My family moved from Vancouver to Gibsons, on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, in 2010, when my wife was pregnant, because of growing unaffordability in the city. More recently, we’ve seen the same with other families moving here, and like us, many are not lower-income residents of Vancouver. Many of them are people who can take their work with them: the folks who can work from home or whose job can move with them. It remains a privileged solution to the problem of soaring real estate costs.
Moving also asks people to break their social ties. If you’re asking people to move to Terrace in northern BC or Fort McMurray in Alberta—wherever things are cheaper—you’re asking them to sacrifice their stability and support network. That’s hard on any family, but particularly on racialized, immigrant, or Indigenous families who may not have cultural community in other locations across the country. It’s asking households to live where capitalism tells them to live, not where the right place for them is.
