FastLittleArticle

After a decade away from Vancouver, I’ve come back. We all know that you can’t go home again, but that expression is supposed to capture the tension between the memory of a place and its disappointing present. In Vancouver, this tension has a different source: it is the gap between reality and the apparent self-perception of the city, the constant hype from the gaping maw of its publicity machine. I find the city baffling and irritating by turns, reactions I am going to try to put to methodological advantage. In any case, there is relatively little good writing about this city. It is still young and not yet big enough. What good writing there is comes from people who have lived here for a long time. Lance Berelowitz, author of the recent Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination, has made his home here for years. Douglas Coupland may have found Vancouver unworthy for the setting for Generation X, but to remove Vancouver from his literary landscape now would be like taking Margaret Atwood out of Toronto.

And why would anyone leave, once they were here? People tend to view living in Vancouver as an achievement. Perhaps this is because, in the Canadian imagination, the city exercises a powerful hold as a goal. The comfortably retired come here in droves, and tell themselves that it’s the best place on earth. A mild climate, public medicine, and (for those in the suburbs just south of the city) only a quick drive across the border for cheap(er) gas. Surely, if ever there was evidence of intelligent design, it is this happy arrangement.

What is odd about the city is that beyond these advantages, it is a vaguely defined paradise. It seems that Vancouver’s main advantage is that it can pretend to be anywhere, fulfill any desire. Over on the west side, which sits in quiet contemplation of its own magnificent splendour, the older houses are of two types: the craftsman bungalow, borrowed from northern California, and the peaked and gabled storybook houses, which are almost indecent in their anglophilia. These houses do not look like anything in the actual UK, and I’d bet money that their original builders and buyers knew of England only what their parents had told them, and that the climate is dismayingly similar. These houses are inspired by a storybook England, a certain conception of Englishness that fought the Hun with cozy stuffed sitting rooms and pots of strong tea. (There are also country manse version of these houses, close to the University of B.C. Campus, that are straight out of a Ralph Lauren ad.)

The built environment is also littered with pink stucco, now mildewed and stained, a reminder - in case you’ve forgotten the leaky condo crisis - that Vancouver is not southern California. But the most famous of the buildings continually at odds with the environment is Library Square. It is an excellent public library, and it’s a pleasant building to work in. When it came time to build a new main library branch, Vancouver put the design possibilities to a public referendum, and this design, modelled on the Colliseum, won the contest handily. Vancouver as the new Rome: who the hell do these people think they are? Best not to read too much into it. Vancouver has always had a prediliction for whimsy.

This unsettling lack of specificity is supposed to be one of the city’s advantages as a film location, but surely that is only because the natural landscape is covered in cloud for two-thirds of the year. The mountains are a powerful part of the city’s self-image, and when they are visible, it is obvious that the city certainly cannot stand in for Anytown, USA. Even so, much of the time, its place on the imaginary map is ill-defined. If you are determined enough, you can grow palm and banana trees here. The only possible reason I can think of for this utter defiance of climate and geography is that these plants are visible reminders of the paradise people believe they inhabit. And – at least since the time that Gaugin abandoned his wife and children for Tahiti – paradise is supposed to be tropical. There’s something very disturbing about the fierce attachment to a city while ignoring the very idea of place.

But perhaps Vancouverites have always been able to ignore what doesn’t suit them. The downtown eastside is well known as Canada’s worst neighbourhood. I live near it, and pass through it regularly. People tell me it has improved. True, there are interesting boutiques on its edges, but so few outsiders spend any time in the centre of it that it’s possible people know only the constant assurances of the 2010 Olympics organizers that Everything Will Be OK. (We heard this song before Expo 86, too. How’d it work out that time?)

At the moment, there is much hope pinned to a new condo project. (Vancouver’s cure for all urban ills is to build condos and hope for the best.) But this might be far too late. The downtown eastside is everything that makes a neighbourhood robust, and nothing that makes it desirable. Residents have their choice of places to live (Powell Street is lined with residential hotels and government housing), a place to work or at least get some cash (recycling facilities and pawn shops), a place to socialize and to pick up or use your intoxicant of choice (just about anywhere, including the infamous safe injection site), and, naturally, dozens of missions that will cater to your spiritual needs. Why would anyone leave? People in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the heady days of the late 1990s, liked to brag about their “vertically integrated economy.” The downtown eastside is the dystopic equivalent.

The safe injection site was the final step in making this neighbourhood permanent. (I’ve often wondered how effective the television show Da Vinci’s Inquest was in making this idea acceptable to Vancouver’s bourgeoisie.) The safe injection site may save individual lives, but it makes the ghetto permanent in order to achieve that. It will take more than a large condo project to turn this neighbourhood. I’m not sure that current sensibilities would tolerate the kind of cruel and brutal rezoning necessary to change it. Once the condo project is complete and the Olympics are over, we will likely go back to accepting the downtown eastside for what it is: an unsolvable problem. In an excellent article in the spring 2005 Vancouver Review, Paul Delaney suggested that “regular citizens complain about the Downtown Eastside, but they would be in open revolt if the action moved to their neighbourhood. Can we say ’safety valve’? ‘Necessary evil’?”

The downtown eastside is an extreme example, but Vancouver is full of social boundaries dividing desirable from undesirable neighbourhoods. When I was looking for a place to live, I knew I could draw a line straight down the middle of the city marking affordable from unaffordable and (not coincidentally) Nice from Not So Nice. I can’t think of any other place where the line is so crude, where the geometry of status is so simple.

But north of half a million dollars for a tear-down in an undesirable neighbourhood is worth it, isn’t it? To live here in this jewel, this Canadian Babylon, this Vancouver? In these gentle and nourishing rains?

Ah, climate! That’s the reason we’re all here, isn’t it? “At least it’s not snowing. At least you don’t have to shovel rain. You can always drive to the snow if you want it.” No wonder Vancouver throws its allegiance behind palm and banana trees. If it’s not snowing, it must be the tropics. It is difficult to avoid cliches of climate anywhere, I suppose. Maybe all beliefs about local climate are flimsy – after all, you can’t do anything about it. It is Vancouver’s claim that it has a desirable climate that is difficult to accept. Certainly that, along with a general suspicion of anything French, is what cleaves Vancouver psychically from the idea of Canada. Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver!

Vancouver’s suspicion of French does not extend to France, which enjoys a fine reputation. The west side (naturally) is dotted with French bakeries (some very good) and stores selling expensive children’s toys and clothes with French text on them. (How the French got a monopoly on the idea of a wholesome childhood, I don’t know.) The purchase of French goods secures our idealization of ourselves as wordly sophisticates. It seems to say that if you can’t live in Vancouver, the only other tolerable place to live is Paris. I don’t fully understand the sources of this particular variety of francophilia, but I’ve observed that New Yorkers suffer from the same disease. Of course, they just might have a leg up in the worldly sophistication department.

But as for North American French, there is a widespread and irritatingly ignorant belief in its cultural and linguistic inferiority. It is a position that shows up with discouraging frequency on the Discover Vancouver boards. If I understand these people correctly, rural France is populated by earthy and jolly folks who love a glass of wine and a good meal, but rural Quebec is just incomprehensible – linguistically, socially, and politically. The threat of separation has offended British Columbians deeply, though relatively few of them have bothered to understand its history or its historic effectiveness as a political position. Meanwhile, Vancouverites would rather go to Paris than to Montreal (the perverse laws of airline pricing mean it is nearly always cheaper), and then complain that their Canadian French wasn’t understood. (Perhaps it would soothe them a little to remember that Parisians think that they are culturally and linguistically superior to everybody.)

These criticisms are not meant to cast Vancouver as a dull or ugly city. The surroundings are beautiful, and the architecture – well, it’s less offensive than it used to be. There is a thriving social scene, to judge from the paparazzi photos in the local rah-rah magazines, and a nascent cultural and intellectual life. It’s the extreme self-satisfaction in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary that makes life here a source of annoyance. The problem with Vancouver is that it’s like seeing a movie that everybody raved about. And it was a good movie, but disappointing because it could never live up to the hype. Vancouver is a nice city. But it will take years, and the development of a dissatisfied restlessness, before it can live up to its current press.

Posted by Katharine on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 12:46 pm.