"But what if the Grocery Store wants to ban Blacks! We can't have them decide what to carry, where to build, what prices to set!"
It's not unreasonable to think about the limits of what kinds of control communities can have, but as you've posed it, it's completely rhetorical.
Nobody is 'banning Blacks' from anywhere. The level of hysteria on these kinds of things is creaking into every discussion even when it's mostly inappropriate.
Vancouver has a busy city with X homes, Y flats, a certain infrastructure and that's that.
If they want to decide to not want skyscrapers everywhere, they can do that, and it has nothing to do with 'banning a group'.
'Tolerant and Progressive' Vancouver has made very material choices that have made living their excessively difficult for people living on the margins, and highly favourable to very wealthy non-citizens who want a place to keep their money safe. Which is their choice, but it's an odd one, more importantly, I don't think communities generally make choices to 'stop poor people', that's not part of the cards, rather policies indirectly do that.
If there is a systematic issue at play here, it may be the 'growth mindset' of new world city managers and businesses, all of whom want 'more sales, more revenue, more tax revenue, more leverage, more power' etc. 'to build that thing and provide that service', never really contemplating something resembling actual sustainability.
As I said in another comment, one of the problems with this approach is the the actual process of decision making for such issues is deeply flawed. The question of who "they" is and precisely how "they decide" is far from simple; the answer is certainly not "the citizens of Vancouver".
Retrospectively, I do think that my comparison with bans on various protected groups was a bit silly. Even so, these decisions are not some simple mapping from "the will of the people", and that means that it's not as simple as "they get to decide".
It's not unreasonable to think about the limits of what kinds of control communities can have, but as you've posed it, it's completely rhetorical.
Nobody is 'banning Blacks' from anywhere. The level of hysteria on these kinds of things is creaking into every discussion even when it's mostly inappropriate.
Vancouver has a busy city with X homes, Y flats, a certain infrastructure and that's that.
If they want to decide to not want skyscrapers everywhere, they can do that, and it has nothing to do with 'banning a group'.
'Tolerant and Progressive' Vancouver has made very material choices that have made living their excessively difficult for people living on the margins, and highly favourable to very wealthy non-citizens who want a place to keep their money safe. Which is their choice, but it's an odd one, more importantly, I don't think communities generally make choices to 'stop poor people', that's not part of the cards, rather policies indirectly do that.
If there is a systematic issue at play here, it may be the 'growth mindset' of new world city managers and businesses, all of whom want 'more sales, more revenue, more tax revenue, more leverage, more power' etc. 'to build that thing and provide that service', never really contemplating something resembling actual sustainability.