What's Hong Kong got to do with Vancouver?

New Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan, I salute you on your electoral victory and wish you all the best.

I didn’t vote for you, but it was more out of laziness than apathy – I spent pretty much the whole of Saturday in bed getting my head together. Twenty hours of travel from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Vancouver and a 16-hour time change will make your head spin.

Most of my time since then has been spent catching up on work and setting up this blog. My head’s still a little fuzzy – hence, the belated salutations.

Running a city isn’t easy, but my time in the ubertropolis of Hong Kong, another mountainous port city on the other side of the big pond, reminded me just how good we have it over here.

Which is not to say that Hong Kong is a mess – it’s not.

But it’s a much more fast-paced, complicated sort of place, where the Hong Kong locals have had to deal with huge challenges to keep their city healthy.

Nearly seven million people live there in one of the most densely-packed places in the world outside of the Gaza strip.

It’s so compact, city engineers have to continually fill in the harbor just so they’ll have enough land to build a couple hundred more towers to accommodate new growth (though Hong Kong’s local government does have an incentive in selling the new turf at astronomical prices to avoid raising taxes for everyone).

Vancouver has TransLink and Hong Kong has its own transit system – subway lines and a huge fleet of buses. The trains alone move nearly two and half million people a day. Transit is widely used by necessity – to get a parking spot from the city, you’ll have to pay about as much as you did for your shiny new car. It cuts down on the smog, the blight of cities on the mainland.

I was surprised to find that Hong Kong has several nice parks stuck right in the middle of swathes of tall office towers and apartment blocks – not as big or as green as what we’ll find here (Stanley Park ranks as the third largest in North America), but beautifully landscaped and filled up with many impressive monuments and public artworks.

Hong Kong is a modern, vibrant city – and from what I saw, it’s avoiding some problems that are already creeping up on us even though this city isn’t half as big or as complicated. I didn’t see much of a homeless problem there (three sad-looking examples in eight days, though I read a recent estimate that there are 1,000 people sleeping on the streets of Hong Kong at night) – and while I can assume there is a problem that I just didn’t notice in my brief stay, the point is that here, you don’t have to look hard, or even wander into the downtown Eastside, to see it.

So, Mr. Sullivan, I wish you and council the best of luck.

Perhaps I’ll even vote for you next time.