{"id":31269,"date":"2015-05-07T04:00:20","date_gmt":"2015-05-07T08:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31269"},"modified":"2015-05-06T21:40:16","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T01:40:16","slug":"vancouver-where-happiness-doesnt-co-relate-with-quality-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/05\/07\/vancouver-where-happiness-doesnt-co-relate-with-quality-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Vancouver – where “happiness” doesn’t co-relate with “quality of life”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reducing the realities of life in a given city to a quick numerical value or data point on a chart requires you to ignore subtleties and local influences. Last month, Mark Collins<\/a> linked to this article by Terry Glavin<\/a> on what the “quality of life” numbers for Vancouver actually conceal:<\/p>\n

If the Economist Intelligence Unit\u2019s annual top 10 world cities rankings are what you\u2019ve been relying on, you probably weren\u2019t surprised last month when the global human resources outfit Mercer tagged Vancouver on its Quality of Living index as the best city in North America. But you might have been surprised this week when Statistics Canada released a study showing that, by a variety of indices, Vancouverites are the unhappiest people in Canada, falling dead last among the residents of 33 cities across the country.<\/p>\n

We like to think of Lotusland\u2019s grand metropolis as a place where people ski, sail, ride their bikes, swim, and hike though lush rainforests, all in the same day. But StatsCan\u2019s annual survey of median household income in Canadian cities routinely puts Vancouver close to the bottom of the heap on that same list of 33 cities, and in January the Demographia International research institute ranked Vancouver second to last in a global survey of 378 cities on its Housing Affordability Survey.<\/p>\n

Vancouver\u2019s median household income in 2014 was $66,400, while the city\u2019s median home price was 10.6 times higher: $704,800. Only Hong Kong fared worse, and just barely. Hong Kong also tops Vancouver, again only barely, as the property investment bolt-hole most favoured by Mainland China\u2019s loot-laden millionaires. For years, we\u2019ve been instructed to pretend that this is somehow mere coincidence. You can\u2019t get away with talking to Hong Kongers like that, but Vancouverites take it sitting down.<\/p>\n

In happier places like Saguenay, Sudbury and Thunder Bay, there\u2019s manufacturing, dairy farming, forestry and mining, and there\u2019s a high degree of neighborliness and civility. But Vancouverites make most of their money from increases in the real estate value of whatever property they might be lucky to own. This tends to skew any real sense of hometown belonging, and nothing quite so rattles the cages as loose talk about the elaborate, federally-sanctioned swindle that has been keeping the bubble inflated all these years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reducing the realities of life in a given city to a quick numerical value or data point on a chart requires you to ignore subtleties and local influences. Last month, Mark Collins linked to this article by Terry Glavin on what the “quality of life” numbers for Vancouver actually conceal: If the Economist Intelligence Unit\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,22,25],"tags":[491,917,426,290,490,315],"class_list":["post-31269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-china","category-economics","tag-bc","tag-hongkong","tag-housing","tag-statistics","tag-vancouver","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-88l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31270,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31269\/revisions\/31270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}