Michael Kluckner has been writing about Vancouver and its vanishing heritage for 40 years, becoming, in his words, “a harsh critic of the city’s willingness to clearcut itself, the way settler culture did with the forests that stood here in Indigenous times.” He began with Vancouver The Way It Was, his first book-length study of the city and its suburbs. His latest book, Surviving Vancouver, continues that work decades later. Like many of his previous titles, it is both a richly illustrated remembrance of things past and an incisive warning for the future.
“We are in danger of losing what was looking in the 1990s to be a kind of a complete city, one with these layers on the landscape, one with a sense of its own history,” he said.
Surviving Vancouver is divided into two parts — one looks at the built heritage of the city that has survived – and the other looks at what people will do to survive here.
The first part is entitled Surviving (An Adjective) and it looks at the parts of Vancouver that are still with us today.
“For example, some of these inner-city areas, the Strathconas, the Mount Pleasants, Kitsilanos, Grandviews, and so on,” Kluckner said. “They have survived largely because individuals have loved the old houses, loved the neighbourhood quality, and they’ve gone and bought up what, in many cases, were rooming houses that were primed for redevelopment, but instead of tearing them down, they’ve fixed them up.”
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Then there are aspects of the city Kluckner feels are increasingly under threat.
“The affordable apartment areas in Vancouver, and particularly along the Broadway Corridor, where they are building at just an immense cost, a subway to create a second downtown.”
Kluckner laments the loss of these areas and the resistance to preserving them. “Mature cities have layers of different landscapes that tell stories,” he writes. “The ‘new Vancouver’ is a general infant of little character and architectural merit that is doing little for the poor.”
The second half of the book is entitled Surviving (A Verb), and it looks at everything people have done to afford to live here since the Great Depression.
“One of the things that I thought was worth doing in the book was doing a review of the 90 years since poor people have been moving to Vancouver,” he said.
Other ways of surviving in Vancouver include the ability to draw from “The Bank of Mom and Dad” to afford a down payment on a home.
“It just points the way that the inequality in our society is being baked in generation over generation, compared with, say, 50 years ago,” he said.
For others, survival means escaping the city into more distant suburbs where they can afford enough space to raise their families.
“If your way of surviving means you got to get out of town, then that’s not, to me, a successful city.”
He warns the more unaffordable Vancouver becomes, the more it may cede influence to the suburbs, one in particular.
“You know Surrey, for all of its problems, that’s where people are going now. And maybe in 20, 30, years, [we’ll] refer to this whole area as Metro Surrey, not Metro Vancouver.”
For an increasing number of people, Kluckner says survival also means a van or a motor home is the only shelter they can afford. And for retirees, it means fleeing to the east side of Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, or the Okanagan — turning what were once BC’s summer places into permanent homes.
But for all of Vancouver’s sham, drudgery, and broken dreams there is no place Kluckner would rather be.
“I don’t want to be one of the ballcap-wearing retirees over on the east side of Vancouver Island, complaining about how things used to be better,” he said. “I’d rather stay here and work and try to make this city better and make it continue being a lovely place.”
And in his own way he has.
Surviving Vancouver is published by Midtown Press.