Clintonium!

Children of a Lesser Vancouver

November 20th, 2006 - Comments (2)

In the entire world, there are only two cities named Vancouver.

This may come as something of a shock to those readers who had no idea that the sprawling metropolis in British Columbia, Canada, had any competition at all.

But yes, there is a second Vancouver. A lesser Vancouver, if you will. A Vancouver that lives in every sense — including physically (in relative geographic terms) — in the shadow of the other. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it. I doubt that I would ever have heard of it myself if I didn’t live there.

The lesser Vancouver I speak of is found in the state of Washington, USA. It lives right on the southern border of the state and, in many ways, is really a suburb of it’s larger neighbor, the city of Portland, Oregon. (You can tell that you’re the suburb of a larger neighbor when your local news channels are really their local news channels. This can be frustrating during the election season when all the ads, and subsequently the election results, are for another state.)

In terms of population, the greater Vancouver is close to six times the size of the lesser. By the 2005 census numbers, Vancouver BC had a metropolitan area population of 2,208,300; Vancouver WA doesn’t technically have its own metro area (it’s part of the Portland metro area), but if you attribute the entire population of Clark county toward its total you get 403,766. A bit generous maybe, but it gives a sense of the scale.

At any rate, you can see that the lesser Vancouver is no slouch in terms of population, but it seems to have come up pretty dry in terms of global mindshare. It may have a sixth of the residents, but it certainly doesn’t receive near a sixth of the attention of its larger competitor. At the time of this writing, if you type in “Vancouver” at Google maps or Wikipedia you go directly to results for Vancouver BC. There are no intermediary disambiguation pages. They know that they can safely assume you mean the Vancouver in Canada.

And why not? Consider that one of these two Vancouvers is going to host the 2010 winter olympics. One of these two Vancouvers is currently home to an NHL hockey team, and formerly home to an NBA basketball team. One of these two Vancouvers ranks as the third most populated metro area in its country. In case you have to ask… no, we’re not talking about Vancouver WA here.

In the business world, if two companies had the same name, and one of those companies received virtually all of the media attention and traffic, the other company would wise up and change its name. But in the world of municipalities — at least in the case of Vancouver vs. Vancouver — this will never happen. Why? Because Vancouver WA has one thing on Vancouver BC. It’s the type of thing that people find very hard to let go of. The same type of thing which explains, against all logic, why Delaware goes on pretending that it’s a real and meaningful State, when it’s less than one third the size of the Seattle metropolitan area. You see, Vancouver WA was there first. It’s the “oldest permanent non-native settlement in the Pacific Northwest”, founded in 1825, and incorporated in 1857 — 29 years before the incorporation of Vancouver BC.

As any kid knows, you don’t give up something that you had first. Not ever.

And so, those of us that live here, in the lesser of two Vancouvers, will go on explaining to people that we live in the USA, rather than Canada. We’ll go on pretending that the confusion doesn’t bother us, that it really doesn’t matter, and that we don’t have even the slightest hint of an inferiority complex. We’ll go on, not even willing to think about a name change that might result in greater clarity.

Because we were here first.

And the name is ours, eh.