Jananas

This shouldn’t come as a total surprise given that I’ve mentioned it previously, but I’m taking Richard Florida’s Creative Regional Strategies course here at Rotman. Over the course of the term we’ve worked towards producing a set of final recommendations on a city of our choice, in our case we have focused on Vancouver. Thus far we’ve produced reports on: overall growth, technology, talent, tolerance, and territory assets (count ‘em and yes, there are 4T’s).

In class this week we presented our set of final recommendations. Like any set of final development recommendations, these are meant to be inspirational and to enable long term growth. One of the people asked to sit in on the presentations, [aside, to disclose this person is a member of the team at the Martin Prosperity Institute] was very aggressive in their questioning. Its been bugging me a bit, so I thought I’d write about it.

Here was our thinking & one of our recommendations:

• As with any development recommendation, the end result is that we want our region to grow. A growing economy also means a growing population.
• Vancouver has one of the highest costs of living in the world (based on median income vs. housing cost) and a relatively high density. We also found that the city has fewer young, single creative class people in part due to the high housing costs. So, if Vancouver’s population grows and they remain in the current area of the city the increase in demand will also drive up housing costs given that density cannot be changed significantly in the short term (real estate economics here). But increasing housing costs means that fewer people can afford to live in the city and more young people will be driven away.
• Vancouver is constrained by their geography: mountains to the North, ocean to the West, and the US border to the South. This makes expansion difficult.
• As a result of this natural tension between growth and geography, we recommended that they look to expanding Eastwards (so through towards Chilliwack). As with any proposal for expansion, this can only be accomplished with a simultaneous strengthening of transit and more specifically public transit (hey, we why don’t we throw out the ever popular high speed train idea).

To summarize: we want the city to grow, growth means increase in people which in today’s city will drive up prices farther making city even more expensive and driving out more of the young creative class workers. Because of geographic constraints, there are limited expansion opportunities.

The feedback and questioning from one of our assessors was, I felt, aggressive. The gist was we were idiots for expanding east as we were merely promoting urban sprawl. That it wouldn’t be possible due to existing infrastructure issues. That it wouldn’t work because no one would commute.

Let’s go over this.

• First, we aren’t promoting the stereotypical suburban sprawl but rather the use of satellite cities well served by public transportation to make the city more liveable. Growth has to go somewhere, so let’s make that growth be as productive as possible.
• Second, as with any set of development recommendations we suggested improving the infrastructure. Which means that we recognize that this can’t be done successfully with the current transportation system. Yeah you? Thanks for coming out and paying attention. And really, these are high level recommendations not detailed implementation plans.
• Last is the concept that people won’t commute.  Some people won’t commute (hey, I’m one of them!) but that does not mean that no one will commute. Look to any major city (for example, Toronto) – people commute well across the city in order to get to jobs. This is really just basic economics – commuting costs vs. the opportunity cost of time.

My gut reaction is that the feedback was motivated more by personal dislike of our recommendations and less by real economic analysis of our assumptions and conclusion. I believe that the person marking us was thinking “I’d never commute” rather than “no one would commute”. Big difference.

To end, I would like to take credit for having thought up this final point while I was in class and that I was tactful enough to not say anything, but… I wasn’t. In a typical life moment I thought this up as I walked out of the building.

Vancouver doesn’t have to expand East (since you seem to dislike that concept so much). Instead, we recommend that they drag over the Texas-sized island of floating garbage currently floating unused in the Pacific Ocean. I mean really, anchor that in Vancouver harbor and build on top of it.

Oh wait, I guess that would ruin those beaches that Vancouver is known for. But hey, at least all those environmental freaks would have something to protest against! I mean, we’d be adding to the economy judged only by the increase in pickets…