We’re settling into a Rio-like future as a resort attached to our festering favela, the Downtown Eastside. Vancouver is a wonderful place to visit, to play, to shoot up, to check out of a career, to retire, but it’s no longer a serious business centre.The first people I heard describe Vancouver as a “resort” were Hong Kong- and Taiwan-born businessmen as they re-aligned their investments towards China after briefly nesting here in the 1990s. The resortification of our downtown has been a quiet secret in Vancouver’s development and urban planning communities for a decade; real estate brokers long ago stopped listing land here as potential office sites—the returns from condos being so much higher. Only recently has the nine-to-one ratio of condo-to-office tower construction since 2000 on our land-limited downtown peninsula become a public issue.

Vancouver bought heavily into the postmodern notion of the city as solely a place to live, not to work, largely with our 1991 Central Area Plan that rezoned eight million square feet of potential office space in Downtown South as “housing optional.” It’s now almost completely developed-out as condos only. The net effect of this downtown forest of condo towers is a kind of reverse clear-cut: a single species monoculture plantation for the quick harvesting of profits by politically savvy developers. And with this development, ironically, we may have permanently compromised our most attractive feature—our spectacular natural setting—for future businesses and downtown workers both.

Next time you spend a weekend in Seattle, do what I call the “condo test.” About 8 p.m. on a Sunday night, just before you point the Toyota back at the border, pass through the epicentre of Seattle’s new downtown condo zone, Belltown, and estimate the ratio of apartments with lights on. A week later at the same time, stroll through our equivalent zone—Bayshore and Coal Harbour—and do the same thing. The difference is startling—where are all the Vancouverites’ lights? I would like to think we’re all making passionate love in the dark, or dining at our swankiest restaurants, but the stark reality is that nobody lives in those condos much of the time. Nearly half of Bayshore-Coal Harbour condos have been bought by speculators, split between fellow Canadians preparing for retirement here and a golden global class of investors whose real estate dalliances tend to dissolve as quickly as they form.

Seattle: look at Vancouver for our strength in shared infrastructure, especially its public transit. Vancouver has had a little too much lately of city planners-über alles, but Emerald City, maybe it’s time your city actually set up a planning department, rather than sprinkling those forward-thinking functions over three or four other civic agencies.

Vancouver: your parks, theatres, schools, community centres and transit lines are all wonderful, but sooner or later you will need to generate wealth in a renewable way to pay for them, and those earnest workaholics three hours south may have something to teach us. We have gazed away for too long, and it is high time our Siamese cities had a good hard look at one other.

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READ MORE IN THE SEATTLE SERIES:

36 Hours in Seattle: Where to eat, drink, shop and sightsee.

Bed Check: Reviews of three very different Seattle hotels.

Culture Crawl: Our ranking of Seattle's independent coffeehouses, and listings of the best local books and music acts.

A Tale of Two Cities: Which city's wealthier? Safer? Healthier? Seattle and Vancouver by the numbers.