The New Seattle

If you’ve not visited lately, you’re in for a shock. What Vancouver could learn from its Pacific sister.

By Trevor Boddy

THE AMAZING THING about Seattle and Vancouver is how different we are, considering our near-identical climates and bioregions, similar hybrid ethnicities and parallel histories. Look at a satellite photo of Puget Sound to Howe Sound, and it’s clear that there is now a border-straddling megalopolis from Lions Bay to Tacoma: seven million people in one virtual city, with the insufferable anomaly of an international border down the middle. With two heads but one conjoined body, Vancouver and Seattle are Siamese twins. Yet we are fused not at the head, but at the back—forever looking in different directions. We may share the same flesh, but our outlooks are, in many ways, starkly different.

Led by the colossus of Microsoft, Seattle has become one of the most important corporate hubs in the world—with Boeing, Amazon, Starbucks, Real Networks and countless other companies founded there, and now spreading their brands around the world.

With its central city ringed with new condos, Seattle has a real downtown, with new office towers rising, and a workaday sense of bustle and purpose. Yes, polar fleece and Gore-Tex make their appearance on weekends, but downtown Seattle sidewalks have a higher ratio of suits (and more of them worn by women) than here. The largesse of Cold War military spending, which once jacked up Boeing and the local economy, also helped to establish the University of Washington as a major research hub—and to make Seattle a nexus of the high-tech universe.

Seattle’s private sector wealth has led to extravagant philanthropy, expressed in creations as various as the McCaw Opera House, the Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall, Paul Allen’s countless pet projects around Lake Union, architect Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle Public Library, and the huge headquarters under construction for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s richest charitable organization. Within sight of the building where the Gates will dispense countless billions is the latest symbol of the new Seattle. This is the Seattle Art Museum’s $100 million Olympic Sculpture Park, its zigzag walkways and hillside plantings flanking a definitive collection of 3D art—an instant global pilgrimage point for the art world. Vancouver, on the other hand, has a grandly named but poorly curated Sculpture Biennale, a promotional event where a fire sale of third and fourth-rung works are temporarily installed in plazas and parks. Nice parks, though.

If the corporation-generated private wealth of Seattle manifests itself through philanthropy that Vancouverites can only dream about—watch the upcoming reality check when the VAG board tries to raise a hundred-million-plus for a starchitect-designed new gallery—then our sister’s downside has to do with the public domain, especially transportation infrastructure. Seattle has spent a decade approving then un-approving a monorail line extension, and now is caught up in an equally protracted debate about what to do with the waterfront-disfiguring raised roadway of Alaskan Way. Certainly, Seattleites have lots of time to consider this coupling of public squalor with private splendour—while sitting in their cars on such permanently plugged routes as I-5 or Lake Washington’s floating bridge.

By contrast, Vancouver is arguably the least corporate major city on the continent, a place where Noam Chomsky and the Dalai Lama are rockstars, where the anti-big-business book/documentary The Corporation got produced, and where everybody would rather be sailing or selling kif at Wreck Beach. Our last city council devoted much of its time fighting Wal-Mart and issuing anti-capitalist screeds, and navigating a system where businesses pay six times what homeowners do in taxes—the highest such skew on the continent. We may be preternaturally beautiful, but we are also having the pants beat off us by dweeb-towns like Seattle and Calgary (Vancouver’s the only one of Canada’s six largest cities to lose head office jobs between 1999 and 2005, down a staggering 30 percent).

The Vancouver equivalents to Seattle corporate gods such as Starbucks’ Howard Schultz or Microsoft’s Paul Allen are, revealingly, our city planners. Las Vegas-raised-and-educated former planning chief Larry Beasley did not invent Vancouver-as-resort, but he did his best to take credit for it. Successor Brent Toderian is now scrambling to balance our downtown mondo-condo with job spaces, but such expectations larded upon mere civic bureaucrats divert attention from where blame and credit more properly reside, in our economic history and contemporary business culture. Vancouver’s core attitude—a sense of God-granted entitlement—twinned with a need for quick returns are our legacies from history, because wealth here was generated by scooping up minerals, knocking down forests and, since 1986, harvesting the last of our non-renewable natural resources: water-view real estate.

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