The Death of the Vancouver Community

Remember the small family-owned Italian restaurant around Vancouver where the owner used to know all the patrons by name, right next to that boutique bakery and the specialty flower shop? Exactly.

If you look around this city you will find numerous examples of gathering places disappearing, little havens where mingling with strangers is perfectly acceptable given the familiarity and friendliness of the environment. Instead, what you will find is nothing but chain restaurants, copy-&-pasted from location to location, where you will not be alone in feeling lonely.

Truth is, you don't have to go far in this city to end up having a conversation with somebody about how hard it is to meet new people, how Vancouver is a "no-fun city", or how this city is being increasingly referred to as a "Resort Town". And that is true whether you do have your local shop to go to, or not.

So, what exactly is going on?

We can point fingers to the perpetrators until we are blue in the face, really. However, there are a few things that elicit special attention. The systemic problem of real estate prices, our culture of individualism, and the myth of community building.

Don't tell me how much you paid for your house 30 years ago...

Unaffordable real estate is a problem. People leave the city because they can't make ends meet, employers have a hard time finding workers, and sky-high rents close down businesses that get their margins squeezed out by higher property taxes.

At this point you say: "But Marc, look at the New York's & London's of the world... they are also not affordable but still have vibrant communities!"

Wrong.

Well, not completely. These are examples of cities that do have high real estate prices, absolutely. But they at least have median incomes to justify it better than we do here in Vancouver. By some measures, you need almost 12 times on average your income to purchase a median priced home. For comparison, London's Price-Income ratio is just over 8, while New York's is under 6.

I am not here to tell you that the sky is falling. We can chat about whether the market will see a correction or not over coffee some other time.

My point is that this disparity happened so quickly and steeply in Vancouver that it is choking out the many places in this city that served as the foundation for communities. If even corporately-owned restaurants have trouble staying in business, what do you expect will happen to your friendly local store?

Have enough of these close, and we will have a city (hopefully only temporarily) lacking meaningful connections.

Is there a problem with Vancouver than just money?

If the problem was just real estate prices, perhaps we could throw money at it and everything would go away. Although this city has an aura for being too centred around status and money—how many Lamborghini's have you seen today?—we can hardly expect to explain the survival woes of Vancouverite communities based on that alone.

After all, culturally speaking North America is known for its individualistic society. You alone can be happy and successful, achieving all the dreams you can possibly imagine. So why bother engaging with others?

We view as Taboo to feel lonely, since we are all strong individuals capable of getting by fine on our own. Unfortunately, this only helps to further the vicious cycle of people feeling even more lonely as they can't reach out to others to talk about it. It's the perfect crime!

It is not all bad news, though. While an astonishing finding by a Vancouver Foundation survey found 30% of people aged 18-24 feel lonely, the rate is less than 1-in-5 for the whole city. Maybe young people have more trouble because of real estate prices, or geography, or too much social media instead. Who knows?

It is one of those problems that are hard to pin point and to offer a solution, but starting the conversation is already an important step.

Communities are not built, they are grown.

If you wanted to have a tree in your backyard, you take a seed and you plant it. You do everything in your power to provide the seed with the perfect environment for it to thrive. Then, nature and time work their magic and you'll have yourself a tree.

If the seed is not sprouting, do you try to force it open with a knife? Would you try to stretch the stems with your hands to make it taller? Or better yet, would you point the seed out to your neighbour's tree, so maybe it will learn to grow by example?

From large educational institutions, to small networking groups, through to businesses: why are you forcing community down people's throat?

Community, much like the simple example of the seed, needs the resources and the environment for it to grow and thrive naturally. A place where people meet, members that can be present, activities that can be pursued. Probably the only thing Vancouverites don't need to worry about is whether it will be watered frequently enough.

Are we going through a rebel phase?

It certainly is not all doom and gloom. There are enough examples in this city that show it is certainly possible to build thriving communities, filled with 'fun-City' settings and people that would disagree with this article. I just happened to have had this conversation enough times to warrant writing an opinion piece on it.

So what's next?

Vancouver is a very young city relative to other places, and it has been through quite a number of changes in a short period of time.

Maybe this city is like the teenager that had to move houses too many times, and now is going through a rebel phase, annoyed at his situation and not open to making friends at his new school.

If that is the case, I sure do hope we grow up at some point without a regretful tattoo from our rebel years.