City Of God 7

One thing that helps us get a sense of what is the City of God is through a process of elimination, or, by determining what it is not going to look like. I just read yesterday in one of our free weeklies a letter to the editor from one Robert Chester (so sue me, Robert!). I will not quote him directly, and I am assuming that he is one of the wealthy burghers in my city sitting on a very sumptuous piece of real estate and occupying a house that is really too big for the needs of one resident or small family. But here I digress. In his letter, Robert seems to have a bee in his bonnet about the city passing legislation to allow duplex housing to be built throughout this beautiful city that is like a lovely woman without a personality, which is to say, Vancouver. He insists that in Canada there is an unwritten right of privilege to those who are wealthy enough to acquire luxury homes in lovely heritage neighbourhoods, such as Shaughnessy Heights (where all the big mansions are); that this class of people is somehow better and superior to the rest of us because they are wealthy and that they should be allowed to retain their horrendous waste of space in heritage neighbourhoods unmarked by development and hermetically sealed off from the great unwashed. In other words, this gentleman (and I use the term very loosely) wants special privilege for himself and his wealthy cohorts. He insists that wealth and luxury home ownership give these people a special and elevated social status that they should not be deprived of. He even goes as far as to insinuate how traumatizing it would be for such wealthy burghers to lose their privilege, that duplexes and (horrors!) townhouses, should be built there and somehow squeezed onto their expansive estates, letting almost anybody who earns slightly less than a six figure income onto their green and pleasant refuge. Well, I don't know where or how he extrapolates this specious nonsense about special rights for the wealthy. First of all, there is absolutely nothing in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that recognizes this special status of neo-feudalism. To my knowledge no one has ever been inducted into the Order of Canada for being wealthy and living in a gigantic heritage mansion. Those honours tend to go to those who have done much to serve and help improve the quality of life for other Canadians and who have otherwise rendered extraordinary service to their country. Being rich is not an extraordinary service. And to my knowledge neither Home Hardware nor Ikea are selling do it yourself moat and drawbridge kits. And there is also the other elephant in the living room: Robert Chester, like every other home-owner in this city, is squatting on Unceded Musqueam and Coast Salish Territory. Not even all the wealth of Croesus is going to justify this kind of robbery. We have also the nagging and ever-present issue of social and income inequality which basically ghettoizes those who are not yet homeless into cheaper areas, usually outside of the City of Vancouver. So, perhaps that would be an ideal situation for the outrageously selfish and fabulously wealthy, but living in a bubble of privilege has its price, and this kind of inequality has its fallout in increased crime and a decrease in the general quality of life in this city. Don't like to see beggars on the sidewalk? Well, they are not about to move on, given they have nowhere to move to. Here is my proposal and I already know that this will send the likes of Robert Chester into apoplectic hysterics, but here goes: Let's make the big mansions of Shaughnessy, and elsewhere in Vancouver, a kind of public trust. First Shaughnessy has already been designated a heritage district. This needs to be carried a step or two further. Let's buy up those big houses as they become available by attrition and instead of letting Chinese and other offshore millionaires buy them, let's give them over to further development and renovations. That's right. One of those heritage monster homes could easily house up to six families, or ten or more single adults or couples. They could be renovated into affordable cooperatives offering townhouse, one to two bedroom units and bachelor suites of affordable housing to people of mixed incomes, which is to say, a fully integrated demographic of renters that would represent the true social fabric of Vancouver. Oh yes, let Robert Chester and his ilk howl as shrilly as they want in their privileged outrage, but they represent a dying breed of leftover British colonialism and it's time to let their kind of thinking totter quickly and quietly into permanent extinction. We have very little available land in this city and no one is going to build (hopefully) on the agriculture land reserve, since we are going to need to somehow feed all those people who will be moving to our city. We are never going to create heaven on earth and I don't expect that any of our utopian efforts are going to change very much, but somehow we have to keep trying. The Kingdom of God now is with us, it is in our midst, and our small efforts to make our cities more liveable and more inclusive including to the poorest of the poor could bring some of us a step or two further in learning to see this reality.