How the online world has changed since I abandoned Livejournal so many years ago. Long format blogging has gone the way of the fax machine, replaced by facebook, twitter, and sms sound bites. Unless one is blogging for a living, using it as a medium to drive content, direct eyeballs, push advertising revenue, SEO, there really is not much interest for the medium anymore.
My motives for writing are different these days. I’m a lot older than I was when I first started on Livejournal, a challenging time in my life when blogging was an outlet for seemingly insurmountable problems. It has been over a decade since I started blogging – nowadays my interests have morphed from finding a career and a place for myself in this world, to developing what were hobbies and interests into lifetime projects – to make a meaningful life, rather than a empty one. This blog will be a reflection of that, a place to post about things of interest me – Vancouver and beyond.
I have been fortunate. At 40 years of age I’ve been able to travel extensively, living in 7 or so cities on 7 continents, visiting over 50 countries, and blessed with an ability to speak 5 languages along with a further 3 or 4 at a more basic level. Financially I succeeded in navigating the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis, the fallout of September 2001, and the 2008 Great Recession. I have established myself in a beautiful city that for the most part is compatible with my values and beliefs. Gay and Jewish, I am lucky to live in Canada in 2014 and not in Germany in 1944, or Uganda or Russia in the present. I love good music, and am fortunate to be able to play some with my own two hands.
By chance and through foresight I live in Vancouver, a stunning urban blend of Asia, Europe, and North America on the shores of Salish Sea, surrounded by the Cascade mountains and neighbouring the fairest of all American States: Washington.
Vancouver is not without problems, it carries the scars of the automobile, the marks of poor zoning, and is hobbled by limited access to tax revenues that is sadly typical in a country where cities are home to 90% of the population. Barely 140 years old, what was once a logging outpost has morphed into a city of glass and trees with nearly 3 million inhabitants, and another million more expected to arrive in the next 20 years. With such remarkable growth comes conflict, as newcomers jostle for space in a city that by North American standards is already “too full” or “too crowded”. Never a day goes by without a vociferous battle being waged by battalions of NIMBy’s and BANANA’s, who seek to ensure no density and change happens in their neighbourhood.
Yet densification is happening, whether it is the replacement of roadways with bike lanes, the growing numbers of crowded buses, the demolition of single family homes replaced with multifamily units. Indeed if Vancouver is to grow to 4 million in the next 20 years, there is no way that all these people can live in far flung disturbias (suburban blights), forced to commute by bus or sit for hours on congested highways to go work for the fortunate few whose parents and grandparents arrived here in the ’50 and 60’s, allowing their offspring to fall into wealth. Density is the only way to go, the question is, “what kind of density?”
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