New West is perfect as it is - don't change a thing... except maybe improve the sidewalks along Columbia St. and Royal Ave. those median strips are way too thin in places.
It's far from perfect; I lived there for twenty years and only moved away last summer.
For starters: it's gone quickly downhill in the last 5 years or thereabouts because the street-level outreach services were placed within the downtown and high-density mixed use areas of the city; and so city promenades and parks have become unsafe for children and other vulnerable persons. I got tired of having to sweep the grass and sand for broken glass and needles before my kids could play; or having to explain why their favourite playground was closed/spray painted/burned down. My wife and neighbours didn't feel safe walking at night; probably because of the _numerous_ murders in the immediate neighbourhood.
But more to zoning: the Queen's Park Heritage Community is an affront to affordability and heritage both! It secures and defends the white-favored, post-war housing that was constructed in the Queen's Park area that replaced the high-density housing that existed in the area pre-war. The tenements that were there prior would never pass the heritage committee now. Good luck trying to convince Queen's Park to build anything remotely affordable.
The whole of Brow of the Hill is a low-income residential area that council, even the current self-declared progressive council, seems determined to completely ignore. It has some of the highest density of children, but parts of Brow are a half hour, or longer, walk from a public playground. There was a playground, 10y ago, but the School Board paved it over to put in parking for teachers.
Last spring, I knew it was time to leave when I was walking my kids to day care at 9am on a sunny day and I had to divert their attention _yet again_ because a man was running down the street with knife wounds. It's funny, because when I first moved to town I did so because it was cheap; and one day leaving the Columbia Sky Train station a man lunged from a bush, covered in dried blood, and asked to use my phone. I let him, thinking he'd call 911, but instead he called his friends and ordered a hit on those who tortured him.
Since then things got better, the neighbourhood cleaned up, but then they rapidly declined again because council thought it was better to embrace than resist.
The political left has somehow spun the idea of common sense policies, like being "tough on crime", as being some parochial throwback to a barbaric past, as opposed to what they are: the only sane route available to society.
Their ideas have been tested, and have utterly failed in the West Coast, yet the political left's base of support hasn't wavered. This to me shows the power of narratives (e.g. "Don't Say Gay"), where they can totally distort reality for the masses.
Despite the narratives about the folly of Republicans/"right-wing" policies, it is exactly those policies that the West Coast needs.
Just FYI both Vancouver and New West are actually in Canada and not America. It's pretty irrelevant to discuss US politics in an article on a Canadian city but it's especially unhelpful when "tough on crime" policies have been shown repeated not to fix homelessness either.
Exactly the same attitudes toward "right wing" policies exists in Canada, and you just exhibited it
>>it's especially unhelpful when "tough on crime" policies have been shown repeated not to fix homelessness either.
Where has it has been shown? Singapore and Tokyo are extremely tough on crime, as any sanely governed society is, and probably spend much less on a per capita basis than Vancouver on social services. Certainly no more. These cities have very little visible homelessness and open drug use, and are extremely safe in comparison, especially with regard to street disorder, property crime, etc.
Limiting the comparison to Canada and the US: Republican-run cities have far less visible homelessness, open drug use, and street disorder than cities run by Democrats, or in Canada, the NDP/Liberals. The contrast is even more stark when you compare places in North America with very left-wing attitudes toward drug use, homelessness and petty crime, like the West Coast, to regions of North America with more traditional attitudes, like Texas or Florida.
Left wing policies in general are wholly ineffective, as evidenced by the fact that there is a huge migration of people from New York stare and California, to Florida and Texas:
In Canada, BC has the most natural advantages of any region of Canada, and managed to have negative inter-provincial migration during the 1990s when governed by the public-sector-unions/NDP.
