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The Rooming House is set between 1971 and '74, when Kitsilano was undergoing seismic changes.

  I could not have imagined Vancouver becoming such a city of contrasts even 30 or so years ago when I was writing the original Vanishing Vancouver book. Certainly, it was in its buildings – the West End had already become a concrete forest when I was a teenager, a forest that became glassy and strata-titled as it expanded through the downtown peninsula in the 1990s. But the city still seemed to be a middle-class kind of place, a yin and yang town of towers and apartments for some and wooden houses for others. To a large extent, it reflected the choices available all across urban Canada.