Vancouver is a mess and these visitors will not be back
I first visited Vancouver in 1988 on a business trip and remember being impressed with this city, the heritage, the warm hospitality, and hoped to return. This summer, my wife and I spent several days here prior to a cruise to Alaska. Guaranteed, we won’t ever be coming back to Vancouver.
Frankly, someone has made an architectural and planning mess out of this city. The panorama of the city looked to us more like Hong Kong, not Canada. The skyline is jammed with featureless green and white buildings that apparently house, at great expense, in tiny spaces, the “new Canada”. It was obvious large tracts of single-family-home neighbourhoods are being razed to build more of these monstrosities.
The cultural miasma continues with masses of non-English signage across the city. When we lived in the Los Angeles area in the late 1970s, migration from Asia was just beginning. Government sensibly required signage to be at least equally accessible in English. Nothing says “we’re not assimilating” more than foreign-language signage.
Your residents now seem self-absorbed and rude. We left one SkyTrain car to escape from someone who was noisily “live streaming” their travel back home somewhere, only to get one where a woman was shouting on her phone to a friend why it was more cost-effective to stay on welfare rather than work.
We note Vancouver’s population has more than doubled since my last visit. Sadly for Vancouver, you’ve abandoned your history and are not going back. Sad for us, as well, because we’re not coming back, either.
Brian McCarthy, Chicago