 59th, Cambie to Heather, will be bulldozed. BC Place is going to be surrounded by more towers, finishing off what was started after Expo 86 ended. Towers going up right beside my old dentist in South Van.
Close to home the madness continues. Two blocks away from home, 2 heritage houses will be replaced by 7 shoeboxes. A house 2 blocks the other way, once owned by nuns, is coming down, who knows what’s going in there. Across the street from that, another newer house is coming down. One block south of us, a 49.5 foot wide lot is going to be bulldozed and almost certainly see 3 dwellings go up, unless an adjacent lot is acquired, which might see another massive thing going in there.
One of our neighbours is selling next year, moving to other BC locations. She’s had it. Their lot is super wide, and developers continue to pester her. They can’t wait to use that lot in a land assembly for more condos etc.
Traffic? I am continualy dumbfounded at the volumes. Since I’m here every 2 weeks, I see the increase in traffic, how heavy it is virtually all day long, in places you once could count on to be light traffic.
Say anything critical of what the City is doing, and of course, since you’re dealing with a well-oiled, well-established well-funded bureaucracy beholden to the real estate industry and developers…what do you think happens? Why, they trot out any number of standard, predictable slick responses designed to brush you off, shut you up, discredit you, distract you, minimize you, and ensure they look good, and are right on top of it, and hey, only their ideas are the right ones.
But the proof is in the pudding. Just take the last 15 years. Probably double the number of housing units ( condos, townhouses, suites, etc ), and yet, enormous, exponential growth in prices. So are they honestly interested in affordability? Availability? No, obviously not. Why would they?
This is the same group of people who cajoled us to spend billions to bury the Canada Line Sky Train Line beneath Cambie St, ostensibly “to preserve the character of the area”…and scant years later approve of the wholesale slaughter of said area, replacing everything visible to the naked eye with a mixture of towers and 4 to 8 storey condo buildings.
The City has even just coined a new term, “view corridors”, …saying they’re working hard to safeguard what they call “view corridors”, you know, those thin slices of city and mountain views, those brief seconds you see the sky, in between the towers going up today, and the ones about to break ground around you.
In conclusion, well, my own conclusions are not fit for publication. For the city I once loved, is quickly being supplanted by monsters, something just as creepy and slimy and offensive as what emerged out of those pods in the film ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.
Inserting the conclusion of another piece I wrote, fits well here and deserves mentioning.
“….made more frustrating by the fact it seems like the city has been robbed from the people and the environment it is a part of…leaving its inhabitants disenfranchised, stressed, impoverished, hopeless, anxious, fearful, disconnected…and so even more, people seek to find any redeeming quality, any morsel to devour, any little piece they can grab onto and maybe, if they tell themselves enough times, how great it is there, how nowhere else could possibly be better…that maybe then it’ll magically somehow erase everything and it ‘ll be alright.
Pretty simple and pretty weak defence mechanism, eh? If I convince myself everywhere else is worse than the frying pan I’m in, then I will somehow deal with the heat. The thing is, you’re stuck in a frying pan, getting hotter and smaller all the time, and you have no control over it, because you aren’t the cook. You’re the olive oil.
….made more frustrating by the fact it seems like the city has been robbed from the people and the environment it is a part of…leaving its inhabitants disenfranchised, stressed, impoverished, hopeless, anxious, fearful, disconnected…and so even more, people seek to find any redeeming quality, any morsel to devour, any little piece they can grab onto and maybe, if they tell themselves enough times, how great it is there, how nowhere else could possibly be better…that maybe then it’ll magically somehow erase everything and it ‘ll be alright.
Pretty simple and pretty weak defence mechanism, eh? If I convince myself everywhere else is worse than the frying pan I’m in, then I will somehow deal with the heat. The thing is, you’re stuck in a frying pan, getting hotter and smaller all the time, and you have no control over it, because you aren’t the cook. You’re the olive oil.”
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