Why Isn't Vancouver (CN) a Megacity?

[someone123]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

Unfortunately, we live in an era where all net growth goes to cities, and the bigger the city, the more it attracts people. If you turn on the taps and get 500,000 people to move to British Columbia, 400,000 of them will settle in the Lower Mainland, even if the Lower Mainland is 50% of BC by population.

People used to say all immigrants went to Toronto and Vancouver, but then the federal government adjusted the provincial nomination system and now we see much broader growth. There's the old canard about how we cannot oppress immigrants by telling them how to live but closed work and study permits have existed for a long time. They could be issued for Red Deer and not Calgary or whatever.

You could write a novel about this stuff but I think part of what's happening is we have no economic or infrastructure strategy either, so it's hard for new areas to really develop.

In the Maritimes the rising immigration rate has been hugely positive and is creating a golden opportunity to fix public finances and infrastructure there. To put things into perspective, NS says their income tax revenues went up by about 20% YoY. Hopefully they will make good decisions about what to do with that (pay off debt, aim to lower taxes). Regardless of what they do though the immigration is causing a structural shift toward the more economically productive areas. Federal policy here used to be perverse with lots of funding aimed at keeping people in the least productive areas with generous EI benefits and white elephants.

In the Maritimes there's also a lot of basic stuff the population isn't big enough to support, so adding a bit more population does concretely tend to help make things viable that positively impact people in their day to day. I don't think this is as true in the GTA or GVRD. The GVRD is also a (difficult to develop) border region and integration would probably add more meaningfully to what's available here than growing the population.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

Or taken more locally, what does Vancouver have today that it didn't 10 years ago? The population has grown a lot, but it doesn't really offer anything now that it didn't then, and I'm not sure that it's more globally "competitive" just because of an extra 400,000 people. Instead, the inability to adequately accommodate that many new people has caused the cost of living to soar - and this is now proving to be a barrier to attracting & retaining workers or encouraging new business, as the cost-to-opportunity tradeoff has deteriorated.

Maybe I'm just old and cranky but there seem to have been a lot of lateral changes and parts of town that are stuck more or less where they were, and there are a lot of low end repetitive chains while the more interesting stuff struggles (partly due to Karen-y city hall dynamics). There are some bright spots like around Mount Pleasant which definitely offers more than it used to. For new younger people moving here without rich parents to pay for their rent the options have degraded very substantially. I used to know grad students who had their own lovely studio apartments with views of English Bay circa 2010. Now they'd pay more to live in a 60's walkup in Fairview (despite the name, with no view) with roommates.

Vancouver struggles to attract and grow companies sometimes because hiring is so difficult with the housing prices. One silver lining used to be that rents at least weren't as high, but those days are gone. The history of deteriorating affordability must itself make people question whether they want to put down roots in a place that already seems financially marginal for them.

[sopas ej]

I haven't gone through the whole thread, but isn't Vancouver Canada's busiest port? Not that that should contribute to it becoming a megacity...

Seeing this thread again, it made me think of Mexico... Mexico has no huge cities on its coasts (Tijuana is just under 2 million, I think?), and its busiest port is Manzanillo---a city of just under 160,000 people.

But I guess I digress!

[someone123]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

Seeing this thread again, it made me think of Mexico... Mexico has no huge cities on its coasts (Tijuana is just under 2 million, I think?), and its busiest port is Manzanillo---a city of just under 160,000 people.

BC has the port of Prince Rupert which handles over a million containers a year. That town has around 12,000 people. A port itself doesn't generate a lot of employment or necessarily generate a lot of economic spinoffs, although it can. Sometimes cause and effect are flipped and an area gets a big port because it's got a big economy that drives the traffic; NYC is to some degree in this category today.

These days I'd guess it means a lot less than it used to due to very efficient port operations and the fact that so much of what we get here is manufactured goods from China, while we tend to ship out raw materials. The ports here ship out commodities like crude oil and raw logs. There's relatively little value add and manufacturing in Western Canada.

[Docere]

The opening of the Panama Canal helped Vancouver surpass Winnipeg in population in the 1920s.

[mhays]

Vancouver appears to be pretty restricted as a port, with limited land for expansion and some gnarly limits on ship dimensions in the Fraser River and Burrard Inlet.

They've solved some of this with Deltaport, but might need another equivalent or two to be a really major port.

A century ago land was probably more plentiful, but how much came across the Pacific vs. the Atlantic? And did the Panama Canal hurt the chances of Asian cargo just heading up the St. Lawrence?

[Docere]

Originally Posted by MonkeyRonin

Here's a map of Toronto in the early 1900s - you can see that the orientation at the time was not along the Yonge St. axis (those were just wealthy suburbs at the time):

Interesting map. This would have been just after the annexations of the Junction and East Toronto (the Beaches) but before the annexation of North Toronto.

Clearly shows how the city ran more east-west prior to the interwar period. North of St. Clair is only partially developed. Also, west end developed earlier than east end, as the completion of the Prince Edward Viaduct in 1918 spurred development in the east end.

[Reverberation]

For a city to become a mega-city it needs lots of new people. Lots of new people need lots of new dwellings - dwellings that are attainable and built at a pace that allows for lots of new residents to come in and quickly fill them. Land use policy in Canadian cities and most large US cities since the 90’s or so does not lend itself to rapid or affordable development without heavily subsidized and limited incentives from government.

This guy’s YouTube channel is almost directly over the target.
• Video Link