While in Vancouver, I noticed something that surprised me a bit: there is more poverty on display than I’d expected. Perhaps it was just the part of town I walked through (Chinatown and East Downtown), but I saw a lot of poor old men, and the churches that served the homeless/poor were packed full. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of these people were men, many of them old.
In the evening, when I watched TV back in my room, I saw a report on house prices in the Vancouver area and was shocked to learn that the average cost of a house in Vancouver is well over $700,000 — more than twice what an average house costs in Seattle. The only thing I could think of that might account for the inflated price of real estate in the area is the recent wave of immigration from Hong Kong, which brought tens of thousands of wealthy Chinese to Vancouver. Perhaps the geography has something to do with it, but Vancouver is no San Francisco, and it looks like there is plenty of space available for development in the near suburbs.
Here in this extraordinarily wealthy city (on paper), there were many obviously poor old men. For all I’ve heard about Canadian socialism, it certainly didn’t seem as though all the people were thriving, and the inflated real estate market bears the hallmark of speculative capitalism.
In Vancouver’s defense, I should point out that poverty there does not appear to be accompanied by the same level of social dysfunction and mayhem that one finds in the poorer parts of the US, and the city felt remarkably safe even in the seedier areas. I’ll be headed back from time to time, so I’ll get a clearer picture over the months, but despite the fact that I enjoyed the visit, it was disconcerting to see so many abandoned old men.
