(NOTE: If this topic doesn’t really grab you, check out the magazine anyway. Aliya-Jasmine Sovani’s boobs are practically falling out of her shirt on the next page after my story ends, on page 64. In her feature by Leo Petaccia, “Sharp sits down with MTV Canada’s most infamous host to talk about the merits of social consciousness, the importance of breasts and why we all need to lighten up once in a while”. Worth a look.)

An excerpt from my story:

“Make a better breakfast faster, Batter Blaster!” The tongue-in-cheek jingle is not the only addictive thing about entrepreneur Sean O’Connor’s invention. His waffle mix in a spray can is now in 13,000 stores across North America, including Costco and Walmart, with plenty of accolades and YouTube testimonials by dedicated fans of the product. “Just shake, point, blast and cook,” the slogan goes.

“We believe we’re consistent with the innovative path that led to microwave popcorn, or lettuce in a bag,” O’Connor notes. It’s organic, easy to use and, increasingly, represents the future of how we prepare our food.

There are certainly enough other examples of packaged foods, unrecognizable a few generations ago, that have become commonplace. But as the demand for high-tech foods increases, so does the demand for organics and local food. Once again, we face a paradox.

Is this the future of food?

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But for the funky, vital neighborhood of Commercial Drive in Vancouver, gradual improvements will just keep adding to the trend of gentrification that has made home-ownership for lower incomes totally out of reach and made some local business owners concerned about their long-term future. Without more massive infusions of subsidized housing, how can the Drive retain its character as the neighborhood becomes irresistible to Yuppies? My comments in the Granville Magazine blog post, When livability and resilience collide

Can Commercial hold back gentrification? If it can’t, is it possible to retain the neighbourhood’s distinct character? These were the sorts of questions that participants were dealing with at the recent Drive to Resilience forum on envisioning the future of Commercial Drive, hosted by the students in the Semester in Dialogue program at SFU. Those in attendance included residents, local business owners and representatives from various neighbourhood organizations who were guided through a day-long exercise in collaborative problem solving.

Much of what participants discussed revolved around developing more support for affordable housing, help for artists and small businesses, and even programs to support the integration of the area’s homeless and marginal people into composting efforts. In this sense, much of Commercial Drive’s character seems dependent on low rent and subsidies for those with low income.

Ironically, the characteristics that define Commercial Drive may have actually become more pronounced due to the gentrification of areas like Kitsilano, which has sent artists and working-class holdouts fleeing for the Eastside. But in a few more years, rent increases for residents and businesses may conceivably turn the area into a slightly more mellow version of South Granville—with its Le Chateau, Pottery Barn and Chapters stores—sending purists and the area’s poor fleeing for some other as-yet ungentrified corner of the city.

If the consensus from neighbourhood residents and Vancouver-area citizens who make the Drive their second home is to preserve a working class neighbourhood and artist refuge in the midst of a rapidly growing, trend-setting cosmopolitan metropolis, the simplest way to keep rents down is to disincentivise certain yuppie types from moving into the neighbourhood. How to do that without going so far that you actually put the area into decline is tricky.

How Does Commercial Drive Retain This?

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Here’s an excerpt from my report in Granville on the viability of Woodward’s as a living example of social housing that works:

Of course, since about 2000, Vancouver’s residents and politicians have made substantial efforts to change this neighborhood. Without an umbrella organization to direct taxpayers funds effectively, many projects have seen pitiful returns on investment. But as I noted last week, the Woodward’s building is an example of a project that has provided real benefits to residents—and in the bigger picture, our city.

There’s no question that April and other residents of Woodward’s are now able to live with dignity in a supportive environment. But this improved living condition didn’t come cheap. Not everyone is pleased about the scale of the investment. As one friend who lives in Vancouver South confided in me the other day, “I understand people need housing, but why do we have to spend so much so that they can have views of Canada Place and brand new couches? I mean, do people really have a ‘right’ to live in some of the most desirable real estate in the world?”

Tough questions. But I think our city has provided some balanced answers in the Woodward’s experiment.

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Of course, this is a city of contrasts. We’re not just a pretty place. It’s complicated. A few examples for our welcome visitors:

* Vancouver aims to be the greenest city on the planet by 2020 and we may just be able to pull it off. But if everyone on Earth lived like people here, we’d need four planets to sustain us.

* Vancouver is one of the most livable cities anywhere. It is also home to the poorest postal code in Canada, the Downtown Eastside, where “livable” is definitely a relative term for some of its most unfortunate residents (like Quatchi?). But there’s another side, too; the DTES, one of this city’s oldest neighborhoods, defies stereotypes with a community that is bursting with spirit and compassion.

* We’ve got a mayor who entered politics as a lefty New Democrat after first making it big as a successful entrepreneur and who has since become a… well, someone not quite defined by conventional partisan politics. Which seems to be a bit of a Vancouver tradition.

* Vancouverites (well, probably all Canadians) have a reputation not just for tolerance (which is sort of a pathetic goal, if you think about it), but for being awfully nice, polite-to-a-fault sort of folks. Yet apparently, we need to be reminded about how to smile properly for our guests.

* Our city is a nice, safe place. Except when the occasional maniac killer stalks our citizens. Or if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the cops show up.

* This is one of the only big cities in Canada where we don’t get ice that stays in the winter. It’s also home to one of the most beloved (and consistently sold-out at minimum $100 a ticket) hockey teams in NHL history.

* For some newcomers to Vancouver who haven’t yet discovered their clique, this place can be cold and unwelcoming. But if you are willing to take five minutes to set up a Twitter account, you can join a rambunctious and eclectic social circle over some locally-brewed pints in less than half an hour.

* Vancouver came on the scene fairly late in the game when it came to settling this continent (well, by people who weren’t already living here for 10,000 years, anyway). Yet we have amassed a unique heritage that is worth preserving; indeed, Vancouver’s late emergence in the modern age was perfectly timed to give us a leg up when it comes to planning and sustaining a city that works.

I hope that visitors to Vancouver will spend some time digging deeper. This is an awfully interesting place to be — even after the Olympics have come and gone.

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Vancouver writer Frances Bula points out a big problem with consultations on social housing projects in Vancouver, in this case referring to a new proposal for my neighborhood of Mount Pleasant:

As is always the case with “public consultation” these days, the open houses are always designed to split people up, rather than have a big open meeting, so that the angry ranters don’t get a chance to dominate.

That’s good, but I was struck by what I noticed in the conversations I had, which was a tendency among the explainers (city planners, architects, housing groups) to take on a tone of “but you just don’t realize the facts and I’m now going to explain them to you.” Very annoying, as it felt like I wasn’t really being listened to…

In the small groups I eavesdropped on, it sounded as though others were having the same experience and not being persuaded by it. One explainer said the neighbourhood didn’t have to worry about problems with the project because there had been a housing project built on Fraser and everyone had been worried about that, but it was completely unnoticeable now that it was up. But, said the woman listening, that project was much smaller, only 30 or so units, and this was is 100. And the people accepted there were people who’d gone through rehab; this one is for people who still have a lot of problems that aren’t going away any time soon.

Talking past one another is only part of the problem. But another factor is that stakeholders in these public forums may be encouraged in the impression that if they can just talk things out, a compromise solution will be found. But in some aspects of the social housing debate, there may be no middle ground.

Does the argument hold that all citizens, regardless of how addicted or delusional they may be, or whether they are a danger to themselves or others, are entitled to shelter? And that the shelter they are entitled to must be in a location and have amenities that offer a better quality of life than your typical bug-infested Downtown Eastside hotel? Well, then, some people, somewhere, in a community that has managed to create a positive experience for its residents, will necessarily have their own livability diluted.

It’s no stereotype that living next door to newly-moved-in drug addicts and the mentally ill is no picnic — it’s just the way it is. The level of inconvenience and public safety is likely to go down. But how much of a downgrade in livability is the community willing to tolerate so that their more unfortunate fellow citizens can have a chance at a better life?

Well, that really goes to the heart of what cities have always been about. Living in an urban setting has always been about trade-offs in access to amenities, economic opportunities, views, safety and just how comfortable you can be with your neighbors.

As a thought exercise, I suppose I’m comfortable with the idea of a single social housing facility going up in my neighborhood. But right now, I’m fuzzy on precisely how these new residents might affect the neighborhood overall. Won’t the potentially negative impact of the new neighbors be diluted in a densely-populated area of 54000 residents?

I’m also a bit more able to be more welcoming, since I know the project isn’t going up right next door to me. I judge the likely impact on my own standard of living to be relatively small. This seems to be borne out by one recent study showing that social housing facilities in Vancouver thus far seem to have little to no impact on the host community. I’m certain I’d be more emotionally involved if I lived on the same block as the new residents. I can afford to be more open-minded. But the NIMBYists do have legitimate concerns. What we have here is a failure to communicate — though it doesn’t have to be.

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To illustrate the paradox, just imagine that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes a break from — well, whatever he is doing while parliament is prorogued — in order to make an unexpected announcement: “We will build a city of the future in Yellowknife!” he shouts with a wild look in his eye. The hastily-assembled reporters move as a unit towards the back of the room and look to the exits.

“Now, I know the Al Gore crowd won’t like this, but the oil sands development in Alberta will double its production capacity to fund this gleaming northern metropolis. Not to worry, taxpayers — to ensure that this city is built as fast as possible while getting the best value for your money, Yellowknife will be designated as a special economic zone. The developers will be able to employ slave, er, ah, inexpensive foreign workers not subject to Canadian labor laws. Oh, and did I mention we’re going to build a commercial and residential tower more than twice the size of the Empire State Building?”

Sounds utterly ridiculous, right? The only question is which group would tear Harper apart with their bare hands first: the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, or his own caucus. The environmental damage alone for building a huge city in a fragile and largely frozen ecosystem would be obvious to a small child. Add robust oil sands development into the mix and there’s a good chance the United Nations Security Council would authorize military intervention to topple the Harper regime.

A Cautionary Tale for Urban Planners
So why is this scenario actually playing out in Dubai with so little attention paid to the environmental damage it is doing to the planet? Just so we’re clear about the scale of the problem in the world’s least sustainable city:

Dubai consumes more resources per capita than any other country in the world, including the US. The city is a monument to indulgence, luxury, and, thus far, utter disregard for ecological footprint or sustainability: for example, Dubai currently consumes a whopping 250 million gallons of water per day (around 97% of which is desalinated sea water) to sustain a city of less than 1.5 million people.

Of course, all those seawater desalination plants require tremendous amounts of energy, which comes from the burning of fossil fuel, namely oil. One would think that a desert kingdom with such challenges would try to conserve some of its precious resources. Instead, the scorching hot desert city plans to literally evaporate its wealth by building the world’s biggest water fountain:

The fountains, which has yet to be named, will be capable of shooting water over 150 metres into the air – the height of a 50-storey building – and stretch over 275 metres – the length of two football fields. The $218 million project will be 25 percent larger than the iconic fountains at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.

The 828 meter-tall Burj Dubai building will only add to the city’s troubles. It essentially added a city on top of the existing city. All the Vancouver city planners in the world — and Dubai certainly tried to get all of them — won’t be able to fix the basic problem: they built a decadent, modern city in a place that lacked enough natural resources to properly provide for a small medieval town.

Sour Grapes and Sweet Crude
Some will characterize my analysis as a bitter, sour-grapes rant of a patriotic Canuck motivated by the demotion of the CN Tower to second-best status. Others will point out that cities in North American are filled with skyscrapers — why can’t the Middle East aspire to this kind of prosperity and engineering feats?

But let’s remember that the West built up most of it’s cities at a time of cheap energy and no general consensus on the threat of global warming. We may have developed and achieved high levels of prosperity at a high cost to our environment. But until the last few decades (and for most of the population, until the last few years), our society did not understand the potential link between our industrial development and environmental degradation. Now that most of us are clear on the connection (and the dangers), we now aspire to incorporate environmental sustainability into everything we do. We are horrified by urban nightmares of places like Los Angeles and Atlanta. Freeways are out, bike paths are in. We may still fail most of the time in achieving sustainable cities — even Vancouver doesn’t yet come close to being carbon-neutral — but at least we’re aiming for a greener future.

As for Dubai, they have access to exactly the same data on environmental degradation and climate change that we’ve got, but the simple fact is that they don’t care. To oil shiekdoms like the United Arab Emirates, phrases like “peak oil” don’t frighten. They conjure dollar signs in their eyes. All the better to help them get rich and have some fun.

Prosperity and fun are are not intrinsically terrible things. But when unaccompanied by sustainable planning (which at this point, would entail massive forced depopulation of Dubai and other parts of the UAE), these all-encompassing aims are terribly irresponsible. They’re bad for Dubai citizens. They’re also potentially dangerous for the rest of the world.

In the absence of a technology revolution involving renewable resources like solar energy, places like Dubai will be overtaken by the desert, probably sooner than later. The difference is that when Las Vegas finally goes down, the citizens of that doomed mirage will be able to take haven in other parts of the USA. When Alberta dries up, parched cowboys will flee to the rainy west coast.

But when Dubai goes down? Will their people run to the other sun-blasted parts of the Arab world when their own ecosystem has been used up? Or will they come here? This brings up the bigger picture problem: is the West destined (and obligated) to become a life raft for cities and nations that destroyed their own ecosystems?

The Wealth of Nations and the Movement of Peoples
As the Copenhagen summit demonstrated, the Third World wants the “rich and decadent” West to transfer massive amounts of wealth, no questions asked, so that they can keep running their countries into the ground. Many Westerners are quite happy to hand over these suitcases full of unmarked hundred-dollar bills out of a misplaced sense of guilt towards countries that have in most cases been the victim of their own internal corruption, political intransigence and fanaticism.

These wealth transfers will occur, likely starting in 2010, if the frenzied one-upping promises of politicians at Copenhagen is any indication. So we will continue to invest in the environmental degradation of what we might call rogue nations, ecologically speaking.

It’s unclear whether places like Dubai will be the eventual recipients of this climate change prevention fund. It’s hard to imagine Canadian taxpayers forking over millions so that Dubaians can keep their desalination plants running, so that they can keep operating their water slides. Then again, no one will be keeping track…

But that’s not where the story ends for places like Canada. Eventually, no amount of cash transfer will be enough to support artificial nations that have literally pissed away their wealth and built their cities on a foundation of sand. That’s when we will be asked to take in people from Dubai and other arid parts of the world — again, no questions asked, since that would be cruel and clearly racist. Will our society, already coping poorly with a stream of immigrants from certain parts of the world where “Canadian values” are poorly understood, be able to cope with the coming flood?

Can we simplify this problem? Imagine, in the course of gaining some temporary measure of prosperity, a man you know destroys his own house and damages the property of his neighbors. Are you ethically bound to give him shelter? Is your decision based on generosity, or the idea that if you deny him shelter and force him to sleep rough, he will instead attempt to break into your basement?

In the bigger picture, when it comes to dealing with the waves of climate refugees, these questions will not remain hypothetical for long.

Where Are the Eco-Warriors?
The well-heeled public relations squad for Dubai has certainly earned their keep. In all the coverage of the biggest building in the world, I saw no condemnation of this engineering monstrosity by the usual green pundits. In fact, the only criticism I’ve seen leveled at Burj Dubai is that owing to the economic downturn, it may not have been timed right in order to guarantee full occupancy.

Are the greens worried about “offending” certain ethnic sensibilities? Perhaps they don’t want to be tarring Dubai’s powers-that-be with the same brush as the one they use to smear colonial, or so called neo-colonial Western nations. Hitting Dubai over it’s big useless tower standing in the bleached desert just doesn’t give the same sense of satisfaction as beating up Canada over the oil sands, or even rising star China over building a new coal plant every week.

The Burj Dubai hides in plain site from environmentalists and gets a free pass this week. Meanwhile, we’ll see if a news cycle can go by without some environmental organization slamming Canada as the real planet killer.

Dubai’s Wild Wadi Water Slide. Dubai’s Vaunted Wealth Goes Down the Drain. So Much for Sustainability

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In my latest Cityview column for Granville Magazine, I decided to take the “shooting-ducks-in-a-barrel” approach and looked at the awful state of public transit in Los Angeles. As I noted on a recent trip, the car-clogged freeways of that part of the American nation are a testament to bad planning predicated on an unsustainable assumption (a lie, really) of long-term access to cheap energy.

Los Angeles has invested billions of dollars to pick away at the problem with subway lines and new clean-energy buses. But the fact is that despite these efforts, transit ridership on the whole hasn’t moved in decades.

One can no more fix Los Angeles’ traffic issues with transit than you could fix a badly infected broken arm with a band-aid. There’s just too much of a legacy of expensive road infrastructure to maintain and a persistent attitude among the locals that they are “entitled” to their cars — and the “loser cruiser” is for the poor (This attitude contrasts not just with Vancouver but L.A.’s polar opposite, New York City, where Wall Street traders in suits and briefcases rub shoulders with working class Joes on the packed subways).

My look at Los Angeles certainly wasn’t meant to slag our American cousins. We certainly have our own mutated versions of this unsustainable model: Calgary and most other prairie cities, have spread out in the absence of natural geographic limits to growth, taking on all the unfavorable characteristics of “Edge cities” — lacking distinct neighborhoods, utterly dependent on ring roads and freeways, and ineffective mass transit.

The question is what these cities will do with all of this legacy of expensive, unsustainable infrastructure. Will taxpayers simply keep on subsidizing these urban disasters? Will these urban wastelands just be abandoned (or at least vastly depopulated) a few decades from now? I expect both of these things to happen in succession. The only question is how much longer taxpayers are willing to put up with subsidizing failure.

Recommended reading: I’ve seen one possible future for Vancouver and it’s scary

Also: Calgary Transit Sucks

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Vancouver residents come out in force to an emotionally charged public city budget meeting, begging the question, ‘what are our priorities?’

Some city services, like parks and libraries, are seen not just as services, but as essential to our civic space where citizens can gather and livability is defined. When the money tap gets cut off, watch out.

Read my complete article at Granville Magazine, Something’s Gotta Give.

For more insight on the budget debate at Vancouver City Hall, I highly recommend City Caucus’ coverage, Council budget meeting brings out hundreds, and high emotions.

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April Smith of Aha Media, 24 and living in the downtown eastside, provides a powerful and moving description of her own challenges in growing up in poverty in Vancouver. You can listen to her full interview on the CBC here.

My hastily done transcription provides the following highlights:

I had parents that were really abusive. There was never enough money. I faced a lot of cruelty. I have a lot of scars on my body. There are more on my soul. It’s something that still affects me today.

I remember being in elementary school and being teased because I didn’t have the proper outfit. I couldn’t go on field trips because we couldn’t afford it. We didn’t have enough food in the house… I remember sleeping in the cold.

It’s been a long journey. I’ve been homeless for many years. I remember sleeping on streets, standing in the food lineups. I’ve been on own since I was 12. I was just trying to survive, standing in lineups, trying to find warm shelter, warm clothes, struggling with my own image, my own self esteem.

Sometimes it meant trying to find protection and shelter in different ways that I never thought I would ever get into. That’s including aligning myself in different relationships. Sometimes with poverty comes violence, trauma and abuse towards women and it can affect the rest of your life.

Learn more about Aha Media’s new-media hyper local citizen journalists, including April Smith, here. They’ve got an incredible story, and this dynamic team helps our community tell incredible stories.

April Smith of Aha Media interviews Jeffrey in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

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BC Federation of Labour’s Jim Sinclair calls the minimum wage situation a disgrace. It’s hard to argue the point.

Given our cost of living, minimum wage in Vancouver should at least be higher than in my original home town of Winnipeg. In Manitoba, minimum wage is set at $9 per hour. My fellow Vancouverites will howl in disbelief as I inform them that a friend of mine in Winnipeg bought a four-bedroom house there a few years back for about $70,000. That’s not a typo — there’s really not a zero missing. Sure, my friend’s spacious place is a bit of a fixer-upper, and it’s not exactly central, but try buying a four-bedroom house on the boundary of Vancouver and Burnaby for ten-times that purchase price. Good luck. That’s just one indication, but Metro Vancouver also has the highest rental rate in Canada. The point is, it’s expensive to live here.

Should someone flipping burgers or delivering pizzas naturally have the scratch for a down-payment on a house virtually anywhere in the country? Probably not. No one is “entitled” to live in Vancouver’s west end or Toronto’s ritzier burbs. Sure, some low-wage earners have to work two or three jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table for their growing families. Well, that’s life. We don’t have a caste system in Canada. The class system here is arguably even more permeable than in the USA, so-called land of opportunity. And there are certainly government programs making it easier for anyone to get the education and training they need to do what they want with their life. Given that, what is a fair minimum wage?

I don’t want to argue the merits of a particular level of minimum wage, somewhere between “enough for someone living with their parents to buy comic books and cigarettes” to “enough to support a small family and keep the fridge stocked with beer”. Frankly, I have no idea what constitutes fair in a society where the top level-CEOs make as much in the first 15 minutes of the year as I do all year.

But frankly, I don’t really want our politicians and business leaders in BC to spend all that much time on minimum wage. Top it up by a buck or two and be done with it until the coffee servers in Osborne Village once again start looking uppity.

Instead, I’d like to hear more about how this province is going to be positioned to train and produce the knowledge workers required to boost our fortunes in coming years. The recession is a temporary bump in the global process of a flattening international economy. North Americans need to become much better at building and sustaining a knowledge economy based on technological innovation, since we know where all the manufacturing and low-skilled labor has moved over the past decades.

If BC is successful in promoting this kind of success to augment its traditional resource-extraction based industries, minimum wage will become irrelevant. It seems natural that the so-called “green economy” will be a big part of this, as there are already plenty of companies in BC building capacity in the fields of alternative energy and more sustainable products. When the economy is roaring again, minimum wage will once more be the preserve of high school students and ambitious but unskilled laborers training at night for future opportunities.

Jim Sinclair calling for an increase from BC’s $8 minimum wage — in 2006

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