DECADE BY DECADE

There Goes the Neighbourhood

From heritage to density to housing prices, panic and outrage over Vancouver real estate has formed the basis of our civic identity since time immemorial—or at least for most of the life of this magazine.

1974

“Some heritage! It is a throwback, an outmoded impediment to this city, a gravestone to a bankrupt period that we might better forget,” raged Mac Parry (a future VanMag editor-inchief), over the city’s plan to save the Orpheum Theatre—then a cinema— by buying it for about $7 million. Benchmark home price: unknown; no one was tracking just yet.

1976

“Nowhere have the cries of persecution, nay, crucifixion, by civic authority been quite so shrill as here, where owners press on with higher and longer buildings that thrust out and over the bank and into the panoramic view like so many brood sows leaning into the trough,” reads this rather dramatic lament of the loss of public waterfront in Point Grey. Benchmark home price: $67,942

1983

In “Peril on the Slopes” we told a familiar tale: density privileges allow developers to come along and overhaul Fairview. Outrage ensues. “People used to write poetry about the Slopes,” waxed long-time resident Netta Sterne in the story. “Today nobody writes poetry; it is strictly real estate.”

Benchmark home price: $125,776