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It's interesting that the exact same thing is happening in Toronto and has been for a little over ten years. When I moved there in '99, the following few years were some of the last ones where any real middle class neighbourhoods still existed in Old Toronto. Now there are really none left, unless you include some less desirable hoods that are far from decent transit options, and even then you're looking at $500,000+ for a bungalow, completely unrenovated, stuck in the middle of no where. It's a goddam shame and a failure to Canada's people that middle class and middle income people cannot afford to live in two of our three biggest and best cities. And instead of building affordable rental buildings, which most cities have in spades, they build condos by the thousands, which are promptly bought up by speculators, who rent them out at sky-high prices.
Our politicians are totally asleep at the switch and this issue isn't even on their radar because - guess what? - all our politicians have the money to live decent lives in these pricey metropolises. But for those who don't, they are forced to live miles away from their job, out in some far-flung burb where the lots are big and the roads bigger, where you have to get in your car and drive to get a carton of milk, and spend up to three hours in traffic each day. Then they say people can't afford taxes and fees to build better transit to ease the gridlock and make the commute from the suburbs less hectic - but how can they afford not to? At least Vancouver doesn't have a mayor with a probable serious substance abuse issue and a minority government whose hands are completely tied by left and right-wing nut jobs in the other parties. Nonetheless, I understand this issue well because I'm looking to buy in my city right now and it's a friggin' crime what little pieces of junk in the city are being sold (and bought) for.
Agree with all of this, but at least Toronto has the luxury of being a high income city. There are still many, many professional jobs available in the city. Vancouver's employment market is a wasteland by comparison.
In Vancouver, first of all there are hardly ANY listings at that price, but for $168,000 you can get a 226 square foot apartment. Yes, 226 sq feet---basically it IS a hotel room. And not a very big one at that.
Not a good comparison. I agree that real estate, especially detached houses may be cheaper in Seattle ( remember though Vancouver is 100 sq k smaller so some of the listings that say Seattle would be considered the burbs in Vancouver )
This link is for a trendy area of Seattle called Belltown. It just a representation of course of this particular real estate site, and near the end of the list as the condo's get cheaper they seem not to actually be in Belltown but out near the Space Needle.
If you didn't want to live downtown, or can't afford it, there are many suburbs where cheaper condo's exist, such as Coquitlam, about 30 minutes drive away. It is also getting a new Skytrain line which will make commuting even easier.
You can see from this link there are 36 listings for 1 bed condo under 200,000, with a few starting at 124,000. The cheapest 2 bedroom though is 219,000. Comparing real estate is very tricky since Belltown is not Yaletown, Coquitlam is not another area of Seattle. You have to look at all the costs involved in owning, property taxes, condo fees etc. For example comparing the price of a condo in Vancouver to Toronto just in price ignores the fact that in Toronto condo fees are sometimes 3 times larger than in Vancouver.
Look, Vancouver is a beautiful city with a ton of density in the downtown core and a great urban park in Stanley Park. BUT....where is the culture? What is the economy? Vancouver is postcard perfect to the casual tourist and average online city data forumer but there's much more to the story than how many people per sq. kilometer/mile are living in an area and how pretty the mountain backdrop is.
I have always argued that at the end of the day I find that Seattle just offers more. Despite what the original poster has said about Seattle being a "suburban" place and casually writing its neighborhoods off as so, they are a true asset to the city. Is Kitsilano considered suburban? because that's how close Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, First Hill are to the central core of Seattle..and speaking of Seattle's core, people actually work there AND with a nod to Vancouver are actually living there in higher and higher numbers. So what is happening is the best of both worlds. A downtown full of historic architecture, markets, condo towers, along with the office towers that are already there. Jobs that afford the cost of living and surrounding neighborhoods that are unique and all with differing vibes.
Culturally it's a lot more obvious. While Vancouver is quickly losing it's small theaters, art spaces and playhouses Seattle is continuing its investment in the arts. An already internationally known music scene that still keeps people guessing as to what's next (Macklemore? who knew that would happen?) KEXP, tons of venues and art house theaters and a food/coffee/beer scene that is top notch.
I do not deny Vancouver's advantages with density, proximity to mountains, and more extensive public transit but livability to me exist more with an intangible vibe that fosters creativity and innovation. Vancouver has built a fine city of parks, condos, seawalls and public beaches so the bones are there. Now how do you make a city come to life culturally? It's not that you can't but I'd argue Seattle is in a better position by starting off with the economy and culture and building a better city from there. It's not always pretty, Seattle has warts aplenty to deal with but it's a pretty exciting time to be in Seattle.
jr75 said in part "Look, Vancouver is a beautiful city with a ton of density in the downtown core and a great urban park in Stanley Park. BUT....where is the culture? What is the economy? "
I think just because Vancouver does not have a big corporation headquarters etc people tend to think that means a small economy.
as for culture that gets quite personal since one persons cultural interests can be very different. I do give the nod to Seattle though in terms of museum exhibits. Seattle tends to get the big international ones that tour the world. Vancouver's cultural scene is alive and I hope well, the art gallery has outgrown it's space and is looking for a very large new one.
As for growth in live plays, well I don't think that has happened in Vancouver, don't know about Seattle. When we lost the Playhouse Theatre group, I was saddened. We still have several playhouses though and big London/Broadway productions do perform here, but I feel less so than previous years.
We still have our symphony, opera, ballet companies. We also have a world class professional choir, The Vancouver Chamber Choir, which is internationally known in those circles. They even got a very, very rare request to perform in front of the emperor and empress of Japan when they were in Tokyo. Also several other choirs.
So even though it's hard to compare cultures, Vancouver isn't a dry wasteland.
"Innovation, tourism and our proximity to Asia: A look into the factors that will shape our city's long-term prosperity"
We have already that in Seattle we are not "planning" to have that in the long term.
"Without name-brand resource captains or a recognizable industry hub—a Microsoft (like Seattle) or Nike (like Portland) or Silicon Valley (like San Francisco)—we’ve become a city with no clear understanding of what fuels our economy. In fact, many believe that we don’t really have a real economy, that we survive on lattes, made-for-TV movies, yoga pants, and illegal drugs."
Exactly
The article from Wikipedia mentions a lit of companies present in Vancouver but it does not tell you how many people they do employ.
Let me give you just an example that I know very well (it was my company), when IBM bought out PwC Consulting it planned a resource center in Burnaby, where is still located, mainly for only one reason...taking advantage of of the low labor costs compared to similar US counterparts....they could send these consultants to do client work all around the US for way less money....not exactly the type of "future" I would like a city to have (low cost labor).
And the people working at Burnaby IBM BCS are happy as clams to be overworked and overtraveled because there are not many opportunities to reproduce that kind of salary in Vancouver.
Is admirable the positive spin you try to put on the arts issue......admirable but there is simply no context between the two.
Natnasci, let me tell you that I think in this discussion I'm maybe one of the most unbiased voice you can simply because I do not have an emotional attachment to either cities.
I was born and raised in Italy, traveled for work all around the world and immigrated in Vancouver as 30 years old IT business consultant, attracted by the "best city on the world" reputation of the city and its position on the West Coast.
Let me tell you that has been a borderline miserable experience professionally.
I was not born in Van nor have a family there the same as Seattle (well I have my wife family now) so I tend to see things more in an impartial, "cut and dry" balanced way I think (obviously partly shaped by my experience) and listening to people around me. I do not have "a dog in this fight".
I'm not Canadian or American at heart (even if I have both passports), I'm Italian.
Seattle is not, by far, my "ideal" city (the "perfect" city does not exist) and I can mention several ones where I would rather live.
The way I see it Vancouver at the moment does not have much of a future for the younger generations, simple as that. It is a very well executed Potemkin Village....huge potential but unreleased, trapped.
This is a terrific take on the Seattle-Vancouver debate...from a native Vancouverite...I agree with him on a 95%+ of the points he makes.
Vancouver vs. Seattle: a Vancouverite's Perspective
May 08 2013
I've lived and worked in a lot of cities: Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, to name a few. My last real "job", before returning to my hometown of Vancouver to become an independent web developer, was with Expedia in Seattle. I love Vancouver, and I love Seattle. But despite people consistently throwing them into the same boat and saying things like "they're basically the same", they're not. They're not the same. Aside from being Pacific Northwest cities and a populous with a proclivity for yoga, hiking, and not working too hard, they're very, very different. I'd like to describe why.
Seattle has an Economy
People move to Seattle to make money. People move to Vancouver when they've already made it. That about describes it.
Some of the world's largest and most innovative companies call Seattle home. Boeing, Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon, Nordstrom, Costco, T-Mobile (US) are all companies based in the greater Seattle area. All this commerce creates with it a cascading set of high-end professional service businesses like patent law firms, venture capital, investment banks, and lobbyists. If you're young and have a good college degree, it's not a stretch to be making six-figures with a few years of experience under your belt.
What's the biggest company in Vancouver, on the other hand? BC Hydro - a crown utility. What's the most well-known tech company in Vancouver? Probably Hootsuite - a business that effectively makes a popular Twitter app and employs a few hundred people. Electronic Arts has a gaming studio in Burnaby, but is merely a satellite of a much larger American company. Vancouver's economy is mostly predicated on cyclical real estate bubbles, drugs, and junior mining companies who employ half a dozen engineers and yet don't actually mine anything.
Vancouver is More Beautiful (and its beauty is more accessible)
I know it's subjective, but at least to this writer, Vancouver wins in the beauty department. The mountains are closer to the city and more easily accessible. Stanley Park along with the beautiful seawall that surrounds it are literally a part of downtown. With the exception of the occasional port or lumber yard, the entirety of Vancouver's coastline consists of publicly-accessible beaches or parks, whereas Seattle's western coastline (with the exception of overcrowded beaches like Alki and Golden Gardens) largely consists of industrial parks and inaccessible raised platforms, while the eastern coastline around Lake Washington is almost entirely privatized. Great if you are a member of the 0.001% who can afford property there. Not so great if you are not.
Vancouverites Are Nicer, But Seattlites Are More Interesting
Passive aggressive is a word many locals use to describe Seattle. People in Vancouver are less passive agressive and just generally more passive. Meeting people is hard in both cities, no doubt. Neither has the critical mass of transient diaspora, the likes of a New York or Washington, that makes people want to talk to and meet strangers, but I've found that at least in Vancouver, there is a crack in walls of people's exclusion that comes from a Canadian politeness that Seattle doesn't have.
On the other hand, if you do manage to get to know people in either city, Seattlites are generally more interesting. Much more interesting. Every bar tender and barista in Seattle is aspiring to be something. Whether it be a PhD, a musician, a producer, a writer, whatever. In Vancouver, bar-tending is a career. Smoke weed and play video games in the day and bartend at night is the name of the game. Or waiter in the day and snowboard at night. I wont judge these people for choosing to live an unburdened life, but I will judge them for how incredibly vapid most of them are.
Seattle Has a Better Music Scene
Seattle is a city of music in a way that makes it unfair, if not meaningless, to compare it to Vancouver. As the home of grunge, it is one of North America's music capitals. Seattle doesn't just make musicians. It creates groundbreaking musicians: Nirvana, Foo Fighters, and Pearl Jam to name a few. Macklemore is pretty good, too.
Vancouver is More Organized, Seattle is More Chaotic
Vancouver zoning laws are brutally protective of mixing commercial, residential, or industrial area. The outcome is an autistic urban planner's wet dream: highly organized neighbourhood grids, straight lines, pristine hedges, and slow transitions between property types.
Seattle is almost the exact opposite. Breweries next to bike shops next to a stack of townhouses next to a highway next to factory a converted to a coffee shop converted to a yoga studio converted to a beed store.
Vancouver is Centralized
The thing about strict municipal zoning and urban planning is that urban planners really like centralization. They are taught density leads to a bunch of good stuff like better public transit and easier allocation of social services. And that is at least partly to explain why Vancouver is incredibly centralized. Everything happens in downtown Vancouver. People live there, they work there, and they go out there. Look at any list of top restaurants or bars in the city and odds are good that at least half of them are in downtown. The good? Downtown Vancouver is awesome. The bad? The rest of the city sometimes feels like a really big suburb.
Seattle, on the other hand, is all about neighbourhoods. Downtown Seattle kind of sucks. Maybe I could put it more eloquently than that, but "sucks" just fits. Pike Place market is nice and so is Pioneer Square, but the list mostly ends there. But what its downtown lacks, its neighborhoods make up for. The beauty about a city made up of discrete neighborhoods is that it's easier to feel like a member of a community. And when you feel like you want something new, to experience a new vibe or a different type of people, you only need to drive a few miles.
Seattle Has More Highways, Vancouver Has Better Transit
There aren't many bus lines in Seattle, and if you are lucky enough to find a bus that'll get you where you need to go, depending on the time and location, you might not want to get on. I was once on my way from downtown to Fremont when a guy in a blood-soaked wife beater and a fresh stab wound was trying to get on. Needless to say, it's nice if not necessary to have a car in Seattle.
Having a car in Vancouver, conversely, is nice but not necessary. Buses take you everywhere, and dedicated lanes sometimes make it faster to get around on the bus than a car in heavy traffic. On the downside, thanks to zoning (again), and wealthy property owners who don't want noise (or suburban "lessers"... let's be honest) in their neighborhoods, there are no real highways in the city of Vancouver. In rush hour it takes literally one hour to go the 15km from west side Vancouver to neighbouring Burnaby.
Time to Get Racial
When someone lands in Vancouver for the first time, the first thing they notice is how many Asian people there are. According to the 2006 census, almost 40 percent of the city is of East Asian (Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, or Korean) origin. This is why Vancouver has some of the best sushi and Chinese food outside of Asia, as well as perhaps the largest population of second generation Asians who do great accents and impressions of their parents.
It's a stretch to call Vancouver multi-cultural, though. When people from the City visit Seattle for the first time, they're normally shocked by all the black and hispanic people, which is funny because people in Seattle often make fun of how white the city is.
For all the sushi we have in Vancouver, it's impossible to find decent ribs, cajun food, or Mexican food. And while I make this all about food, that's only because that is the most obvious benefit of a pluralistic city. And to that extent, Seattle and Vancouver are kind of a draw. ****, I'm hungry.
Concluding Thoughts
I'm not here to say which is better. I love both cities. But they are not the same. If I look at the list above and think to myself, "what is it really that sets the cities apart?", it does come down to the nebulous Canadian/American thing. Seattle, like America is more economically free, more chaotic, more raw, more enterprising, more expressive, and more industrial than Vancouver. Meanwhile Vancouver is more compassionate, more organized, more pleasant, more free-flowing, and more untouched than Seattle. Both are great.
Last edited by saturno_v; 05-18-2013 at 06:43 PM..
What I personally find rather unique about Vancouver is that it seems to me the city with the widest gap between appearance and reality in the world, in my experience.....I have not find that kind of disconnect between the facade and the substance anywhere else.
Even for the largest and most glamorous cities in the planet, think London, New York, Rio De Janeiro, Los Angeles, etc....places that "sell" the dream of their lifestyle and experience to the world, the problems and issues are well known in the open, the "other side of the coin" so to speak...
This article on the National Post is very indicative of what I'm saying:
Dave Bidini: The myths of Vancouver’s superiority do the city a disservice
By Dave Bidini
Vancouver is a tough city. It’s always been that way. The postcards and the telegenic broadcast openings and the Olympics’ Euro-swim and the nude drum jams and the latte bars and the juice-bottle mayors have always belied what lives beyond Vancouver’s pretty cardboard facade. No other Canadian city could have yielded bands such as D.O.A. or The Subhumans or Death Sentence, and none has matched Main and Hastings for its horror and squalor. Those I’ve known who have succumbed to heroin abuse didn’t end up in Saskatoon or Niagara Falls, and when Pierre Berton assailed the city for allowing the Spanish Banks to become Canada’s first polluted beach in the 1960s, he was portraying a metropolis as neglectful as it is ostensibly beautiful. Anyone who has wandered through the bars of Gastown at closing time on a weekend has seen Vancouver’s wild side at its worst. After gigs there in the late ’90s, it was routine to step over countless men savaged by guardians of the velvet rope, left to bleed as the dark gave way to dawn.
A few years ago, I was heading back to my Granville Street hotel. Outside a club kitty corner to where I was staying, a dozen men emerged looking both ways over their shoulders. Across the street, a bus idled at a stop, and after moving, it revealed more men — 20 of them — who rushed across the street to attack the other men. A full-scale brawl erupted in the heart of the street — chains and knives and fists. One victim kneeled wobbling in the street as another man ran at him, hoofing him in the jaw. I was sure that he’d killed him, but I’ll never know. After five minutes, then 10, the police arrived. But the gang had fled, leaving only bloodied denim and bodies splayed on the pavement. The next day, I bought The Province, hoping to read the story of the small, terrible riot. After flipping, then flipping some more, I found a small account. Page 34. It hadn’t warranted front page news.
It’s not that Vancouver isn’t a great city. And it’s not that great people don’t live there. But in many ways, it’s a disingenuous city. It’s a violent, stressful place, as uptight as it is free. All of those tourism ads that show it idyllically nestled betwixt mountains lapping at the nape of the sea only hold it back, and it’s not until some Vancouverites, or its public servants and tourism steering committees, own up to its problems that the events of last week will be understood. The hubris that propels West Coast factions to see themselves above other Canadian places only hardens the glue that holds these blinkers in place. That and the conceit that everyone else is doing themselves a disservice by not migrating to its sandy shores.
Vancouver has always had more of a geographical and social and cultural affinity with the North American West Coast than with the rest of Canada. As a result, it has absorbed many of its contradictions — and problems. The triumph of the Olympics may have been both the best and worst things to happen to Vancouver, giving the city an unreasonable sense of stability and calm when neither of these things are as uncomplicated as they appear. The lower mainland’s chemo-weed Wreck Beach calm is chimeric and, as we saw in the aftermath of Game Seven, the city has a tendency to swerve from meek to freak. I’m not saying that other Canadian cities are better or worse. It’s just that Vancouver’s civic boastfulness should be seen as suspicious. And when WestJet pilots shepherding passengers west to east offer their condolences to those disembarking in Toronto, you wonder what they’re really saying, and why they feel compelled to ridicule another part of their country.
Interesting thread. But many posts here have missed the point.
The question being asked is: Would you move from Vancouver to Seattle if you could live in both Canada and the US?
Now the answer will vary entirely based on "you".
1. Would a recent Canadian immigrant in Vancouver working in IT move to Seattle? Most likely, Yes.
2. Would a well settled 30-40 something year old with a good job and family in Vancouver make the move? Most likely, No.
3. Would people working on low wages (e.g. retail, etc) move to the Seattle-area? Never.
When it comes to desirability/ livability for the average person, Vancouver (and most cities in Canada) would beat Seattle (and most cities in US). This is the year 2013. Much of the middle class in America are struggling. Jobless rates in many cities are 25-20%. Just dont think about employees at Microsoft in Seattle. Think about the Walmart employees who are on food stamps and are collection donations at their own stores ...
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