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Tea & Two Slices: On Alfred Lord Tennyson and the Lotus Eaters

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by Sean Orr | We’ve been lured by the highly sexualized vision of Vancouver; the unsustainable model driven by the whims of the market with no regard for rental stock, affordable housing, or an increased burden on municipal services (without an increase in taxation).

Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness,
And utterly consumed with sharp distress,
While all things else have rest from weariness?
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan,
Still from one sorrow to another thrown;
Nor ever fold our wings,
And cease from wanderings,
Nor steep our brows in slumber’s holy balm;
Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,
‘There is no joy but calm!

Because as Howard Rotberg writes, we’ve all eaten the Lotos (in our case, the Lotus).

I recently came across a Facebook group called Save Yaletown’s Houses. At first I thought it was quaint, but then the depressing reality became clear. Houses in Vancouver are becoming extinct. We’ve opted instead for extremely inflexible condos built to attract investors, not families. This is what happens when you have a land shortage and you give a massive swath of land to a single Hong Kong developer to run wild with. This is what happens when you have no plan to save any of it for affordable housing.

But why should we toil and worry? Houses are for old Vancouver, for the fishermen and the loggers. Now, “in the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined.” We’re a retirement villa, a movie set, and “on the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind”. We are those J-Pod wielding Generation Xers with their cushy video game jobs and empty condos. Investing in nothing is the future of everything. We are a caricature of ourselves.

Meanwhile, the young – some numbed by the colloquial BC Bud – live in the most expensive city in the world, in a province with the lowest minimum wage and the highest child poverty rate in the country. Our city’s culture has been systematically reduced to a concentrated strip of bars called Granville. Our tuition fees are exorbitant and our debts unrivalled.

Some are lured by the promise of a sexy lifestyle by a fetchingly worded condo billboard in SoMa (wherever that is). Most struggle just to pay the rent. Our social safety net is being dismantled in the name of the economy, yet we stand ready to bail out banks when they crash. This is what compels me. I want to stir us from our slumber and initiate discourse (sometimes to my detriment).

These are the reasons why I rail against media companies that get their ad revenue from real estate developers. The Vancouver Sun is basically a Home & Garden magazine. The Province exploits our fears and prejudices, yet mostly ignores fundamental issues like mental health, recovery services, aboriginal welfare, peak oil, the housing bubble, light rail, livable wages, worker’s rights, market fundamentalism, gentrification, and public institutions (except when to slander them).

And so there is some context, a little preface to the coming renewal of focus on our daily news; let’s call it Tea and Two Slices, shall we?

There is 1 comment

  1. It’s difficult to find a balance in a city like ours. I’m all for saving houses, especially old ones that should often be considered heritage. However, we can’t live in a city like ours without building up, but it’s how we build up thats important. So much of what you say is true. We are building not for the people to live here but for the investors. The people who invest in the initial construction, and the people who invest in the units to rent them out. We are building to sell and not to rent, and at the heart of it we have forgot our poorest demographics.

    We’ve lowered corporate income taxes to attract business, but failed to think of the workers. With the last report to come out for living wage at 18/hr it’s simply becoming too difficult for people to live here, we’ve created new groups of people, the working homeless, people with jobs who can’t afford a place to live, and so many more simply one pay cheque away from losing the place they’ve got, all because some people want to make a little more money.

    Something has to give. There needs to be more affordable housing for the people making 8-12/hr so the living wage drops, or the minimum wage needs to increase so that people can realistically be able to afford to live in this city. On the other hand wonder what it would be like if we woke up tomorrow, and nearly everyone in the service industry, everyone in a support position, the artists, the musicians, the heart and soul of the city were gone. It’s an interesting thought.

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