After having spent over a week in Calgary — and the city leaving very little impression on me, positive or negative — I’m in Vancouver for several days and I’ll be sharing my thoughts of the experience day by day.
One of the joys of solo travel is that I can be completely whimsical in my schedule and given my workload the past month or so, I’ve filled my first day (one with a fair share of rain, by the way) with a great deal of sleep, coffee, reading, F45 and laundry. Yes, I am one of those people who works out and does his laundry on vacation and I apologize for neither.
I’ve been to Vancouver before, so I was prepared for the natural beauty of the place and its wonderful internationality. But a couple things surprised me anyway.
The first is the incredibly diversity of faces in this city. I spent some time in Asia last year, so I have been in places where I could witness all the different sizes and shapes of Asian faces, but here I get to see that with people from just about everywhere else as well. Although, I have to say, I have yet to see anyone of African or Caribbean lineage in this city since my arrival. I might not have seen any in Calgary either if I hadn’t been attending a global convention that drew people from everywhere.
There are so many really beautiful people in Vancouver, it’s a wonderful people watching locale. But this also brings me to the other surprise about this place, one not so pleasant. Every large city has an underserved population. But Vancouver is the first place I’ve been where it’s overwhelming generational.
People in their 20s are clearly not thriving in Vancouver, and you see them everywhere. There is a massive disparity here between people living their best lives in this wonderful city, either as residents or tourists, and those who are poorly dressed, on drugs, homeless — or just simply look worn out. To me, it’s really depressing to see so many young people this way. If you are over 30 in Vancouver, you’ve probably made it … under 30, they all look like their parents should be deeply worried.
I spoke to a young woman in a shop about the affordability of this place and she confirmed that it’s nearly hopeless for young people right now. She said she could only continue to live in Vancouver because she still lived with her parents. Vancouver ranks third globally in housing unaffordability, looking at the ratio of average wages to housing prices, and those wages are significantly lower for people just starting out in life.
Now, obviously, Vancouver is not alone in this condition — there was an election in New York City this week that basically hinged on this very issue. And Vancouver is not an American city, there could be factors unique to Canada that I’m not aware of contributing to this.
But it’s hard for me to just blissfully go about my vacation and look away from the reality of life here. The situation is not substantially better for young people in the United States and I have serious concerns that what I’m seeing on the streets of Vancouver neighborhoods today could be in Chicago soon.
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