Vancouver BC is the third-least affordable city in the world! Its even more expensive than London, San Francisco, and New York City.
Vancouver BC is the third-least affordable city in the world! It's even more expensive than London, San Francisco, and New York City. Charles Mudede

All is not lost. There is still room for maneuver. Seattle has yet to become a Vancouver or a San Francisco. What do these cities represent?

In the case of Vancouver, the most beautiful city in the Pacific Northwest, it is the divorce between the real economy and the global one. The result? The average income in Vancouver is around $45,000 CAD and the average cost of a house is $1.1 million CAD and rising. The wage realities relate to the local economy, the price of property to to global finance, which in Vancouver mostly originates in China, but is still no different from the nature and mode of all hot money.

What is hot money? Free-moving capital in search of assets that have a high yield or safety from taxes. At present, money that's doing nothing just loses its value (“Leave a million dollars with a bank, and in a year, you get only something like $990,000 back"). The recession business journalists and elites are worried about concerns hot money and the scarcity of profitable opportunities in the financial realm. (Hot money is rarely transformed into actual business opportunities.)

San Francisco represents all that went wrong with Jane Jacobs' urban program, which successfully confronted car urbanism (then called urban renewel) but failed to develop a urban economics that operated outside of laissez-faire urbanism (for this approach, turn to Ruth Glass, the woman who gave the world the word gentrification). As a consequence, obstructing the development of car infrastructure expanded, in San Fransisco's case, to the obstruction of any kind of development. Jane Jacobs' urbanism leaves a wide door open for NIMBYism, and unchecked NIMBYism in San Francisco has placed great upward pressure on the value of its housing stock, which is frozen in time.


There are forces in our city that want us to become one or the other city. The matter has yet to be fully settled. The bad news, however, is: We do not have a Seattle way that offers an exit from either of these directions, these terminal cities. We are, as it were, moving without really thinking about where we are going. And we can expect this thoughtless urbanism to spatially express historically deep racial inequalities.