With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1406705
moving. A year ago September, they bought a small house on farmland near Chilliwack for around $800,000—an amount that might have covered a small two-bedroom condo in the city. "I honestly don't think we would be here if COVID hadn't happened," Oakley says. She quit her full-time job and now works as a freelance consultant for com- munications, public engagement and social media, often with First Nations. When she needs to do work in Vancouver, she rents a work-share space in the old police headquarters at Main and Hastings streets, which has become a hive of organi- zations focused on social missions. One of the most persistent stories from the pandemic has been about people fleeing the city for more space and a less stressful environment, as they worked from home and were coping with waves of anxiety. But like with the work-from-home trend, the picture is still coming into focus about what exactly has happened and will happen going forward. There's not a hous- ing specialist or realtor alive who thinks Vancouver will empty out permanently, though condo sales downtown did slow during COVID and some reported that women started moving out of areas that began to feel unsafe, like Gastown. But the central city will fill up again, they say, as soon as the world is on the move again and the students, immigrants, tech employees and just regular people lured by the West Coast lifestyle start flooding in again. People like Bea Torre- villas and her husband, due to arrive here in September because they just want a city with a more robust economy and nicer weather. They're willing to pay more and live in a smaller space, possibly the West End. "We are tired of Manitoba's winter, and I believe there are more opportunities in Vancouver careerwise," says Torrevil- las, a 28-year-old veterinary tech originally from Spain whose husband runs a consult- ing business. That's the typical pattern for any city: The new arrivals, especially young people, come in on regular tidal waves. At some point, some of them ebb out—to the sub- urbs, to other cities and towns—as they get older. The pandemic slowed the incoming tides of new arrivals and accelerated the retreat of everyone planning a move out anyway. That bump of outward motion, after an intense several months, appears to have slowed as the majority of that group has made its move. Stories about people fleeing to bucolic towns and midsize cities, far from the expensive coastal cities, abounded during the pandemic. However, careful studies in the U.S. have shown that most people who did leave central cities in the last year-and- a-half didn't move very far. They mostly ended up a little further out in the region— like Oakley. But the Vancouverites who did move further afield, even if they're the minor- ity group, still had a huge impact elsewhere. "We have so many new people," says Susan Swan, the mayor of Clinton, a village of about 650 on Highway 97, which runs north from Cache Creek. That's added to housing pressures that were already there. "Even when we hired our CAO last year, he had difficulty finding a place. There is noth- ing to rent here, and even when there is, the prices are so high." None of that is breaking news to Mar- leen Morris, who's been researching the housing crisis in non-metropolitan Canada for years. It's affecting small towns all over B.C., creating a downward spiral because housing shortages make it hard for those towns to attract teachers or doctors, stifles possibilities for economic growth and ulti- mately pushes people into the larger cities. "The housing issues here are as impor- tant and critical as the metropolitan areas. They just aren't as visible," says Morris, co-director of the Community Develop- ment Institute at UNBC in Prince George. "The more this happens, the more social and economic momentum dies. It's actu- ally detrimental to the well-being of the whole province." Smaller towns that attract retirees— Campbell River, Osoyoos, Parksville, Penticton—have seen developers come in to build for the new population. But that doesn't happen in many other small towns, where tradespeople have left for growing metropolises and developers don't want to take a chance because they've been burned by previous booms and busts. That's how someone like Lori Fell ended up living the past year in her trailer in Van- derhoof, even though she has a relatively good job and can pay as much as $1,000 a month for rent—a reasonable amount for a place so far from a major metropolis. She was beyond thrilled when, this August, she scored a place to rent, beating out 50 oth- ers, including someone who offered $400 a month more. It's still a trailer of sorts, and it's still 35 kilometres from town, but SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 45 GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY Planned for Vancouver: the Squamish Nation's Se ' nákw residential development (top) and Wesbild's Marine Landing, a mixed-use industrial site FROM TOP: REVERY ARCHITECTURE, WESBILD