(More) Laments for Lotus Land Lost

Jessica Barrett’s hugely viral personal essay “I Left Vancouver Because Vancouver Left Me” is an instant classic in a growing genre: Laments for Lotus Land Lost.

After her piece appeared Monday on The Tyee, 30-something Barrett was invited on the CBC to speak for her generation being driven from Vancouver by skyrocketing housing costs. She is collateral damage from policies embraced by politicians since Expo ’86 — the selling of Vancouver as a green, safe real estate investment for global winners.

The flaw in that strategy was that it untethered the price of real estate from the region’s incomes. For a city to be a real city, among the inhabitants it would need, one might think, is an editor for its city magazine. But Barrett, making a mere editor’s wage at Vancouver Magazine, stood no chance against the wealth flooding here from the top strata of other economies — whether Alberta or Los Angeles or Shanghai.

Some of the comments posted under Barrett’s article were Darwinian; basically: You lose, you move, too bad for you. This thinking is what is killing Vancouver’s future. It ignores that cities die if they don’t make room for a healthy range of human aspirations. Barrett politely reminds she represents a “segment of society that came from away and made a conscious commitment to the city. We chose to invest our skills and energy and empathy and, oh yeah, hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent, in our adopted home.”

Many surely share Barrett’s predicament, as the mad traffic for her essay demonstrates. But the buzz can’t be due to the originality of her theme. Indeed, the trope of Laments for Lotus Land Lost (because Vancouver is being turned into a theme park for the rich) dates back more than two decades.

Which is to say there is not a shred of a “Who knew?” defence left for those who’ve run the show. Each lament has really been a warning — all falling on deaf ears because developers were shouting more loudly in the halls of power.

Vancouver pricing out its next generation, and in so doing rendering its future sterile, is a theme I’ve sounded not just in print but in meetings with foundations, politicians, developers, bankers, academics and urban planners since just a few years after I arrived in the city in 1991.

Déjà vu, therefore, overwhelmed me when I read “I Left Vancouver Because Vancouver Left Me,” leading me to google up these…

12 LAMENTS FOR LOTUS LAND LOST
A sampling of unheeded worries and warnings published by The Tyee since 2004.

2004: “Struggling to Stay in Vancouver” by Bruce Grierson

The writer is one of North America’s best (New York Times Magazine, books, etc.) but 13 years ago he was thinking a lot like Jessica Barrett as “I read the results of a new study showing that Vancouverites are being forced en masse, by economics, out of the West Side and the West End and even much of the East Side.”

Already back then Grierson and his partner wondered: “What does it mean that a whole generation of residents has been reduced to just trying to maintain a handhold, just trying to come up with the scratch not to be kicked out of here? Forget trying to ‘get ahead’ in any traditional sense. You win if you can keep one nostril above water, balancing the finances, working the lines of credit. You lose the moment you have any bit of bad luck — accident, fire, robbery — that sends you irrecoverably into the red.”

2007: “A City’s Fragile Soul” by David Beers

An ode to proprietors of hole-in-the-wall businesses that give Main Street its character thanks to rents, at the time, relatively low. “This of course is not the face that Vancouver presents to the world. That would be sleek towers, raked beaches. Clean, tight and shiny — a perfect planner's PowerPoint. The official fastidiousness driving that vision is beginning to frighten. It threatens now to sterilize the last of what is lovably scruffy about Vancouver. It feeds on Olympics anxiety and the search for the next hot real estate play.”

2007: “Vancouver Eats Its Young” by David Beers

“Nowadays in Vancouver, if like me you are middle aged and own your digs, it can seem cruel to invite younger adults over for dinner, a taunt to those whose incomes are relentlessly outstripped by real estate inflation. Even worse, you begin to sense that you and your guests are on opposite sides of a firming up political divide. You are, after all, a member of the generation that is asking the young to endure and solve global warming, but what have you done for them lately, besides pouring fine wines in a heritage home of the sort they can never aspire to have?”

(A version of this ran in the national edition of the Globe and Mail, and was the most read article that day.)

2009: “A Home for All” by Monte Paulsen

“Having a job or even a two-income family is no longer enough to guarantee a basic, comfortable place to live — in fact, the average Metro Vancouver earner can afford only half a home. In a market that isn't delivering a variety of cost-effective housing, Tyee investigative editor Monte Paulsen reports on how different approaches to finance, government policy and design could whittle the costs down to manageable proportions. And we invite experts to weigh in with their own opinion pieces.”

A pdf version combining all 12 articles in this prescient series is here.

2009: “Why Portland Beats Vancouver” by Christine McLaren

A Vancouver journalist in her 20s ventures south and discovers the Promised Land. “If you're young, creative and low on cash,” says the sub-headline, “Oregon's biggest city has much to envy.”

2009: “In Vancouver, a Renter’s Rat Race” by Katie Addleman

“I blame the scarcity of reasonably priced accommodations for the otherworldly human landscape of the downtown core, its streets strewn with people wandering bleary-eyed under the high rises, their skyward faces seeking addresses and that Holy Grail, the ‘Suite Available’ sign. Line-ups for open houses snake around city blocks at 50-people long, and while they wait the hopefuls size each other up for weak spots, like animals.”

2012: “I Want to Stay!” by Luke Brocki

“It's taken me some five years to hustle together enough freelance income from local newsrooms and magazines to live a comfortable lifestyle, one filled and inspired by artists, musicians, comedians, designers, entrepreneurs and other types of creative nerds. Many of those folks are also renters in East Van, which is where I'd like them to stay, but a few leave every year, either to far regional suburbs or to wintrier cities in other time zones. All claim financial reasons. “That worries me too, but can you blame them? How long can you leave your savings at two per cent interest in so-called high-interest savings accounts when land prices are ballooning ever higher to the delight of those already invested in real estate?”

First in an eight-part series in partnership with the CBC.

2015: “Stop Telling Me to Move to the Suburbs,” by Katie Hyslop

Hyslop, a Tyee reporter in her late 20s, was done with condescending elders telling her to shut up or get out. She needs to be in the city’s mix to do her work and live her ideals. She’s OK with renting a tiny flat and other sacrifices. Just don’t sneer at her struggle to hang in there.

“Take a recent column from the Vancouver Sun's Shelley Fralic deriding . . . ‘coddled’ and ‘indulged’ millennials who think the world ‘owes’ them a decent living and a place to stay,” wrote Hyslop, nailing the Sun columnist for boomersplaining that high cost housing in Vancouver “‘was ever thus.’”

Hyslop’s retort: “Maybe. But it's never been ‘thus’ bad.”

2016: “Vancouver Is Home, Must I Leave?” by Christopher Cheung

A love song to his hometown by Tyee reporter Cheung tinged bittersweet by the fact that he and his 20-something friends endlessly discuss where to move if forced out of Vancouver. For the son of immigrants, the irony is acute. “In my lifetime, this is the only home I’ve known and the only home I feel I can know. I’m the first in my family to experience this feeling of stubborn rootedness. Everyone else has called foreign soil home at one point: Hong Kong, Peru, Australia, America, and even Nigeria. But for me, the three-tone chime of SkyTrain doors, blue mountains over every rooftop, and street names like Rupert and Renfrew give comfort.”

2016: “How Vancouver Youth Feel about Life in ‘World’s Most Livable City” by Katie Hyslop

In which The Tyee’s youth reporter is told by 17-year-old Braugh Loflen: “If someone asks where is home I would say Vancouver, but it doesn’t feel like home. Coming into the city now, because I live outside of it, going into places in town that are really wealthy where I can’t see myself being able to sustain a future, it feels like I don’t belong here.”

And 22-year-old Monica Alas says: “My friends, many of us, are in a kind of survivor mode: just minimum salary or a little bit more, but you have to pay a huge rent. And finding a place to rent here is so hard.”

2016: “Make Vancouver the World’s Slowest City: A Manifesto” by David Beers and Patrick Condon

What good is a “greenest city,” the authors ask, if Vancouver’s affordability crisis makes us stressed, overworked, polarized by wealth and unable to imagine our own, personal sustainable futures? Co-writer Condon is a professor of urban planning at UBC, so this thought piece combines lament with ideas for solutions.

1997: “Vancouver Secedes” by David Beers (republished in The Tyee in 2014)

Twenty years ago, in the hope that satire might jumpstart the already so apparently needed conversation, this was published in a special issue of Vancouver Magazine guest edited by Douglas Coupland. The gist of the yarn was that Vancouver, chasing global money dirty and not, had pulled out of Canada and, because real estate was its primary industry, policed its neighbourhoods to meet the highest standards of bland appeal to international buyers. Ahem.