John Moore beats a path out of the city
“WHAT CAN YOU DO? (SHRUG) IT’S PROGRESS.”
“YEAH, (SHRUG) I GUESS.”
My wife and I were eavesdropping on two old guys wearing heavy-equipment-company baseball hats as they contemplated the recent grand openings of gigantic side-by-side Wal-Mart and Home Depot outlets in Squamish. Hunched at the next table in Tim Hortons—a national chain every bit as generic as the major retailers it now calls neighbours, and just as busy grinding our old, local chrome-and-Formica hangouts into financial and cultural oblivion—they looked like a couple of uncles-of-the-bride, unimpressed with the groom but trying to make the best of the reception. They’d been around the block enough times to know that “progress” is the party dress that small communities put on when they’re about to drink too much cheap fizz and lie down for some slick developer from the Big Smoke.
Pre-millennium, Squamish still crossed its legs when corporate retailers like Loblaws and London Drugs tried to shove a sweaty hand up its civic skirt. When Loblaws put out feelers in 2000 toward locating a Superstore on one of the coveted intersection corners of the Sea to Sky Highway to Whistler, the town rebuffed with outrage the suggestion of becoming a big-box community. Within a year or so of that pitch, the site was home to a Canadian Tire outlet. Within five, Timbits were the brunch of choice, Wal-Mart and Home Depot were blueprinted, and the highway-side Industrial Park was evolving into a commercial strip mall.
When we moved here in 1992, the old downtown retail core was a vibrant village community; now it has a 30 percent vacancy rate and looks like the set of one of those post-nuclear attack films of the 1960s. More and more, we catch ourselves shopping at the big boxes and going for coffee at Tim’s. Everything we left Vancouver to get away from has caught up with us, and with the town itself.
Overwhelmed by the rate of change, the last municipal building inspector threw in the towel in December 2006. Developers built on without permits; two brazen hypocrites even had the gall to claim in The Squamish Chief that reform of the paralyzed oversight process would affect their bottom line and “be detrimental to the town since it would reduce the availability of affordable housing ” (italics mine) as they slapped up monster houses and high-end condos with nary a discouraging word from the pro-development municipal council. Council, after all, represents the electorate—we who now sit in Timmy’s bitching about construction delays on the pre-Olympic Highway and grousing because the town isn’t like it used to be, every one of our gripes tempered with guilty delight at having received tax assessments inflating the value of our properties almost to par with those of Vancouver’s North Shore.
You’re supposed to feel grateful for small mercies, so we try to feel lucky that we moved here when we did. We sure couldn’t afford to now. In February 2007 the Chief reported on a study commissioned by the district, which concluded that even though almost 6,000 new housing units were set to hit the market, none of these would be affordable to couple-based family households earning 80 percent of the median income, since larger sizes, waterfront locations, and concrete rather than wood construction had driven up prices. Lack of oversight apparently didn’t reduce the bottom line of those developers enough. We are “a town in transition,” our newspaper constantly reminds us, spouting the mix of boosterism leavened with platitudinous concern that substitutes for a genuine politics of engagement.
Welcome to Metro Vancouver, Squamish.
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Our town isn’t a lone minnow being gobbled by Shark City. We accept the growth of cities as a historical inevitability. Over centuries, even millennia, cities like Rome, Paris and London amoebically absorbed surrounding communities that once were independent towns and villages. Flip through the timeline maps of Bruce Macdonald’s Vancouver: A Visual History (Talonbooks, 1992); you’ll see a fast-forward of the pattern as Vancouver morphed from a couple of sawmill-and-saloon outposts into Greater Vancouver, swallowing Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, Delta, Ladner, Port Moody. Even New Westminster, a city that briefly served as provincial capital, is now just a ‘burb. Around the towns of the Fraser Valley, all the way to Mission, the chain of connecting roads, malls and infill housing grows tighter every year, linking them, binding them, to Vancouver.
In May of 2007, The Economist published a 14-page special report by John Grimond, “The World Goes To Town,” on the worldwide growth of cities and the problems created by urban expansion: jammed traffic; masses of waste; the paving of agricultural hinterland; total dependency on imported fuel, energy and food; speculation leading to ballooning land values; inflated property taxes due to maintaining over-stressed infrastructure; and rising crime among swollen underclasses that can’t afford to live decently in their own city.
Trying to make a virtue of its own over-stressed infrastructure, Vancouver has taken the line that not having citizens grovel in the shadow of elevated concrete expressways or pay admission to sit in the shade of a real tree make it a candidate for the title of most livable Postmodern City of the Future. In architectural circles, the business of “revitalizing” downtown neighbourhoods by flogging $2,000-per-square-foot condos is actually being called Vancouverization, but an article by Charles Montgomery entitled “Futureville” in the May/June 2006 issue of Canadian Geographic, which touted Vancouver as the new model of sustainable urban development, stirred up a shit-storm of response from citizens and former residents.
In subsequent issues, correspondents ranted about the “obscene” tax burden of doing business in Vancouver and a cost of living that drives both industrial suppliers and employees out to the towns of the Fraser Valley. One snarled, “To join the happy throng of '80,000 people… doing what was once considered unthinkable: living in the downtown core,’ one must be very, very wealthy. The headline on your cover would have more accurately read: Is Vancouver becoming the ideal sustainable city for multi-millionaires? ” Another letter writer’s graphic portrait of a dystopic downtown, and his assertion that he now “sleeps well through the night” in Surrey, added insult to injury, given that suburb’s rep for stolen-car chases, crack houses and late-night gunnery.
Still, a chorus of millionaire boosters, pet planners, political hacks and media flaks mindlessly repeats “world-class city” like a mantra (remember The Simpsons episode where the whole town chants “ Monorail”? ) as the city pursues one money-pit project after another with little concern about socio-economic impact on the existing populace and environment, expanding the mandate of authorities like Metro Vancouver and Translink in an apparent quest to become a West Coast version of Toronto—Canada’s only certifiable Mega City and best indicator of the future if the conventional model of urban development is followed.
So, how are things in Mega City? Well, on March 8, 2007, the Toronto Star reported on the acrimonious debate over Toronto’s capital budget for that year under the headline “City decays as debt climbs.” Follow-up stories detailed costs of servicing the debt incurred by a $1.2 billion budget that bulked up to $2.3 billion, while departmental allowances for basic infrastructure maintenance like road repair were gutted. Responding to the crisis, Toronto city councillors displayed true grit in a savage backyard dogfight to hang on to their expensive perks of office.
Toronto isn’t an isolated case; on November 20, 2007, the Star ’s Ottawa bureau chief reported, “The infrastructure of Canadian cities is 'near collapse’ and will cost $123 billion to repair and replace—money that municipalities don’t have… That figure is far higher than previous estimates and indicates that the physical foundations of cities like Toronto are deteriorating faster than first thought.” The bottom line is easy to read: The cost of living in Mega City is going up and you’re going to get less for your money, in both hard infrastructure and social services. We’re bad, we’re nationwide, and we’re still in thrall to a vision of the modern metropolis that may be past its best-before date.
Essayist Walter Benjamin declared Paris the “capital of the 19th century”—a city that embodied the Zeitgeist of a historical period, even if London was its political and financial nexus. Few would argue that the only serious contender for the title of “capital of the 20 th century” was New York. Despite the fact that this archetypal modern city was bankrupt for most of the last half of its 10 decades of fame as a result of dealing with the problems listed above, in this first decade of the 21 st century, New York perversely remains the Big Apple, model for city fathers, planners and media whores obsessed with being in at the birth of their own “world-class” megapolis.
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No city passionately pursuing a quest for wealth, power and global validation wants to hear that it may be working from an out-of-date map, but this is what some architects and designers have been saying for half a decade. The fall 2002 issue of Canadian Architect included a dispatch by Peter Yeadon reporting on the XXI World Congress of Architecture hosted by the Union internationale des architects in Berlin that summer. Postmodern Germany’s “zeal for rapid reunification was to focus on Berlin as the resuscitated Hauptstadt , the New Berlin,” Yeadon noted. “From the beginning of unification, the entire nation rallied around the city as the representation of confidence and optimism, unity and plurality.”
Plurality, of course, is the postmodern Urban Grail. Canadian cities call it multiculturalism. It used to be called cosmopolitanism, and was achieved by great cities after centuries of prosperity resulting from a laissez-faire inclusiveness, a tolerance for many whose agendas of individual self-interest ultimately enhanced the power and prestige of the civic collective.
Forcing it to bloom in a scant decade was a tall order, as Yeadon admitted: “If the New Berlin was to represent diversity and excellence through architecture, it required bold contributions from world-renowned architects—those individuals I have called nextperts. We can now look back and scrutinize the offerings of this enormous international cast of architects and planners.”
But while the nextperts scrutinized, Berliners were voting with their feet. Yeadon noted that “The Berliner Zeitung reported in July 2002 that more than 30,000 disenchanted Berliners traverse the city boundary every year, moving to parts unknown. The Prognos think tank speculates that 180,000 will leave Berlin by 2010.”
Analysts may ascribe this migration to the international drain of intellectual and financial elites to greener pastures, specifically the US, but even so, their exit is hardly a ringing endorsement of what one conference delegate called “the new model for cities like Las Vegas to aspire to,” especially since Las Vegas, unlike Berlin or New York, is actually growing and solvent. What’s more, in his charting of the supposed global urbanization trend for The Economist , Grimond overlooked the fact that Berliners are not alone in their exodus from the postmodern metropolis. In April 2007, Associated Press reported that demographic studies carried out by the Population Reference Bureau, a private research think-tank, indicate that all major American cities (other than the anomalies of Las Vegas and, strangely, Atlanta) echo the Berlin flight pattern. For the first time in their histories, large North American cities, including New York, are totally dependent on immigration just to maintain current population levels, while populations of smaller towns are growing and their economies reviving.
Statistics Canada reports a pattern of rural depopulation and urban growth consistent with Grimond’s analysis , yet Grimond’s dismissal of the civilizing effects of country life—“the rural contribution to human progress seems slight compared with the urban one”—is too glib; it is not merely premature, but simply wrong. As Alan Broadbent admitted in an article for The Walrus , (“Brighter Lights, Bigger Cities”, June 2006), there are enough people out in the country that Stephen Harper’s January 23, 2006, victory “returned no seats from Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.” Broadbent, CEO of a capital-investment corporation, beats the drum for Mega City like a Sally Ann evangelist, prophesying that Harper’s government will fall unless it develops policies to address the problems of Canada’s major cities. Yet all the evidence he cites is as likely to break his case as make it, starting with the observation that rural Canada still has the clout to elect a government without throwing a single bone to the urban junkyard dogs.
“On average, urban ridings are represented by one Member of Parliament for just under 120,000 residents, while rural ridings get a federal representative for just over 86,000 people,” Broadbent complains. “As it stands, an urban vote is worth almost one-third less than a rural vote.” If moving to the boonies will give my vote more clout and spare this country another expensive, asinine constitutional crisis that does nothing but deepen our political cynicism, I’ll pack Ma and the kids on the wagon directly. Anyone with an eye on the real-estate market (and who hasn’t?) knows Broadbent is blowing Cohiba smoke up his own Armani boxers. Formerly quiet backwaters of Canada—the Okanagan and Kootenay valleys, Vancouver Island, the Niagara peninsula, the Miramichi valley in New Brunswick—have experienced an explosive renaissance as baby boomers flog their overpriced city properties to newcomers, pay off their mortgages, and retire to more bucolic and affordable digs.
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Architects are understandably attracted to cityscapes because they offer opportunities to make big, bold design statements, but a Canadian scholar and architect stunned the large crowd of pro-urban enthusiasts at the 2002 Berlin congress by stating that the architecture of the future is the architecture of villages—in effect implying that architects should stop designing Pharaonic monuments to money and corporate ego and address “the relationship between resources and resourcefulness” on a human and, above all, humane scale.
In a speculative plenum on the architecture of 2030, Richard Kroeker of Dalhousie University’s School of Architecture cited examples of African villages that developed viable, environmentally friendly infrastructure solutions by using local ingenuity and technology instead of depending on “high-tech welfare” imported from the West, which often failed under local conditions and required long delays for replacement or repair. In his Economist article, John Grimond notes that “no continent is urbanizing faster than Africa,” and admits that traffic, crime and health problems are rocketing out of control in cites where infrastructure is minimal to begin with. How long can it be before his assertion that “people prefer urban squalor to rural hopelessness” is challenged by mass pilgrimages back to villages in the bush?
In fact, some celebrity nextperts have already made sweeping predictions about a coming shift from urban to village life on this continent. Most widely quoted on the subject is American urbanist and community planner Robert McIntyre. Quotes that follow come from the 20th-anniversary issue of Canadian House & Home (December 2006), but have been repeated in many media. McIntyre invariably credits himself with the invention of a cultural buzzword—a quicker route to fame than urbanics or community planning—in this case, The New Village .
“I coined the term to describe a type of rural land development with enough self-reliance to be classified and marketed as a traditional village. New Villages are inspired by the dispersed agricultural villages where your ancestors may have lived, but have been updated for the 21 st century. For example, a typical New Village will create a diverse economy driven by the rapidly growing number of tele-workers and by the home-based businesses that are already common in rural areas,” McIntyre wrote.
He claims to have identified 5,700 places in Canada and the US, including ghost towns, that could qualify as initial bases of what amounts to a cultural revolution: “I decided that if a settlement has less than 1,000 residents and produces most of the jobs, food, water and energy within its boundaries, then the community qualifies as a New Village,” McIntyre says. “This modest level of self-sufficiency avoids much of the air pollution, traffic congestion and other sprawl-related problems created by parasitic bedroom communities where transportation can account for half of the total energy use.”
The difference between McIntyre’s idealized New Villagers and the equally idealized traditional swain and milkmaid is that the new incarnation is educated, electronically enabled and financially independent, or nearly so, thanks to equity acquired by exiting some suburban Sodom or Gomorrah without looking back, except on 250-channel cable TV and broadband high-speed Internet. The New Villages are not for the rich, for as critics of Montgomery’s “Futureville” article noted, even a dysfunctional modern city is a fine place to live if you’re a millionaire. New Villagers are the ex-urban middle class, sick of traffic, crime, stress, watching their children turned into twisted droogs and their nest egg for the future devoured by a predatory cost of living.
They are also older . Despite a backwash of disaffected urban escapees, Statistics Canada’s 2006 census reports: “In all metropolitan areas combined, more than one person in three (35.7 percent) was between 20 and 44 years of age in 2006, a much higher proportion than in rural areas, where young adults made up only 27.7 percent of the population. The difference is primarily due to internal migration of young adults, who often leave rural areas in their late teens and early twenties to pursue their education or to find a job in urban areas.”
The document notes that “rural areas also have a higher proportion of people aged 65 and over, and that proportion is growing faster than in urban areas,” daring to suggest that “[w]ith fewer young working-age adults, more seniors and more rapid population aging, rural areas may encounter some challenges in meeting the needs of an older population, for example, in the area of health and home-care services. These challenges may increase in the near future, when the first baby-boomers turn 65 years”—a candidate for Understatement of the Century. The post-World War II baby-boom age-wave has so far been the biggest marketing opportunity in modern history; anyone who catches that curl can ride it to riches. Despite their professed desire for the simple charms of small-town life, as middle-class boomers become New Villagers they’re going to take their mass demand for goods and all kinds of services with them. If you’re old, blind or confused, the government can rescind your driver’s licence, but it can’t take away your right to buy, or vote .
Ten years ago my brother-in-law and I saw gated communities of ranch-style (no stairs/wheelchair accessible) homes being built in Kelowna. He said, “Let’s buy a drugstore and a couple of cheap Hondas and offer free home delivery of prescriptions. Later, we’ll move into the funeral-home racket.” If we had, I wouldn’t be writing this. I’d be too busy counting money.
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Yet if McIntyre’s New Villages are to thrive and endure as a new model for living, they’ll have to be more than just enclaves of retired refugees from urban blight. They’ll have to offer economic opportunity, and the hope of a better future to both younger people and those for whom the poverty line is a more daunting obstacle than the old Berlin Wall.
The idea got a boost from an unlikely source when, in a June 27, 2007, interview, BC Housing Minister Rich Coleman bluntly stated that “the eventual answer for the homeless of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is relocation—to another BC community. The Downtown Eastside is going to have to change. Over time, it frankly needs to disperse its problems out of that one particular area of the city. We can’t put all the services for these folks in one place, because we’re creating our own self-fulfilling prophecy… Towns in the Fraser Valley and the Interior offer a better chance at an escape from the addiction cycle that leads to homelessness.”
That Vancouver Province interview could prove to be Coleman’s political suicide note. In almost the same breath, he made implied threats of compulsory relocation that invited East Side housing activists to compare him to Adolf Eichmann, and warned residents of small communities that they’ll “get little of his sympathy if they try to keep the poor and troubled from their midst.”
Ordinarily, I’d interpret any inclination to agree with a representative of the Campbell Liberals as reason to speed-dial the mental-health crisis line. Yet Coleman’s government ponied up $37 million to buy 10 single-room-occupancy hotels on the Downtown Eastside to prevent almost 600 rooms from being gentrified into condos or turned into fleabag hostels by landlords greedy to wring a loonie out of the 2010 Olympics. They also jacked the welfare rate by $100 a month and shelter allowance by $50, dropped $11 million into the Salvation Army tambourine to support Grace Mansion’s work with 85 high-risk residents on East Hastings, provided funding for emergency shelters at churches in the area during the winter, and are working with the city of Vancouver to develop 300 new social-housing units on city-owned sites.
East Side housing activists are guardedly grateful, but more suspicious of Coleman’s gift horse than the Trojans—and with good cause. The Campbell Liberals make no secret of their desire to see Vancouver turned into a “Futureville” of modern monoliths co-existing with gutted heritage façades in a multicultural pluralist hive of happy condo-dwellers and mall-shoppers with 1/26th ownerships in Whistler timeshares—a polis fit to welcome the world in 2010. But even if Coleman’s get-out-of-Dodge advice to the urban poor is just a cheap political ploy to disperse Vancouver’s homeless, criminal and mentally-ill street people into the hinterland so they won’t embarrass the Liberals or the City of Vancouver in 2010, what if he’s right, albeit for the wrong reasons?
You don’t have to be a middle-class urban refugee to appreciate the value of fresh air, abundant green space and good neighbours, especially if you’re raising kids. Even someone with chronic substance-abuse or mental-health issues is significantly safer and better cared for in a small town where police, health-care and social-services staff know your history and treat you like a person instead of another scrap of downtown roadkill. The urban poor actually have far more quality of life to gain by moving to a village than the bailing-out bourgeois who buys the biggest house in a small town. However legitimate their immediate concerns, activists like the Downtown Eastside Residents Association have fought a rear-guard action against gentrification for decades without ever once answering the larger question: Why fight for the right to continue living in what is officially admitted to be the worst urban shithole in all of Canada?
If Coleman really expects Vancouver’s downtown poor to move to Princeton or Dawson Creek, and if Harper or any other politician wants to turn the tide of young people abandoning the country for the city, they need to do two things: foster the economic opportunities presented by baby boomers moving to small towns (which they’ll do or get voted out), and reverse policies of centralizing education and essential services, which governments have manipulated to extirpate unique village cultures (like Newfoundland’s outports) in the past. Policies like the Campbell Liberals’ Interior hospital closures, or the plan to replace unionized health-care workers in the Okanagan with low-paid contract workers, would be examples of how not to attract younger new villagers to the Interior.
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Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” became a classic poetic eulogy for rural English culture, destroyed as country folk were lured from healthy hamlets to pestilential urban slums of the early Industrial Revolution by the illusion of economic advantage. Prospects for today’s urban poor are still low-paid futureless jobs, an ugly toxic environment, and a social milieu that corrupts from kindergarten. No one disputes that country life is healthier, less stressful, environmentally friendlier and more socially supportive than life in the metropolitan gutter, where the poor are doomed to be outsiders looking in through plate-glass restaurant and boutique windows at a lifestyle systemically denied them.
Long before MacIntyre coined the concept of the New Village, culture critics like Jane Jacobs ( The Death and Life of Great American Cities) and planner/statistician Anthony Downs, whose Stuck in Traffic grimly concludes that the number of vehicles will always expand to fill the available asphalt, abandoned the city as a workable social construct. Their conclusion that most urban problems are ultimately insoluble is a tipping point in our cultural evolution. These aren’t back-to-the-land neo-Luddite hippies running off to get naked in a bush commune; they’re smart, serious people who see Canadian media savant Marshall McLuhan’s vision of the Global Village as the only possible future for mankind.
When McLuhan coined the term five decades ago, he imagined a future in which interactive mass media and automation would encourage decentralization of populations, since nobody would be dumb enough to live in cities if they didn’t have to. Satellite media and the Internet would unite all citizens of the planet in the cozy intimacy of a village. He didn’t call it the Global City or the Global Suburb. But in his enthusiasm for the virtual village, McLuhan underrated the enduring power of the real one, what Brian Fawcett, Canada’s foremost culture critic since McLuhan, calls the “local and authentic”—the deep impact of geography, climate, economics and history on the culture it produces, as opposed to the pixel-depth homogenized culture promoted by global media.
Whatever the socio-economic makeup of New Villagers, their only hope of creating an enduring viable social alternative to the nihilistic hedonism and fluffy futurism of urban real-estate brochures is to grasp the meaning of the ancient saying “Tao resides in the hearth”—in the real domestic interactions with family and neighbours that make up everyday life in a genuine community.
McIntyre narrowed his criteria for the New Village for maximum media impact. In fact, there are tens of thousands of communities of more than 1,000 souls in North America whose economies are predominantly local and whose experience of the torments of urban sprawl is negligible. When we moved to Squamish, it had a population of 12,000 yet still fit McIntyre’s definition. The town no longer produced its own food, but with an economy based on the Woodfibre pulp mill payroll, the BC Rail shops and logging outfits of various sizes, Squamish could afford to sneer at tourist traffic on Highway 99. You still see bumper stickers from those days bearing the salutation Fuck You, I’m From Squamish—a quaint gesture with which locals distinguished themselves from the Whistler-bound yuppie scum in the MacDonald’s parking lot of a weekend.
Those stickers are now as faded as the Forestry Feeds My Family ones plastered beside them, and the trucks are no longer new models. The first five years of the millennium brought permanent closure of the mill, the sale of BC Rail to Chicago-owned CN with buyouts and layoffs at the yards and the steady decline of logging—all stakes in the heart of Squamish independence. Led by a mayor and council eager to kiss the assets of any developer with two slabs of Beaverboard to rub together, the town is desperately re-inventing itself as Canada’s Outdoor Recreation Capital . Municipal signs now direct visitors to world-famous windsurfing at the Spit and climbing on the Stawamus Chief—the same visitors former councils disparaged as “hippies who live in vans, only eat brown rice and granola and contribute nothing to the local economy.” Squamish no more fits any stretch of McIntyre’s vision of a village than does its tourist-dependent nemesis to the north, Whistler, which has become a cash cow whose jugular we need to tap regularly for sustaining lifeblood without killing the beast.
As for the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child,” the rise of crack-cocaine and crystal-meth use and violent crime amongst our kids suggest that, as villagers, we’re no better than the urban rich for whose awful offspring Whistler has become Fort Lauderdale North: a place to trash without consequences. Whistler plagiarized a Las Vegas marketing slogan inviting irresponsible hedonism—“What happens in Whistler stays in Whistler”—and now whines when visitors treat their town like a public toilet. Old and young, many Squamish residents are cashing in their Olympic-Highway equity bonus and lighting out for places like Powell River, Enderby, Lumby, Salmon Arm and Grand Forks, joining the worldwide club of runaways from the postmodern city looking for a Global Village of their dreams.
Sprawled on the weedy lawn of my half-million-dollar 1960s Squamish split-level tract house with my kids at night, I squint to glimpse stars that once littered the grass with a light so ethereal that Mary and I conceived at least one of them under it. Now they’re masked by the glare of 24-hour arc lights illuminating parking lots big enough to host tank battles. In my head I hear a refrain from an old Bob Dylan song that seems to have acquired greater meaning than when I first heard it:
And you ask why I don’t live here?
Honey, how come you don’t MOVE?
Copyright © John Moore, 2008