David Brewster Led by Microsoft and Madrona Investment Group, there’s revived interest in a Vancouver-Seattle technology corridor. Partly this is driven by Microsoft’s interest in hiring foreign workers, who have an easier time gaining residence in Canada than in U.S. Partly it is B.C.’s interest in capturing the West Coast’s technology smarts. The article stresses how Vancouver’s astronomical housing prices are a big negative; as Seattle’s will be soon.
Tom Alberg of Madrona has long had the Cascadia bug. He and I and others once started a quality quarterly, “The New Pacific,” to articulate this regional perspective (Portland was included). Eileen V. Quigley was the editor of this fine venture. Encore???
American tech giants stand to benefit from Canada’s smoother immigration process, and Vancouver is looking to feed its own homegrown tech ambitions.
NYTIMES.COM|BY NICK WINGFIELD
We, and especially our state legislators and citizens, need to realize that the UW is the ONLY world class research university not just in WASTATE but all the way from San Francisco to Vancouver British Columbia.
That fact is central to a new twist on the idea called “Cascadia” being promoted by Microsoft and Madrona Investment Group. The ideas is to create a Vancouver-Seattle technology corridor.
Part of the idea is driven because our tech sector (and the UW) have problems getting visas for foreign scientists. Vancouver already has a branch of Microsoft with the most obvious intent to bring in worlers be close to Redmond.
Elements of Cascadia would include other regional issues that also affect us:
transportation: a corridor would require high speed rail not only from downtown Seattle to downtown Vancouver, to serve cities along the way. This would disperse our housing and require more regional colelges like Western Washington.
the border: the usual discussion is about low wage immigrants across the Mexico border. That is hardly an issue here.
jobs: This is obvious but we should be planning not just for tech jobs but for a whole gamut of jobs that would grow here as they do now between San Jose and San Francisco.
If this proposal takes off, as I think it must, we, the UW need to be in a position to also serve not just Washington state but a much bigger world market.
It would be great to know if we have any plans to collaborate more with UBC?
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Stephen M. Schwartz
Pathology