Published May 2, 2004 12:00AM
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The World’s Great Towns, June 1997
Vancouver By the Editors Here’s a town with proper leisure-time priorities: Rainforest-replete Stanley Park is jammed every afternoon, and the cheese-culture Three Tenors couldn’t sell out their last concert. Vancouver is Canada’s least provincial city, partly the result of its 30 percent — and growing — Asian population; in spirit it’s closer to Tokyo than Toronto. British Columbia even encourages schoolkids to learn an Asian language, starting in elementary school — Punjabi, anyone? Such City-of-the-World efforts help make Vancouver fiercely cosmopolitan, and the metro’s 3,000 restaurants and internationally respected symphony don’t hurt. The resulting lifestyle is rich enough to inveigle the most skeptical would-be Canadian. Workdays usually end at five sharp, spilling eager wage-earners out into a landscape of unparalleled options: a 1,000-acre park just a stroll from the skyscrapers, four major ski mountains nearby, 11 miles of swimmable beach in and around town, enough sailboats to form an armada, and…you get the idea. The perhaps inevitable result: Almost 50,000 immigrants preceded you in the past year; Vancouver’s growth rate is the third-fastest in North America. What’s Out There Locals cling close to home for their frolic, and for good reason. With the wealth of pleasures right outside the door, why jet anywhere else? You can sea-kayak on the Strait of Georgia, winter-dive amongst giant octopi in Howe Sound, and shed your skivvies at Wreck Beach. When you do finally wander from town, you’ll find Garibaldi Provincial Park, 40 miles north, site of more than 35 miles of wilderness hiking trails; whitewater on the Cheakamus, Thompson, and Chilliwack Rivers; coastal islands; many peaks topping 5,000 feet; and, less than two hours away, the world-class slopes of Whistler. If you need a workout buddy, virtually the entire population of Vancouver qualifies. Around Town Vancouver is clean and green, littered only with gardens and lagoons, footbridges and ferries, and enough over-the-top themed architecture to rival Epcot (the Colosseum-style library, the geodesic golf ball that houses the Omnimax, the mushroom-shaped B.C. Place stadium). Politics is easygoing, meaning universal health care and needle exchanges. As for assimilating, if you’re anglophone, American, Asian, or any combination thereof, your camouflage is perfect. Maybe too much so: About a third of the population turns over in a five-year period. This can make for an underlying anonymity that will suit some more than others. Bring a companion, a dog, or a friendly smile and you should do fine. Living Quarters Spectacular views from every direction, but also a rental vacancy rate of close to zero. Be prepared to crack your wallet, especially as gentrification swallows up the once-affordable east side. Count on $600 per month for a “garden-level” studio (read basement) in a converted Victorian or $2,000 for the three-bedroom top floor. Buyers will pay $150,000 and up for a 700-square-foot condo in the rehabbed, portside loft spaces of Gastown. A Craftsman-style cottage in the popular beachside neighborhood of Kitsalano will run about $500,000. Nine to Five Let the great times roll. A healthy array of revenue streams flow into Vancouver; filming of The X-Files alone is a major industry, and wealthy investors, many from Hong Kong, have done spectacularly well in the stock market. The city is a magnet for enterprising home-office types (artists, writers, graphic designers), who’ve managed to expand, not saturate, the freelance market. Scoring “landed immigration status,” a long-range dream, means first clearing Immigration, which employs a baroque point system: Skilled gum-machine mechanics, for instance, score ten points (out of a requisite 70) for their value; lawyers and shrinks, on the other hand, can barely scrape up a single job point between them. (We told you about priorities here.) Whatever your career, it’s apparently possible to eventually best the system — last year 1,169 Americans became permanent residents of British Columbia. Memorize This Yu hsia te kou to le ma? (“Wet enough for you?”) |