Sales Report

I have long wished for someone to write the definitive book about Vancouver: its blend of idiosyncratic subcultures, its conservative-meets-Lotusland-meets-revolutionary politics, its fraught relationship with real estate and housing. Something that would be the equivalent of Mike Davis’s 1990 portrait of Los Angeles, City of Quartz.

Over the years, there have been several titles about various slices of Canada’s little L.A., this city on the edge of the continent, far from the national power centres. The urban planner Lance Berelowitz’s Dream City explored Vancouver’s emergence as a beacon of new urbanism. Jill Wade’s Houses for All was about the grinding fight against a free-market, capitalism-will-solve-all mindset to get some subsidized or affordable housing built. The journalist and researcher Donald Gutstein’s Vancouver Ltd. looked at the power brokers who controlled development in the 1960s and ’70s, while his The New...