Endnotes

Endnotes for "The death drive on Marine Drive", current as of 2019.03.21.

1 Calculations were done by taking the census tracts surrounding each SkyTrain station, adding their
areas and populations, and getting a cumulative density like such, in residents/km^2 . The two census tracts
used for Ambleside and Dundarave are 9330130.01 and 9330130.03, which include the few blocks
surrounding Marine Drive on each side – the area that would be directly affected by TransLink’s planned
B-Line and lane reconfiguration. This area has a density of 4013.19. The SkyTrain stations in question
are Sperling – Burnaby Lake (2112.5), Lake City Way (985.0), Inlet Centre (2450.0), Braid (2944.5),
Sapperton (2377.0), Scott Road (425.4), Oakridge – 41st Avenue (3392.9), and Aberdeen (1200.7); these
were identified for calculation via the map cited from (Smith 2013). Calculations were also performed on
King Edward (5142.5) and Langara – 49th Avenue (4190.9) stations, both of which have a somewhat
higher density than Ambleside and Dundarave.

2 At the intersections being compared here (Marine and 13th , West 4th and Vine, and Clark and Venables),
all three of these streets are configured with two through traffic lanes and a parking lane in each direction,
though there are restrictions on parking along Clark during peak times on weekdays. These streets are all
about the same width, too – 22-24m from building to building, and 17-19m from curb to curb.

3 In the recent council videos, white people dominate the speakers list, and most people who mention
their socioeconomic status at all discuss being involved in well-paid professions or business ownership.
For speakers who disclose their addresses, their property values can be searched for at
https://www.bcassessment.ca/Property/AssessmentSearch; previous searches on my part indicate that a
lot of their homes are worth at least double the benchmark price of a house in Metro Vancouver,
CAD$1,016,600 (Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver 2019).

4 The scare quotes here are intended to highlight the questionable sense in which the term “taxpayer” is
often used by wealthier people – it often contains an implicit value judgment that those who pay more tax
ought to have more control over how political decisions are made. It is of note that people who are in
poverty and/or are involved in precarious work nearly never rally around the term “taxpayer”; on the other
hand, this term is used frequently by people who are more or less free from the effects of structural
oppression.

5 For example, the comment sections on these two articles about the workforce housing,
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/west-vancouver-considers-building-subsidized-workforce-
housing and https://www.nsnews.com/news/survey-of-west-van-educators-shows-support-for-workforce-
housing-1.23462164, show some instances of the mentalities discussed here. I’ve uploaded screenshots
at https://imgur.com/a/z1A8e25 and https://imgur.com/a/osZyLgH, respectively.

6 Citing best case scenario travel times from the closest edge of North Vancouver/Stanley Park/&c. to
Park Royal is hardly an honest metric of rush hour travel times from, say, Lynn Valley or Renfrew –
Collingwood to, for example, Marine and 18th.

7 Metro Vancouver’s land area which is either developed or available for development; that is, its total
land minus the ALR, conservation zones, watersheds, parks, and explicitly designated rural areas; adds
up to about 840km^2 . If one calculates Metro Vancouver’s density with that area figure, using the
population data from the 2016 Census (2,463,431), the result is 2,932.66 people/km^2 , denser than every
single urban area in the USA, for example. Furthermore, there is only about 78.5km^2 of undeveloped land
left inside Metro Vancouver’s urban containment boundary, an area smaller than the District of West
Vancouver.

8 The trajectory of housing prices in Metro Vancouver over the past twenty years should be sufficient
evidence that the market cannot be trusted to maintain sustainable, let alone affordable, housing prices
without government intervention, or even removing market forces from housing.

9 Mary-Ann Booth is a registered member of the Liberal Party of Canada. While she does have some
relatively progressive political lines that are incompatible with the retrograde perspectives pushed by local
reactionaries, a communist would not join a party whose governments have banned the Communist Party
of Canada twice, and have seized said party’s assets an additional time, leading to the Figueroa v.
Canada legal dispute. Thus, it is reasonable to conclude that Booth is not a communist, even if she
supports policies such as improving housing affordability.

10 Hypocritical in the sense that, for the vast majority of people in, for example, West Vancouver who
consider themselves to be “Canadian” who make no effort to comply with the laws of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh
Úxwumixw, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, or səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, let alone learn Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim or hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, it is a
fairly incredible double standard to start accusing immigrants from elsewhere of not doing enough to
follow the laws of the Canadian state or learn English, or otherwise complain whatsoever about peaceful,
non-settler-colonial immigration.

11 It could be argued ad nauseam as to what constitutes “severely inflated”; however, having talked to
many Vancouverites in precarious or otherwise undesirable housing situations, there is a strong
consensus that, if land values are high enough that they are inducing landlords to displace tenants via
measures such as renovictions, those land values are too high.