I loved the letter 'Places like Oak Bay are not the solution to the housing crisis', because it was a perfect encapsulation of what people mean when they say "NIMBY". An Oak Bay resident complaining about younger generations wanting the same standard of living that their parents had.
Do we really believe that people are moving here simply to irritate us personally, steal our golf courses, and force us to listen to rock music? People come here to work. Despite our declining birth rates and stagnant wages, our capitalist system demands growth. We produce too few Canadian residents and fail to equip or pay them sufficiently to meet this labour demand. So, we import cheaper and more skilled labour from countries where people are willing (or forced) to work for less, and/or whose countries are failing to adequately train them. To significantly limit immigration would impact economic progress, something that no government in our lifetimes has been willing to do, as they serve corporations, not people. I doubt that the solutions to this situation are ones the author would be any more amenable to.
Even those people who move here as interprovincial retirees or remote workers still expect to access the amenities of our city. Building in "not-built-up" areas will not prevent them from coming. Shipping the undesirables to some as-yet uninhabited space does nothing but increase urban sprawl, a model of urban planning that has already failed time and time again.
The letter writer and I agree on several points. Explicitly: Immigration levels are exceeding our capacity. More borrowing to buy homes only worsens the issue. Implicitly: The character of neighbourhoods is something to be valued. We ought to develop and protect our communities. People who already live here should not be punished by poor planning and policy. What we are unlikely to see eye-to-eye on is the root causes of this situation and how to address them. There is a cohort that has existed in every generation that blames spoiled youths for the real or perceived erosion of inequities that are favourable to them. To people on the other end of those inequities, it is clear that it is the political and economic system itself that does not work.
People who truly want to protect the ideals of community and island life will also campaign for a radically more comprehensive welfare state and the socialization of more public services.
Jessica Birnie
Victoria
