Ep. 207: Vancouver: Love Me, Love Me Not

Guest: Abeer Yusuf, journalist and writer

Tom Davidoff described Vancouver as a beautiful city created by nature and ruined by man.

He, of course, was talking about his pet project, the cost of housing. Our guest today says that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Abeer Yusuf, like so many before her, came to Vancouver, gasped at the natural beauty and determined this was going to be a great place to call home. That is, until she started living here. Soon she discovered what so many before her have found about Vancouver's fickle nature.

You want to love the city and, at the same time, it does just about everything to make you scratch your head and wonder what you saw in the place when you fell in love with it. You want to stay, you want to leave – you’re torn in both directions.

Housing, yes, but so too transportation, the cost of food, clothing. Yes, there are jobs but career opportunities are hard to come by and so too are friends who can keep a date. As Abeer Yusuf has experienced, "People are super flaky here," on a dime and at the last minute they will cancel their date with you. A true Vancouver problem that pre-dates Abeer's arrival by decades.

Are we truly multicultural or do we spend to much time congratulating ourselves about inclusivity and then come up short when it comes to creating integrated communities?

We invited Abeer Yusuf to join us for a Conversation That Matters about the myriad challenges of feeling truly at home in Vancouver.