When Vancouver advertises itself, the faces on the condominium billboards are young and smiling, poised to Live! Work! Play! And yet, is there any other Canadian city more ruthless toward its young adult citizens?
Talk to Vancouverites in their 30s or younger, and you learn why, despite a booming economy, a lot of them doubt they'll spend their futures here. Which can't be good for the city's own future.
Young people, of course, tend to rent while taking a city's measure and working toward owning a home. In Vancouver, the rental vacancy rate is under 1 per cent. Landlords, therefore, can be very picky, and so a caste system has developed among prospective tenants. To be young is to occupy a bottom rung. To be young, male and not in graduate school, the very bottom.
Almost all the new rental housing coming on line is investor-owned condos, and so those rents are in sync with the city's famously skyrocketing house values. The result, according to a report in the newspaper Georgia Straight, is a crisis placing hundreds of young Vancouverites at risk of swelling the homeless ranks.
Nowadays in Vancouver, if, like me, you are middle-aged and own your digs, it can seem cruel to invite younger adults over for dinner, a taunt to those whose incomes are relentlessly outstripped by real-estate inflation. Even worse, you begin to sense that you and your guests are on opposite sides of a political divide. You are, after all, a member of the generation that is asking the young to endure and solve global warming, but what have you done for them lately, besides pouring fine wines in a heritage home of the sort they can never aspire to have?
Much as the real-estate windfall graced middle-aged Vancouverites like myself, rising resource commodities prices have helped B.C.'s Liberal government run surpluses in the billions of dollars for several years now. But, for the young, the same government has more than doubled university tuition fees since 2001. And it's given its MLAs a fat raise while refusing to up the minimum wage to $10 from $8. To add insult, the Liberals let employers pay a "training wage" of just $6 an hour to workers starting out, most of whom, of course, are young.
Spiralling housing and education costs. Low entry wages, weak public transit, kids living on the street and greenhouse emissions spewing away. If these seem vexing "issues" to older people, the young tend to bundle them as "boomer legacies," burdens unfairly shifted onto them, says opinion researcher Angus McAllister. Politicians ignore at their own peril this way that youth filter politics, he suggests.
If so, Vancouver's ruling party, the Non-Partisan Association, sent an impolitic message last year by eliminating the Child and Youth Advocate office, which had championed young people's rights at city hall for 17 years.
"It was a way for youth to be able to navigate the system. Losing it was a real blow," said Rachel Marcuse, 23, an elected member of the executive of Vancouver's COPE opposition party. She liked Montreal a lot while she pursued her sociology degree at McGill. Montreal was full of students, apartments were easy to land, rent was $100 a month less than in Vancouver, public transit was plentiful and she envied young Quebeckers their inexpensive tuition, far cheaper than what the University of British Columbia charges.
Now, after graduating with honours and working with street kids and the Vancouver Fringe Theatre Festival, she is part of a youth movement within her party, one of six out of 11 elected members of the COPE executive who are under 30. Marcuse is also co-founder of Vancouver25, which she describes as "a new non-partisan, progressive think tank."
Ms. Marcuse is the kind of creative, engaged young person that makes a city buzz and stay relevant. But she confides what I've heard from so many other up-and-comers. Her hometown exacts too high a price for too little in return. She wonders how long she can stick it out.
What does it mean that Vancouver, itself only five or six generations old, feels so unwelcoming to its latest generation? For one, the brand doesn't fit the reality. The young city about to play host to the world's Olympians in the prime of their youth is verging on becoming a preserve of affluent, staid boomers. Nothing cool about that.
David Beers is the founding editor of The Tyee
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