The mayor was Art Phillips, the population of the city was 425,000, Pacific Centre was under construction, Granville Mall was just finished, the traffic was awful and a big issue was the cost of housing:
“Anyone making less than $20,000 a year cannot afford a single-family home within comfortable commuting distance of downtown,” a Vancouver resident said.
Vancouver was struggling with rapid population growth, wondering how to accommodate 30,000 people a year pouring into the region, according to Ray Herbert, the urban affairs writer for the Los Angeles Times, which published this profile on May 4, 1975.
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Thanks to Katharine Jose at the University of Texas at Austin, who found this piece as part of her research. “It’s truly remarkable the degree to which Vancouver in 1975 sounds like Austin in 2015.”
Geez, I wonder who the architect was who called the curvy Granville Mall our “Champs Élysées”? Delusional.
Erickson?
Later, in a similar desilusional pattern, some planners have called the “curvy” Pacific Bld, our “Champs Élysées” too…