Petition calls for Vancouver to cast out 'selfish yuppies'

Yuppies are ruining Vancouver with their laissez-faire attitudes and their gentrification and their yoga pants.

They’re moving into the city and pushing out homeless people, they’re breaking down the sense of community and they’re making the once-hip coastal city a little less accepting.

And, according to a petition currently calling for Mayor Gregor Robertson to cast “selfish yuppies” out of the city, it has to stop.

"When yuppies started moving into Vancouver, it was expected that they would be good, caring neighbours and compassionate citizens of this city," wrote Megan Speers in a petition currently posted to Change.org.

"Instead, they are selfishly stalling all attempts at shelter and housing for all in their growing sense of entitlement to the land that Vancouver occupies, even though it is unceded and really belongs to the Coast Salish peoples."

The petition, which currently has nearly 1,500 signatures, goes on to claim that yuppie greed and apathy has made “Vancouver into a hostile place in which people [are] living in multimillion dollar condominiums” and work to shut down homeless shelters and make the city unsafe for poor people.

"We need to get this dysfunctional, self-interested ‘community’ out of our city before they destroy the whole thing. We need to make Vancouver a yuppie-free zone," reads the petition, before asking Robertson to rethink his "strategy of catering to developers and yuppies."

This is a harsh take on Robertson’s mandate. The Vision Vancouver mayor, whom I’ve heard referred to as “Mayor Moonbeam,” recently won re-election after issuing an extraordinary apology for, as the Vancouver Sun noted, alienating “some voters with his aggressive green and affordable housing agenda.”

To have his credibility on affordable housing thrown into doubt is quite notable. So is the notion that “yuppies” are an identifiable subset of Vancouver’s community. And a negative one at that.

Though the impact of yuppie culture is an issue that has been debated elsewhere.

Intriguingly, this battle cry against Vancouver yuppie-ism comes just days after the city’s role in yuppie-fying yoga was cast into disrepute.

India’s government recently announced its plan to “reclaim yoga from the West.”

Shripad Yesso Naik, India’s new minister of yoga, says the once-traditional form on art and healing is the country’s most famous export. He is moving to secure trade protection from the UN, and take it back from Western commercial interests.

That battle has obvious connections to Vancouver, the heart of Canada’s yoga culture and the birthplace of the Lululemon yoga uniform.

Vancouver Desi points to the unending line of yoga chains and studios in the city as an indication that the West has commercialized the practice.

“We haven’t ruined it yet,” yoga teacher Eoin Finn told the news agency. “We are definitely walking a really fine line.”

Is this all part of the larger threat presented by yuppies in a city once best known as being the hippy brother in Canada’s family tree?

Vancouver is still loved, of course. It wins international acclaim for its natural beauty and its livability. But the tides are turning.

It’s popularity and growth begets more popularity and growth, which brings its own problems, such as the birth of this yuppie culture now under attack.

Vancouver has a significant problem with homelessness. The city needs to address this somehow. Throwing yuppies out of the city probably won’t fix those problems.

But it sure is fun to name call and point fingers.