Has Canadian Land’s End Hit Its Limit?

In the seductive light of evening, when the sunset reflects off the skyline and shimmers in the dark waters of Burrard Inlet and the snow sparkles like granulated sugar on the mountains beyond, it is easy to believe everything the boosters say about this place.

This, they enthuse, will be North America’s gateway to the Pacific in the 21st century, a nexus of Asian, American and Canadian culture and economics, the continent’s most livable city, proof that urban high-rise and mountain wilderness can coexist and thrive.

Certainly there’s something irresistible about this much-hyped adolescent town. It’s so at one with surrounding nature that Gore-tex and hiking boots are considered urban wear, so environmentally sensitive that it closed its zoo on grounds that confinement was cruel to animals, so trendy that at the crossroads of its most posh shopping district two Starbucks coffee boutiques face each other.

“It’s the best 100-year-old city in the world--it’s naive, it’s a teenager, and it’s great to live here,” volunteers television talk show host Vicki Gabereau.

But then comes the realization that: The orange tint to the air here is smog; rush-hour traffic headed out of town over the Lion’s Gate Bridge is backed up for three miles; and not far from the double Starbucks is Canada’s poorest neighborhood, a few blocks so strewn with heroin junkies and cocaine shooters that it has the highest incidence in the developed world of individuals infected with HIV.

Things are more complicated than they first appeared.

“Vancouver is poised to become a major Pacific Rim city-state, but what we’re all afraid of is, if we don’t plan well, we’ll lose all the quality of life that brought us here in the first place,” says David Mitchell, a historian and former legislator.

Beginning Sunday, much of the world will get a close-up view of Vancouver as President Clinton and leaders of 16 other Pacific Rim countries gather in this British Columbia port for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. They will find a city rapturously in love with itself--not without justification--and awash in contradiction.

The conference will largely spotlight the Pacific tilt given Vancouver by tens of thousands of Asian immigrants who have arrived here in the last decade. Today, more than half the children in Vancouver schools are nonwhite and mainly Asian; shopping centers in suburban Richmond are patterned after retail centers in Hong Kong; and the annual dragon boat races are as much a part of civic bonding as the Canucks’ annual chase after hockey’s Stanley Cup.

But for visiting Californians, what is most striking about Vancouver today is the parallel with the heady atmosphere of the Golden State in the 1950s and ‘60s, when for most Americans California was still the alluring glow at land’s end.

The California example is also on the mind of a growing number of civic leaders and urban thinkers here. They are preoccupied with how Vancouver can satisfy its appetite for growth and international recognition while maintaining its ambience.

The conundrum is commonly referred to as “avoiding Los Angelization.”

“We’re at the point that we could go the way of Los Angeles, with sprawl, huge traffic jams, traffic rage, racial conflict, crime, but we still have a choice,” says Michael Harcourt, a former Vancouver mayor who spent four years as British Columbia’s premier. “We’ve got some serious problems, but they’re solvable . . . and they’ve got to be addressed within five years or they’re going to be doubled and will be that much harder to solve.”

Harcourt left politics last year for academia. His office at the University of British Columbia is spare and environmentally correct (a sensor in the wall shuts off the lights if there is no movement in the room for five minutes, and the floor-to-ceiling window offers a view of a cedar grove). From this bracing perspective, he is sanguine about Vancouver’s future, confident that the city’s taste for experiment and multicultural mix will help it rise to the challenge.

“We have created a Pacific culture now,” he says. “We have Chinese, Korean, Japanese people interweaving with the English Canadian culture . . . [and] the city has gone from being the last stop on the trans-Canada railroad to being the gateway to the country.”

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Vancouver was created 111 years ago as the western terminus to the cross-country rail line and named after George Vancouver, an 18th century English explorer.

But the city only has moved into international consciousness in the last decade, when it became the meeting place for Asian immigrants crossing the Pacific and westbound Canadians fleeing a lingering recession and the frigid climate in the rest of the country.

Between 1986 and last year, regional population increased 32.7% to nearly 2 million. It is expected to increase 50% more in the next 20 years and perhaps hit 10 million or more by 2035.

Growth has more or less followed the Los Angeles pattern, spreading outward in a barely controlled sprawl as skyrocketing housing prices in the built-up central city force newcomers to move farther away. The eastward-extending Fraser River Valley has been carpeted by suburbs.

“The model that came out of Los Angeles in the ‘30s and ‘40s still dominates ideas of what cities should be, especially in the West, and of course, the automobile is dominant,” says Gordon Price, a city councilman and student of urban life. “Now, we need new models, but they’re hard to find.”

Vancouver’s great resistance to the Los Angeles paradigm came in the 1960s, when civic activists persuaded the government to halt freeway construction at the city’s edge.

But there was no accompanying commitment to build a rapid transit system, and today incoming suburban traffic simply dumps into downtown, making for rush-hour congestion that rivals Los Angeles freeways in the rain.

Reluctant to impose bridge and highway tolls on a populace that already is the most highly taxed in North America, officials are in a quandary over how to finance more transit and replace or reinforce the landmark Lion’s Gate Bridge, which engineers say is nearing the end of its life.

For Alan Artibise, an urban planner, author and university professor, that indecision typifies the reluctance of the city establishment to attack budding problems.

“Our urban problems are quite rapidly becoming so severe they’re going to force us to make the decisions we’ve been putting off for so long,” he says. “When I make speeches I often begin by saying that I have the solution to the growth problem, which is to continue to do what we’re doing--essentially nothing--and then no one else will want to come here and our problem will be solved. But of course no one really wants to do that.”

He patiently catalogs the transportation, housing and economic issues gnawing at the Vancouver utopia. He notes that the city’s rising home prices have spawned an estimated 100,000 illegal units--mainly basement and garage apartments that homeowners rent to “mortgage helpers.” He scores the provincial government for paying more attention to British Columbia’s shrinking fishing and timber industries while Vancouver loses ground to neighboring Seattle, Portland and Calgary as regional capitals of the high-tech, post-industrial economy.

Surprisingly, he does not mention crime--a favorite topic here, as Vancouver has the highest property crime rates in Canada.

Home invasions have been much in the news lately, as have police concerns about the potential influx of Asian gangs.

This is not crime on an American scale. But Canadians are proud that their cities are bastions of security and calm compared with most of their U.S. counterparts, and any trend away from that is a serious concern.

Mina Shum has lived all of her 31 years in Vancouver, and it wasn’t until recently that she had been victimized by a crime--her home was broken into--or had encountered an ethnic slur. There are parts of the city now that she will not visit at night.

Shum, a writer-director with two feature films to her credit, remains a fierce partisan of Vancouver and has spent enough time in Los Angeles on business to draw invidious comparisons.

Her debut feature, “Double Happiness,” a semiautobiographical romantic comedy about growing up Chinese-Canadian in Vancouver, led Hollywood to come courting.

“I got very familiar with these conferences on speaker phones in which everyone sounds like they’re talking to you from the next toilet stall,” she recalls. Eventually she passed on the studio scripts offered and returned home to direct her own action film, “Drive She Said.”

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Shum figures that Vancouver is going through a cultural and economic transition and that its problems are temporary, saying: “It’s not a big, big city yet, but we’ve had this fast influx of people. . . . Everything’s just a little bit larger. There are people here who see the Asian immigration not as a wonderful cultural influx, as an injection of new ways of doing things, but as an invasion of strangers and the end of the old ways. . . . The landscape here changes every six months, but we’re going to be a cosmopolitan city.”

Meanwhile, she’s contemplating new locks for her recently burglarized home.

Police fix the source of most crime as a 15-block area--”the Downtown Eastside,” which census data have identified as having the lowest per capita income in the nation.

The area long has been a center of Canada’s heroin trade and the theft associated with it. Recently, addicts have shifted to cocaine, injecting 10 to 15 times a day rather than the three or four shots typical of heroin. One result is a surge in infections with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

Health officials believe that a third or more of the estimated 3,000 to 5,000 addicts in the neighborhood carry the virus, a rate they believe is the highest in the industrial world.

Last month, the regional health board, fearing that prostitutes who frequent the Downtown Eastside are spreading the epidemic, declared a medical emergency, freeing $2.2 million in provincial funds to battle the problem.

But the crisis has also prompted frank discussion among health and civic officials and even some in law enforcement about decriminalizing narcotics like heroin.

“We have to talk about it because, frankly, what we’re doing now isn’t working,” said Larry Campbell, the chief coroner. “What have we got to lose?”

That Vancouver might be willing to tackle such a difficult problem with an unconventional solution is heartening to some here, even if they do not personally favor decriminalization of drugs. To them, the city’s flexibility is a key to containing its urban ills.

Historian Mitchell sums it up this way: “I’ve always thought there should be a big sign at the Vancouver Airport, saying, ‘Welcome to British Columbia. Everything you’ve heard is true.’ ”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Next Metropolis?

Vancouver’s natural beauty and burgeoning culture and economy are reminiscent of Southern California’s in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Greater Vancouver

Population: 1.8 million

Unemployment: 8.3%

Per capita income (1993): $20,284

Annual number of airport passengers: 12 million

Average monthly rent for two-bedroom apartment (1995): $590

Note: Greater Vancouver covers the city of Vancouver plus surrounding cities and districts; income figure is average among those who filed tax returns; figures in U.S. dollars.

Sources: Census data, British Columbia Film Commission

Hot Location

Number of feature films produced in British Columbia: 35 in 1995

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