In Newton-North Delta, a riding that swings between Liberal and NDP, New Democrat Jinny Sims says the people she meets are worried about things like affordable housing for their kids – usually viewed as a Vancouver problem – and they’re piling in together in multigenerational households to save money.
Municipal politicians are noticing the difference too. Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts was one of the first to sense the sea change. Since her election six years ago, she has focused on treating Surrey like a city instead of a bedroom-suburb fortress immune from urban problems.
But politicians in farther-afield Langley and Maple Ridge are feeling the shift as well.
“We’ve seen a huge influx of these new residents,” says Jordan Bateman, a 35-year-old two-term Langley Township councillor who moved from a large single-family house to a townhouse with his family to be in a more compact area close to Langley's urban amenities. “They’re at many public hearings, saying, ‘I moved here from Yaletown because it was affordable, but we loved Yaletown so can we have some of that.’ The number one issue is always transportation.”
Mr. Bateman says it’s a balancing act for him and his fellow councillors to find solutions for both the older-generation suburbanites from eastern Langley, who moved out for a rural experience, and the newer suburbanites in western Langley, who want something more like a city.
The older generation doesn’t always get the transit hunger of the newer residents. “One said to me, ‘Why are you talking about buses? We use cars. That’s how we built this place.’ ” In the seventies, eighties and even nineties, says Mr. Bateman, if you built transit to a community, it meant to many people that it was poor.
In Maple Ridge – the last major suburb left that still sees more single-family homes built than multifamily each year, though not by much – Mayor Ernie Daykin says he feels the shift in his own family. His family started farming in the area in 1879; he ran a lumber-store franchise.
“I think differently than my kids,” he says. “They’re content with a townhome. And my daughter is the recycle queen, very conscious of the environment. There’s an expectation from that group that we’re going to do a better job of developing.”
For him, that means a new and different kind of debate when, for example, Walmart comes to town wanting to build on a green field near the old Albion ferry, something his council is currently grappling with.
Pollster Greg Lyle, an avid observer of subtle shifts in public opinion, thinks the new suburban patterns could mean a change in political behaviour.
Until recently, the suburbs have been seen as an undifferentiated mass of mostly conservative voters. Mr. Lyle, who runs the polling company Innovative Research Group, believes they’ve been inclined to vote that way because they’re stretched so thin, in time and money.
“What I run into is people who are exhausted. They don’t get enough down time or sleep time. They’re driven to the suburbs in the first place because they think it’s more affordable and they don’t realize the time and driving it’s going to cost them,” says Mr. Lyle. “They have no time to watch The National or read a newspaper. So when they do hear about an issue, they’re angry. They become populists.”
But the suburbs now hold the majority of the country’s population, Mr. Lyle says. And while some voters there may stay true to the image of the conservative suburbanite, others – living in places that increasingly feel like cities – may change.
“I would argue those people in the town centres will be less populist than the old suburbanites,” says Mr. Lyle. “They’ll be more like people in the city, where life is lived more easily.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
