Less than a week away and there are enough candidates running for mayor on the random ordered ballot to stage a basketball tournament. In fact, that’d be my suggestion for whittling down the number of candidates for mayor. Divide them up into four teams, play some round robin hoop, and the team with the most wins is the 5 people who get to be on the ballot. Simpler for the voters and more entertaining. Who wouldn’t want to see Wai Young dish to Fred Harding who then dunks on Ken Sim? Of course my suggestion is not treating city politics seriously and this election is serious business. It’s Vancouver’s most important in a generation, or at least that’s what it says in the mailing I got from the Kennedy Stewart campaign.
Twenty, yes twenty people want to be your mayor. Are they the twenty smartest, most imaginative, learned, insightful people in Van City? The top twenty? You decide. The candidates run the gamut from front runner Kennedy Stewart to Roller Girl and among the things all 20 have in common is a solution to our affordable housing issues.
The problem is, what exactly is affordable and what does it look like? The livable wage – that which covers your monthly expenses – is $20.91 an hour in Vancouver. Assuming you’re fortunate enough to have full time work, and are only spending 30% of your income a month on housing, you’re still looking at a minimum $1,000 per month.
What do these 20 good people, who feel you should pay them to sit in the big chair at 12th and Cambie, think a minimum $1,000 should get you? Six hundred square feet? Four hundred square feet? A half a shipping container? A studio in a forty story rabbit hutch beside a Skytrain station ?
My suspicion is that in the end affordable, presuming you’re making a livable wage, is the market rate. Just once I’d like to hear a candidate say;
“ It’s too late. We need to focus on transit. Improve transit cause
people have to live farther out. “
Of course any candidate for mayor who would say that, would never make the top twenty.
By Contributing Writer Al Tee
ILiveInEastVan.com 
Leave a Reply