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Nelson Journal

With Flood of Urbanites, a Canadian Hippie Haven Tries to Keep Its Mellow

A late-night busker playing in Nelson, British Columbia. The recent influx of people to this compact town of 10,000 has led to an affordable housing crisis.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

NELSON, British Columbia — Marijuana, Vietnam War draft dodgers and artists gave Nelson its tree-hugging, bohemian soul.

This remote mountain town in British Columbia has recently welcomed a new wave of settlers: urban refugees, increasingly priced out of cities like Vancouver and yearning for a simpler life. They are drawn to a postcard-perfect burg that seems to have it all — a music academy, two video stores, three record shops, a charcuterie owned by actual French people and a main street unmarred by a Starbucks or fast-food chains.

Many of Nelson’s recent transplants fled Canadian cities, where even a couple in cubicle professions can struggle to get by. Others were willing to exchange lucrative salaries for jobs that let them go mountain biking in the afternoon.

“Nobody moves here to work their butt off,” said Amy Bohigian, 43, a Harvard-educated filmmaker who relocated with her wife to Nelson from Toronto in 2006. To stay, however, they had to adapt to the town’s rather quirky entrepreneurial skill set. “You may have to sell goat-milk soap at the craft market for the first few years until your massage practice has enough clients,” she said, only half joking.

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Founded during a silver rush in 1897, the town is wedged between a lake and the steep slopes of the Selkirk Mountains, some 400 miles east of Vancouver by road.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

But Nelson’s charms have become something of a curse. The recent influx of people to this compact town of 10,000 has led to an affordable housing crisis, set off by bidding wars over its scarce housing stock and a zero percent rental vacancy rate caused in part by homeowners who rent their properties to tourists through sites like Airbnb.

Nelson’s homeless shelter has been full for months, and some residents, unable to find a place to rent, spent the spring and summer living in tents or trailers in the town’s campground. The local community college lost around 60 students this year because they could not find housing, officials said.

Nelson’s housing crisis echoes a wider problem in booming British Columbia, where tight real estate markets, diminished government support for affordable housing and rising inflation have spawned a vacancy rate of 1.3 percent, and made rentals virtually impossible to find in Vancouver, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

But Nelson is no metropolis. Founded during a silver rush in 1897, the town is wedged between a lake and the steep slopes of the Selkirk Mountains, some 400 miles east of Vancouver by road. Around a century ago, a sect of Christian Pacifists from Russia, known as the Dukhobors, settled nearby, infusing the region with antiwar zeal. During the Vietnam War, Nelson became a haven for young Americans fleeing the draft, many of whom were spirited across the border by members of a local Quaker community.

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Lana and Mike Hames at the top of their home in Nelson. They have spent 30 years working on their self-built house, which has become a local landmark.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

In the 1970s, Nelson and the surrounding Slocan Valley were abundant with draft dodgers, hippie communes and “the best weed in the world,” said Mike Hames, 68, a Canadian carpenter whose zany, self-built house, resembling “a boat on a mushroom trip,” is a local landmark.

Nelson lost its sawmill and university a decade later, forcing the struggling town to reinvent itself through tourism and entrepreneurship. “Marijuana was definitely how people made money,” said Deb Kozak, the mayor.

Nelson’s liberal tolerance played a major role in making it a regional hub for social service providers. But they have been overwhelmed by a swelling population and rising poverty. “It’s a perfect storm of big-city issues,” said Jenny Robinson, executive director of the Nelson Cares Society, which runs the town’s 17-bed homeless shelter and provides services to low-income residents.

The group has received funding and donations to maintain and build some new accommodations, she said, but not enough to solve the town’s extreme housing crunch. “In the last 18 months it’s just gone crazy,” Ms. Robinson said.

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Adam Thomas at work at a video store in Nelson with Sylvie, his daughter. They recently moved to Nelson from Vancouver, where they were priced out of the housing market.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Janet Mulloy and her twin, Judy, both artists, were free spirits when they moved to Nelson in 1984. Until a decade ago, Judy said, they were able to afford an apartment for under $800 a month, scraped together from their small jewelry business, odd jobs and public assistance. But Nelson’s housing crisis pushed them into homelessness this year.

“This is the first time we’ve lived apart in over 20 years,” said Janet, 51, who had been sleeping in the shelter for a month while her sister moved in with a friend. The misery of homelessness has compounded a sense that the Nelson they once knew was disappearing. “It’s an economic cleansing of this town we helped create,” Judy said with a sigh.

Baker Street, Nelson’s main drag, is a testament to the tensions roiling the community. On a recent afternoon, a gray-ponytailed busker stood strumming a Tom Petty tune in front of a cafe that sells organic coffee. Beggars with swollen hands suggesting heroin addiction panhandled outside a boutique selling hemp yoga pants, beeswax candles and posters explaining “How to Be an Ally to Indigenous Peoples.”

Balancing Nelson’s economic future and cultural heritage is complicated by the town’s cramped mountainside locale. “Geographically we can’t do sprawl,” Mayor Kozak said. Still, she said that Nelson was working to develop a “full spectrum” of housing to ease the crisis, while trying to address the concerns of residents worried that new development will ruin their counterculture paradise.

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A cafe on Baker Street, Nelson’s main drag.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The community once thwarted the construction of a Walmart superstore, but officials have since installed broadband internet and hope to approve a tech innovation center, part of a plan to stem rural brain drain.

New arrivals are not complaining. Adam Thomas, 42, who moved to Nelson in July with his family after selling their Vancouver home, said that even dual incomes there were no longer enough to keep them out of debt.

“We felt trapped in Vancouver,” he said, seated by the fire in the three-bedroom house they purchased for $250,000. “We’re lucky. I feel like I’ve got to earn the right to be here.”

His wife found an office job and he dived into the town’s communal economy, teaching at the local college and working at the co-op radio station.

On Take Your Daughter to Work Day, Mr. Thomas took his daughter to his shift at Reo’s Video store, a bustling rental throwback bought and expanded this year by another Vancouver transplant. It is stocked with about 15,000 films, a foreign section and every Academy Award best picture winner.

“It’s like living in the 1990s,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Mellow Canada Town Faces Urbanite Flood. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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