Home is a good place to start when reflecting on my personal biography and history. Therefore, to make sense of who I am and to “think [myself] away from the familiar routines of everyday life” (Mills) it requires that I trace my parents’ separate journeys culminating in their calling Vancouver, Canada home. Like a stone skipping across a pond, my grandfather made the journey from Ireland to upstate New York and, a generation later, his son to Vancouver, BC. When questioned on the subject of his wanderings, my father would offer anecdotes about the mountains of snow and bitterly cold winters on the southern shore of Lake Ontario as the reason for picking up roots and leaving family and friends, but I’m sure the real explanation behind his exodus
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My neighborhood was quite different from that of the previous generation when Vancouver was known as a sleepy colonial British coastal town. It had grown out of that image and become a much more cosmopolitan city. In elementary school, I was surrounded by a diverse set of close friends many of whom had emigrated from countries like Iran, China, India and the Philippines. Actually, it was difficult to know many students with a multi-generational tie to Canada which made the search for a true Canadian identity rather elusive. My friends unique backgrounds brought diverse points of view that complimented my own, nevertheless, I sensed that they were living parallel lives caught trying to protect their family’s cultural identity, while also realizing the importance of sharing with the mainstream culture. Multiculturalism had been the policy in Canada since 1971 with the government proclaiming the benefits of demographic and cultural diversity in the hope of creating positive attitudes for their programs. The shift to Asian source countries which could provide a wider cultural and ethnic diversity had been in place for decades. Although, in recent years the effects of monocultural migration could be observed in areas such as cuisine, clothing styles, language, popular culture, even elevated socioeconomic status. Subsequently, the vast majority of newcomers gravitated toward ethnically homogenous areas even …show more content…
Many of my friends are waking up to the realization that they will never own a home in the region. Without going into the numbers, the Lower Mainland has become the third most unaffordable area behind Hong Kong and Sydney. Offshore investment has devastated the housing industry and stoked public outrage as the true nature of the problem begins to surface. Laundered drug money and other proceeds of crime have been responsible in no small part for fueling the rise in prices. A government obsessed with political correctness, financial institutions and a real estate industry seduced by mountains of cash coming into the market, have combined to create the perfect environment for this calamity. Other Pacific Rim cities affected by this phenomenon like Auckland, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia are reacting much more proactively to the problem. In Auckland, for example, there is an outright ban on selling any type of housing to nonresidents.The Canadian Housing and Mortgage Commission, a government agency that oversees housing in Canada has deemed housing a fundamental right for all Canadians, however, it has never had a policy in place to safeguard citizens’ rights in this regard. As far back as 1976, Vancouver Mayor Art Phillips warned in his book The Housing Crisis, “ I maintain that the primary approach to solving the housing problem in the Greater
My neighborhood was quite different from that of the previous generation when Vancouver was known as a sleepy colonial British coastal town. It had grown out of that image and become a much more cosmopolitan city. In elementary school, I was surrounded by a diverse set of close friends many of whom had emigrated from countries like Iran, China, India and the Philippines. Actually, it was difficult to know many students with a multi-generational tie to Canada which made the search for a true Canadian identity rather elusive. My friends unique backgrounds brought diverse points of view that complimented my own, nevertheless, I sensed that they were living parallel lives caught trying to protect their family’s cultural identity, while also realizing the importance of sharing with the mainstream culture. Multiculturalism had been the policy in Canada since 1971 with the government proclaiming the benefits of demographic and cultural diversity in the hope of creating positive attitudes for their programs. The shift to Asian source countries which could provide a wider cultural and ethnic diversity had been in place for decades. Although, in recent years the effects of monocultural migration could be observed in areas such as cuisine, clothing styles, language, popular culture, even elevated socioeconomic status. Subsequently, the vast majority of newcomers gravitated toward ethnically homogenous areas even …show more content…
Many of my friends are waking up to the realization that they will never own a home in the region. Without going into the numbers, the Lower Mainland has become the third most unaffordable area behind Hong Kong and Sydney. Offshore investment has devastated the housing industry and stoked public outrage as the true nature of the problem begins to surface. Laundered drug money and other proceeds of crime have been responsible in no small part for fueling the rise in prices. A government obsessed with political correctness, financial institutions and a real estate industry seduced by mountains of cash coming into the market, have combined to create the perfect environment for this calamity. Other Pacific Rim cities affected by this phenomenon like Auckland, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia are reacting much more proactively to the problem. In Auckland, for example, there is an outright ban on selling any type of housing to nonresidents.The Canadian Housing and Mortgage Commission, a government agency that oversees housing in Canada has deemed housing a fundamental right for all Canadians, however, it has never had a policy in place to safeguard citizens’ rights in this regard. As far back as 1976, Vancouver Mayor Art Phillips warned in his book The Housing Crisis, “ I maintain that the primary approach to solving the housing problem in the Greater