Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Dire in what way? Vancouver still has the YVR airport, a seaport, ferries, a downtown float plane airport and both road and rail access to the US. There will be some impact to prices, I imagine, while the road and rail links to the rest of Canada are rebuilt.

View on HN

Dire for Merritt (evacuated), Princeton (under water), Hope (all highways closed or curtailed), Abbotsford (under water), Chilliwack (under water), Fernie (no highway access) and a host of other places on the mainland and on the Island that are vital transport, agricultural, forestry, tourism, and mining centres. You mentioned prices, so scale it up to international economics level.

Also Cowichan (cut off by road and also on an island) and the Gulf Islands (many without power, probably for a long time).

If I had a nickel for every time folks have suggested moving out to the country as a solution to the housing crisis...

He he, and if I had 4 million nickels I might be able to afford a small home in Metro Vancouver.

[EDIT] see reply - should say 40 million but what the heck, I ruined the joke.

You _might_ be able to afford a small home for 200K?? I thought Vancouver was much more expensive than that. Or do you mean only the down payment.

I think a reasonable variation on that strategy is for a bunch of people to "move out to the country" all at once, and in roughly the same place. I.e. bootstrap a new city. It'd take a high level of coordination to pull it off successfully though. Ideally they would move somewhere not in a flood plain and not subject to a substantially higher risk of natural disasters (or the not-entirely-natural disasters brought on by climate change). Part of the reason we have a shortage of housing in cities that people want to live in is that we have a shortage of cities that people want to live in.

Otherwise, just moving to the country just means you're dependent on infrastructure in different ways. You might be able to grow your own food if you had to, which is an option city people don't really have. That's worth something.

Did someone suggest that?

It comes up pretty frequently, in topics about remote work, housing crisis, homelessness, minimum wages, etc.

Onto a floodplain...

Fernie is accessible both from the south and the east.

zaptheimpaler specifically said they were talking about the reporting on Vancouver, not elsewhere.

I'm totally unfamiliar with the geography there; are peripheral cities and towns around Vancouver as unaffected as Vancouver itself? I can imagine it happening in some places I've lived, where the central city is humming along just fine and everyone inside the city is blind to the 50% of the population around the city that just got stranded and cut off from supplies.

Depends what you consider peripheral. The places within a couple hours big enough to notice as you drive through are basically Lions Bay/Squamish going north, Maple Ridge/Mission on the 7, and Abbotsford/Chillwack/Hope on highway 1 out the Valley.

Chilliwack and Hope might be cut off, though I think it's possible to get there via minor roads/unusual routes. Abbotsford is partly flooded, but areas that aren't should be accessible. Lions Bay/Squamish and Maple Ridge/Mission are fine, as far as I know.

So if a 1-2 hour drive is the limit, then parts of Abbotsford/Chilliwack/Hope are pretty miserable right now, but it should be fairly localised.

On the other hand, you can argue that most of Southern BC is "peripheral" to Vancouver, despite parts being 4-5 or more hours away. Those parts will have more issues, since you start getting into places where the only connections are (were) the highways that flooded and washed out.

More or less. Greater Vancouver suburbs largely unaffected. Farther out peripherals (Abbotsford, Hope) badly flooded. All regional towns and cities beyond those cut off.

"In the wake of the extreme weather events that continue to devastate First Nations across BC, the First Nations Leadership Council (FNLC) calls on the Provincial government to declare an indefinite State of Emergency in BC, effective immediately."

https://www.bcafn.ca/news/fnlc-calls-state-emergency-due-unp...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com