Thoughts on the West Coast

I think if I had ever held any illusions about moving out west, this last little jaunt out there quashed those ideas. Or, at the very least, about moving to the greater Vancouver area. I can't fairly rule out rural BC, Vancouver Island, etc, not having been there.
Without a doubt, Vancouver has a lot going in its favour: awesome weather, beautiful scenery, a generally healthier population than out east, managing to succeed in its Olympic bid (OK, I don't think that's a big seller, but some people would), bountiful sushi establishments, etc.
It started with the small, nagging feeling that though their bus route system seems to serve the city quite well (slowly), and the Skytrain is amazing in its driverless cars, rapid, public transit overall leaves much to be desired. I clued into this when trying to figure out how to navigate how to get to my friend's house from the house I was staying at, and the transit finder said it was "impossible" for me to do the trip UNDER 3 HOURS. This was the equivalent of trying to get from Greektown to Lakeshore Village. Incredible. Yes, they've built an impressive link from the airport to the downtown core (only by getting kicked into gear by the IOC), but in terms of shuttling people around efficiently in a city considerably smaller than Toronto, they've still got quite a lot of work set out for them.
A further dart to the heart was meeting with various environmentalists and food security types that squashed any stereotypes I held about green Vancouverites; apparently they don't exist quite as proliferatively or as ubiquitously as I had previously thought. But I think the kicker was trying to do some work around poverty and justice while I was over there. The city itself seems to be designed more similarly to an American city than a Canadian one (this was confirmed by several Vancouverites I spoke to). That is to say, that the poor live in their own enclaves, away and aside from where 'everyone else' lives. I suppose if the city is composed mainly of single dwelling homes, yes, that does already construct the city to housing formats that cannot include everyone. Not everyone can afford to buy or rent single dwelling homes; if this is almost exclusively the housing style available, it cuts many people out of the market. I also passed by a very controversial subsidized housing project several times while there, closed down by the government for 'unspecified reasons', the low income people living there were kicked out of the city, and many people in the community had protested its closing, saying it was a conspiracy. Normally, I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but I couldn't help but notice that one of the Olympic venues was right across the street....
Visiting people, people I love, in their opulent homes, in almost gated neighbourhoods, listening to them talk about how "safe" the neighbourhood was, how "nice" their neighbours are, how they don't have to worry about their children being friends with the neighbours, how all their neighbours were "just like them", how those "bad" people from North Surrey wouldn't be able to reach their neighbourhood because they'd need a car... hearing talk like this broke my heart. I was happy for their financial success, and the utter gorgeousness of all their homes, but wondered about how the 'otherness' was being built up, the fear driving them into enclaves where they'd never have to see a homeless person, let alone a coloured person, and where the heart of Jesus was beating... all told me how where they lived were "good" neighbourhoods for their children to be raised, but I heard very little of how, in being served with 'safety' and 'good schools' and the 'right neighbours' by the communities they were living in, they were going to serve the High King... Sigh. Sure, we're not perfect here in the Centre of the Universe, either, but it certainly was, from an socio-economic/justice point of view, a fairly disappointing trip (it was really fun otherwise!)...