A planner friend sent Frank Ducote an excerpt from Michael Luis’s new book, 21st Century City – Seattle’ Fifty Year Journey from World’s Fair to World Stage, with an explanation of how Seattle overcame its geographical isolation and prospered:
What happened–and this is the critical point–is that the Puget Sound region largely leapfrogged the industrial evolution that most of the country experienced. By jumping directly from natural resources to high tech,
the region bypassed the phase of heavy industry that had defined the Northeast and Midwest.
This meant that few industries of the Puget Sound region ever had to deal with obsolescence and the devastating international competition that crippled much of the nation’s industrial base in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, the region had the luxury of being able to wholeheartedly embrace globalization in ways that other regions could not. So in the end, isolation paid off, having left the region as fertile ground for a new kind of economy.
Good explanation for Seattle – but how then to explain Vancouver? We, after all, did not come up with the Evergreen city’s advantages:
… new industries for which transportation of finished products was not a factor… First came Boeing, with products that, magically, deliver themselves. Then came software, which has almost no delivery costs at all.
(Interesting, though, how the illustrative photo, sans Space Needle, looks like it could have come right out of some Vancouver development brochure.)
both cities not so isolated as jumping off ports to Asia re: embracing globalization.
Being the only major city on the canadian coast also helps (no LA, no SF to compete with nationally.)
IMO trade is the key to vancouver’s economic development. we don’t have any similar preeminent industry like seattle (amazon, MS, boeing, etc). it makes vancouver a global convergence point to some degree and involves us in global supply chains. I see a possible enconomic future to be like a rotterdam of the north
I would b open to opening foreign trade zones like they did with Winnipeg to increase value-added work. I’d even contemplate approving the gateway pipeline/kinder morgan pipeline once environmental concerns were met.
Seattle is the headquarters for Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, Eddie Bauer, Nordstrom, Amazon, etc.
Vancouver has Lululemon, and it’s very recent. So, how do we prosper? Is it mainly real estate?
Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago a few years ago and WaMu was absorbed into NY based JP Morgan, so they have had there own head office handwringing down there. Boeing’s reason was that it wanted to be closer to its customers.
Vancouver is the headquarters for a bunch of mining companies, but it’s true that this town does not have a big head office base. This is concerning in some ways, but not in others. People here are obviously making a living, so why should be care whether they are making a living in large corporations. As along as we are not running a big current account deficit (which we are right now) people can be left to their own devices.
During the seventies I travelled often from Kamloops to Vancouver on business. Vancouver was then the end of the line: CP, CN as well as air traffic. During one of my visits I actually encountered (gasp) a couple of foreigners in the Vancouver, – Japanese, I could tell, because they stopped in the door of the washroom, I tried to enter bowing to me several times.
Then came the double whammy of the mid eighties: Expo 86 and the UK – China agreement on Hong Kong. The Expo put Vancouver on the world map and together with the exodus from Hong Kong it suddenly opened up airways to the west. Combine that with better long distance capability of aircraft, accessibility to northern routes and their inherent utilization to the jet-stream and you suddenly have a (the?) major gateway to Asia from this continent.
Add to all that the then new buoyancy of the economies in Asia, tourism aided by tax advantages, as well as obstructive US policies concerning port-of-call restrictions for cruise ships and you have a pretty good starting base for sustained growth.
A hindrance to even more growth is our reluctance to utilize the business acumen and their familiarity with the customs of the target nations of our Asian immigrants more in our trade missions.
olafhenny stole my thunder on “Hong-couver” but the other factor for B.C. has to be the climate. Since Victoria and Vancouver have the least oppressive winters in Canada, the desire to escape the cold, yet remain in Canada has to be a factor. Add to that the decline of the Rust Belt cities around the Great Lakes, so many of which are Canadian, plus the outflux from Montreal due to politics there, and the ease of travel and communications compared to 40 years ago, and its not a surprise.