Summer is a time when our routines are happily disrupted. Kids are out of school and many of us take time off from work to enjoy the hometown that draws tourists from around the world. Maybe we wander off the beaten path and see parts of our own city we usually miss on our repetitive commute. Perhaps we leave town for a week or two and return with fresh eyes.
Anyone who has lived in Vancouver and environs for more than a few years can’t help but see change at every turn. Many of us are watching our old elementary and high schools being replaced with new structures, memories being ploughed under with the old bricks. Community centres throughout the city are seeing replacements. Canada’s oldest business, the Hudson’s Bay Company, is being liquidated, leaving another gaping hole (for now, at least) in the retail landscape at the heart of downtown. Woodward’s is a distant memory. And, of course, what old-timers call “the new Oakridge” is being redeveloped into the new new Oakridge, as anyone trying to navigate by car or bus along 41st or Cambie cannot help but be reminded.
Not everyone likes change, put mildly. But, it is inevitable.
It is simplistic to say there is only one way to go – up. There is an alternative, albeit not a good one. We could continue a 20th-century trend to suburban sprawl, in which we lay housing and concrete across precious arable land.
Novelties like laneway houses have attempted to increase capacity in erstwhile single-family neighbourhoods. Along arteries like Oak, Cambie and Granville, single-family homes are giving way to four-, six- and eight-unit developments. As was always the plan, mixed residential and commercial hubs are skyrocketing from the ground up around transit stations, as evidenced most profoundly around Brentwood, Metrotown, Marine Drive and Oakridge.
Which brings us back to what, for most of the past century, has been the “Jewish neighbourhood.”
That term is a bit of a misnomer. A place where most Jews live does not equate to a place where most people are Jews. Even in the most Jew-dense neighbourhoods, we remain single-digit or low-two-digit proportions of the population. Emotionally, traditionally, spiritually and institutionally, since the 1950s at the latest, the rough area around Oakridge, down Oak and Granville and the surrounding blocks, have been home to Metro Vancouver’s Jews.
This reality began fraying about three decades ago, when housing prices began their notorious upward escalations. (Great for homeowners. Not great for first-time buyers.) And the Jewish community became more geographically dispersed, with inevitable positive and negative consequences.
While the City of Vancouver still holds the largest share of the BC Jewish population (at 58%), other municipalities now have significant Jewish populations, including, in order of size, Richmond, Surrey, the District of North Vancouver and Burnaby. Greater Vancouver’s proportion of the BC Jewish population has decreased, though, from 81% in 2011 to approximately 75% in 2021. (For much more data, see jewishindependent.ca/quick-look-at-canadian-jews.)
For Jewish institutions, this reality has demanded accommodations, with services becoming less geographically rooted. Many agencies, notably the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, Jewish Family Services and even the Jewish Community Centre, which by its nature is geographically rooted, are successfully delivering programs across the region.
For Metro Vancouver’s Jews, and for every cultural group, this relentless change has personal and collective impacts.
The JWest development on the 41st and Oak JCC site will include – among other things – hundreds of new homes, notably purpose-built rentals, the scarcity of which is a major contributor to the crisis in the housing market. These hundreds of new homes will not, of course, all be occupied by Jews. But they will be a dramatic increase in available homes in what was, and may again become, the heart of a “Jewish neighbourhood.”
This does not take into account the thousands of other new homes being developed within a radius of a few kilometres, not least at the Oakridge site. Will these be affordable housing? In Vancouver, that term has perhaps lost all meaning. Everything is relative. But volume and variety of housing options are the key to what approaches the concept of affordability.
We can only remotely predict the sociological impacts these dramatic physical changes in our city will have on our day-to-day life, including the vibrancy of Jewish life – not only here, but around the Lower Mainland and the rest of the province.