No surprise, life better in the ’burbs
Vancouver losing its social soul: Surrey’s the friendlier place, survey suggests
Polls often reveal what is best described, at least by those possessing a certain amount of sass, as flashes of the blindingly obvious.
Obesity leads to heart disease and diabetes. Children raised in nurturing environments are happier adults.
People who engage in risky behaviour have shorter life spans.
Admit it. Sometimes you read survey results and think, like, who didn’t know that and, seriously, why go to the trouble and expense of asking 1,000 people if it’s guns, and not people, that kill people. It’s guns, people. Maybe the purpose of polls is not to enlighten us, but to simply confirm in an official manner what we intuitively suspect.
Which is why it is absolutely not a shocker to learn this week — courtesy of Vancouver pollster Mario Canseco of Insights West, who writes regularly about his company’s poll results in this newspaper — that Surrey is friendlier than Vancouver.
Go ahead, insert a Surrey joke here, but those who’ve lived in the Metro Vancouver area for any time know that the treasured urban traits — like neighbourliness and sense of community — that once made Vancouver so livable have long since shifted to the suburbs, leaving behind a city losing its social soul.
The migration to the suburbs from Vancouver proper began in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, when the cost of a house in the urban core became unaffordable for the average family. Think a west-side starter home is out of reach today? Try buying in the neighbourhood where you grew up when interest rates hit double digits.
And so the population shifted from Vancouver to Burnaby and Coquitlam, New Westminster and Maple Ridge, Tsawwassen and, yes, Surrey.
It was a mass migration of mostly young home buyers opting for roomy square footage and big child-friendly backyards, for garages and cul-de-sacs, for nearby schools and playing fields and one-stop shopping centres, for neighbours who chat over the fence and bring three-bean dip to the block party.
Thousands of city dwellers upped stakes and moved east, and they still are, creating instant communities and mirroring a socio-economic seismic shift that redefined cities — and gave rise to words like exurb, meaning prosperous commuter town, all over North America.
When Insights West decided to test the theory that “one of the key elements of a community is a shared emotional connection,” as Canseco wrote in Tuesday’s Sun, its results reflected the unsurprising fallout of that demographic evolution.
Specifically, the poll found that 40 per cent of Surreyites surveyed “had the neighbours over for coffee/drinks/meal” in the past year compared to 17 per cent for Vancouverites.
It found, too, that 52 per cent of Surrey residents introduced themselves to a person who moved to their block, compared with 36 per cent of Vancouver residents. And that while 30 per cent of Vancouverites “took care of a neighbour’s home while they were away,” Surreyites stepped up to the tune of 49 per cent. You’re nodding, right. Because it makes sense.
Vancouver, somewhere along the way, relinquished its title as the postwar promised land for family life and instead has evolved into a gorgeous wasteland of insular communities, ethnic enclaves, empty bike lanes and ghost neighbourhoods, a once-vibrant city where alarm systems, blacked-out highrises and shuttered houses have replaced potluck suppers and children racing down the boulevard on bicycles.
Yes, there are still pockets of robust community spirit — in parts of east Vancouver and the West End, for instance — but mostly Vancouver is a catch basin of people who don’t much talk to each other, who seem not to share the similar or the familiar.
The Insights West survey, of course, also found that Surreyites have the domestic problems that come with a growing population, with more of them reporting speeders, dog poop deposits and having to call police because of noisy partiers nearby.
The suburbs, despite evidence of their attraction, nonetheless remain an elitist target, sniffily deemed the black sheep of urban planning, where downtown hipsters direct their clever cynicism while pounding the pavement in their Blundstones looking for their stolen bicycles and puzzling over friends who sold their souls in exchange for the evil charms of Costco and lawn mowers and why, oh, why do they never seem to want to come back to the big city for a bourbon gingersnap cocktail anymore.
Truth is, out in the ’burbs the car has air conditioning instead of that drunk guy on SkyTrain, the neighbours know your name and, best of all, the kids have friends who actually live on the same street.
Could it be that Surrey, dare we say it, is the new Vancouver?