One City, Two Nations

On Beatty Street, Big Ugly, a monster condominium, steals the sunlight and privacy its neighbours purchased only a year or two before, and entrepreneurs erect metal fences to keep the homeless from camping in their doorways. This is Crosstown, the eye of Vancouver’s storm of inequality. Here, my front door opens onto boxy office towers and cloned condos; the back door accesses Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside, the poorest postal code in Canada. Occasionally these two worlds converge. One night I saw a clutch of East Asian teenagers in private school uniforms buying crack at the corner of Hastings and Abbott, but everyday encounters are limited to those between desperate panhandlers and irritated suits on Granville and Georgia Streets—conversations the city has tried to outlaw. Nowhere in Canada are the gaps in money and power more gaping than in this West Coast city.

Dimensions of Inequality in Canada from Vancouver’s University of British Columbia Press...