After about two years living in metro Vancouver, I decided to leave. I’m in a smaller city in the Fraser Valley, and it has been great!
My first time in Vancouver was for an interview at Amazon in 2019. I stayed at a hotel near the downtown office for a couple of nights, which was less time than I spent in the 6 different airplanes and a similar number of airports to get there from Brazil. Then the pandemic happened. After almost two years waiting for the visa, I finally moved to Vancouver in late 2021.
My home town of Recife has a tongue-in-cheek tradition of boastfulness, typically claiming ridiculous titles like having the world’s longest street or largest apartment complex. In Vancouver I kind of felt the flipside to that good-natured humour: people seem serious when claiming that this place is the best at this or that.
At some level, the level of braggadocio found in Vancouver must be part of the all-encompassing real estate industry (which as of 2023 represents 17.75% of BC’s GDP), which obviously benefits from selling the region as the best at everything. But my perception was that everyday people more or less buy into these views, not batting an eye at claims to having “the best” of something - food, transport or housing.
On housing - I lived for a few months in a high-rise apartment which had around 350 units and only 3 elevators - 15 minute waits for an elevator ride were commonplace (for comparison, my old apartment building in Brazil had 64 units and 2 elevators). Building-wide fire alarms went off once a month for ridiculous things like the ground-level retail burning a tortilla. None of this was seen as abnormal or even a bother - people seemed OK with it.
The city has a nice natural framing, with ocean and mountains, but that’s really it. The urban environment itself is underwhelming. It looks like any other large North American city, courtesy of having the same draconian zoning laws as basically everywhere else in Canada and the US for the last century or so. The province is going in the right direction by loosening restrictive zoning, but the improvements will take a long time to be noticeable. But my personal impression of Vancouver will remain the blue-gray blandness of the header image, while other places have so much more to offer.
