Does Metro Vancouver have an optimum population?

Is there a point where our numbers out-strip quality of life?

In the past few years, I have received thousands of emails from readers who say that point has already been reached. The frequency of those emails seems to increase with every passing year.

A variety of subjects — housing, immigration, the environment, densification and, lately, even the transit tax — inspires the same response in those who feel there are already too many of us living here.

Whether it’s nostalgia or xenophobia or ecological concern, or even our topography talking through us — with our stockade of mountains and the moat of the sea keeping the world at bay — many of us, if my mail is any indication, feel besieged.

In terms of the transit tax, the argument being made by the Yes side, which I count myself on, rests on the projection that there will be a million more people living in Metro Vancouver in 25 years.

That’s an intimidating number. If you include the Fraser Valley regional district, it’s even more intimidating: Our population will reach four million by 2043.

Depending on the year, that’s between 35,000 and 50,000 more people living here every year. We’ll have to build over 600,000 new dwellings to accommodate them.

“From a density perspective,” wrote Andrew Ramlo, of the non-profit Urban Futures institute, “if we take the size of the land base in each of the GVRD and FVRD (16,218 square kilometres), and the resident population today, this would imply a current population density of 168 people per square kilometre. By 2043, assuming no land is annexed in either of the two regions, density would increase by almost 50 per cent as there would be 248 people per square kilometre.”

In strict environmental terms, this is long past untenable. Bill Rees, UBC professor emeritus, ecological economist and the man who coined the term “ecological footprint,” figured that the optimal self-sustaining population for Metro Vancouver was about 30,000. We passed that number in 1901.

“Our region is now almost entirely dependent on imports of food grown elsewhere,” Rees said. “If you assume the world is a stable place, and the next 50 years will look as stable as the last 50 years, then if you have more people here or less people here all depends on personal preference.

“But I don’t think the world will look like that in the next 50 years. I think because of climate change, we’ll be facing dramatic and, more likely, catastrophic changes.”

Our choices?

We either stop immigration to Canada completely, which won’t happen (though Rees thinks Canada is “vastly overpopulated” as it is), or we densify so we can protect what agricultural and rural land we have left. The worst thing we can do? Sprawl, and eat up our land base.

Some communities, notably in the U.S., have instituted no-growth policies, though those communities tend to be smaller and upscale.

The City of Vancouver experimented with a kind of selective no-growth policy in the 1980s, constraining development and demolition in certain neighbourhoods like the West End and Kerrisdale. But that was in a time when Vancouver had empty land elsewhere in the city that could absorb the growth pressures.

Gordon Price was a Vancouver city councillor during that period. Now director of The City Program at Simon Fraser University, Price, like Rees, has an historical perspective on the issue. His, however, is rooted in nostalgia, and the fear of change from a comfortable past.