No they weren't. This place has been in a nosedive since expo.

To add insult to injury the Van Winter Olympics is one of fortune magazines 7 biggest financial disasters in Olympic history. You'll be paying for it for years while you're priced out of the housing market by outside forces. Eat it suckers!!

“Go back where you came from” is not a thing. If you want to find somewhere nice and relatively undiscovered, you need to get off your butt and find that place, and move there. Plus, lots of things have actually improved since before the olympics. Case in point, 5 craft breweries in my neighbourhood. This city used to be too uptight for that kind of thing.

Things were nice here before the colonies...

Don't you have a wonderful sense of entitlement.

Op, I would say you are barking up the wrong tree. But that would be an insult to dogs.

The developers and realtors are laughing all the way to the bank.

Vancouverites wanted the Olympics to prove to themselves Vancouver is "world class". Their inferiority complex got the better of them but there's no free lunch. They Olympics have seen no benefit to the broader economy according to studies and tax payers will be paying for the infrastructure upgrades for years. Vancouver was in over it's head. It's just not an important enough city to justify the spending. It's not a major player in business or tourism. Sadly, we are eating it.

Happy Chinese New Year of the Dog to yu!

Alcohol is neurotoxic, carcinogenic and teratogenic. The increase in alcohol availability in the City is not a good thing. I wouldn't support alcohol prohibition, but LSD, MDMA, mescaline, mushrooms and, to a lesser extent, pot are all safer alternatives to alcohol, unless one really likes the anaesthetic effect of alcohol.

That's what alcohol is, a deleriant anaesthetic.

As for people leaving, well, I would push it back to the 1989, which is when Canada changed federal immigration policy to "continual massive immigration." It was never in Vancouver's interest.

The place started going to shit after Expo 86, when the site was sold to a billionaire foreigner for next to nothing, then sold piecemeal to more billionaire foreigners. That coupled with Canada's embarrassing immigration policies and......... fucked!

It started with Expo 86 and The Olympics made it worse...I was opposed to the Olympics and was so disappointed when it went through....I totally agree with you!