Osama Elemary: What holds a city together is the willingness of people to show up for each other. Vancouver is pricing that willingness out of existence. The rents keep going up and many have to work more or move further out.
Choosing Vancouver
I live in Vancouver. I want to be clear about that because what I am about to say comes not from someone passing through, but from someone who chose this city. Who chose its grey winters and its impossible housing market and its particular brand of West Coast beauty that makes you forgive almost everything else.
I chose Vancouver the way you choose something you love before you fully understand it. And lately, I have been afraid of what I am beginning to understand.
A Lost Ritual
For years, a group of us had a ritual. Every few months — sometimes more often — we would leave the city behind. A day at the beach. A morning lost in the forest. An afternoon on the water in someone’s boat, the mountains behind us, the ocean ahead, nothing urgent anywhere.
Those were the days we measured our lives by the ones that pulled us out of obligation and responsibility into something wider. Open sky, open water, open time. People were present. Not performing presence — actually there. Someone would spot an eagle and everyone would stop talking.
Mortada was obsessed with hunting — ducks mostly, sometimes birds — and he was almost always the one who fed us. Edison would quietly collect the dishes before anyone noticed they needed collecting, and wash them without being asked. I did not know then that I was watching something rare.
The Excuses Begin
Slowly — so slowly that none of us named it as it happened — the excuses began. “I can’t this weekend, I picked up an extra shift.” “We had to move further out — the rent went up again.” “I’ll try to make the next one.” The next one came and went.
What I noticed was not the empty seats. It was Adam. Adam used to find a joke about everything — a moment of waiting, a wrong turn, a bad weather forecast. He could break any tension with a single line. Then the rent went up. Then it went up again. He moved from one place to another, further each time, and the commute swallowed what was left of him. When we did see him, he was still Adam, but the jokes took longer to arrive.
The Question Vancouver Asks
I have spent my career thinking about what makes places feel alive — not as a philosopher, but as a practitioner. A museum strategy consultant who has worked across three continents, designing spaces where people encounter history and feel something real. The question that follows me through every project is the same question Vancouver is now asking me in return: What happens to a place when its people no longer have time to love it?
A few years ago, a friend brought me to Britannia Shipyards in Richmond on a grey afternoon. No ticket booths. No velvet ropes. Wooden houses on stilts above the water, old boats resting onshore as if their owners had stepped away. And on every door, a placard telling the story of a family that had lived and worked here.
