Look Who it Was Random video

I Left Vancouver Because Vancouver Left Me - Mass exodus - Yong People leaving the City -

622 views · Published 1 November 2017 · 5:53 · Indexed 29 October 2026

Channel: Mike Martins · 2017 · News & Politics

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We’d been arguing, my partner and I, for months in that way that couples do when life stresses have been piled on so high that you lose sight of the fact that you’re on the same team. Our occasional outbursts had become a cannibalistic routine of repetitive gripes we unleashed on each other on an almost daily basis. But this statement was a sudden left turn, an arrow of truth that hit me square in the heart.

I was, by many standards, the definition of success in Vancouver. I had a permanent, full-time job at the top of my field as senior editor of Vancouver Magazine, I had a rich network of professional connections, a solid group of close friends, and stable, albeit cramped and expensive, rental housing. Yet my entire life felt like a struggle. The effort required to keep these very basic building blocks in place had been increasing steadily over the last several years, and had recently reached a tipping point where the energy I expended vastly outweighed what I was getting in return. I was keeping my head above water, but just barely, and I was losing strength fast.

I had moved to the city 15 years earlier, almost to the day, arriving by Greyhound a few weeks shy of my 20th birthday. The official reason was to finish my degree in contemporary dance at SFU, but really, my post-secondary trajectory was the excuse I needed to get out of my hometown of Edmonton and try something new.

Vancouver, with its exotic beauty, mild winters and bigger city vibe was a natural draw. It wasn’t instant love — my first winter living in New Westminster with a buddy from high school was a lonely and difficult one — but by the end of year two I was smitten. I’d moved into an apartment just off Main and 14th with two friends from SFU. Back then, circa 2003, the neighbourhood was an affordable up-and-coming area that was still rough around the edges. I adored it, and revelled in the abundant street culture, the cool coffee shops, cheap sushi places and Asian produce markets that sold foods I wasn’t totally familiar with. But the real clincher came that spring when a bunch of spindly and unremarkable trees on our block exploded in cotton candy blooms that bathed the whole street in confetti. It was like living inside a fairy tale.

That spring I took to riding my bike around town under those floral canopies and fell completely, unabashedly, in love. The affair wasn’t just fuelled by the natural beauty of Vancouver. I was equally intrigued by the social fabric of the city, the distinctions of culture and class evidenced in every neighbourhood boundary. Back then, the prevailing public debate wasn’t about the growing divide between rich and the rest of us, but about how to lift up our most vulnerable people to create a more inclusive city, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. As a newly graduated BFA, I spent my ample spare time exploring the city. I’d amble around places like Chinatown, Gastown and the Downtown Eastside, or the industrial rubble of southeast False Creek, pre-Olympic Village. I wanted to understand this strange city that wore its social problems on its sleeve in a way that, to me, seemed refreshingly honest. It was on one of these wanders that I wound up at the opening of InSite in 2003, completely by accident and unaware I was witnessing the beginning of one of the most successful public health programs in the world.

Looking back, it’s no wonder that I ended up trading in dance for journalism. I went to Langara College and, like many aspiring reporters, had dreams of charging into conflict zones and bringing down corrupt foreign governments with the power of my pen. But when I did get the chance to do some reporting overseas I found it, to my great disappointment, daunting and draining. I came back to Vancouver and landed what I thought would be a boring gig covering West Vancouver municipal council for the North Shore News and, to my great surprise, found it utterly fascinating.

The ins and outs of garbage collection bylaws, road repairs or squabbles over bike lanes are not sexy or glamorous, they are seldom the stuff of adventure, but they are the realest measure of real life. As my career progressed and I moved onto bigger outlets like the Westender and the Vancouver Sun, I developed a burning passion for local reporting. It gave me a rare vantage point from which to witness the intricate details of how cities get built. I saw how neighbours related to one another, or didn’t, and how people actually used and interacted with the places where they lived. I had a front row seat to the dramas of their day-to-day lives and insight into their decision-making. I felt like I’d been given a key to the psyche of the city. At some point in there, I started referring to Vancouver as “home.”

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