Month: August 2017

“Buy a house for my daughter [or] I’m not going to let her marry you!”

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Some of the people who I talked to for my book spoke directly to cultural differences in how they saw the importance of buying a house. A Chinese-Canadian interviewee, originally from Hong Kong, thought “Asians” in general were more likely to link home ownership to marriage. As she humorously described it:

They think that before you get married you have to buy a house. They’re like, “Oh, you don’t have money? Buy a house for my daughter [or] I’m not going to let her marry you!”

Of note, in Hong Kong (and across much of urban East Asia), very few people actually live in houses, and lots of people live in various types of public housing (covering about 30% of the population of Hong Kong, for instance). But setting that – and the selectivity of  just who immigrates to Vancouver – aside, the association between partnering patterns and access to housing is really interesting. In fact, changing the setting to Sweden, it was the topic of my dissertation! (See some of my old research here, here, and here)*

At some point, I hope to return to this kind of detailed research in North America. But in the meantime, I can work a quick metropolitan comparison. We all know that buying a house is pretty much impossible for most people in Vancouver. So how does it affect marriage and partnering patterns here, if at all, compared to other metros?

Here’s a comparison of partnering patterns across four big metropolitan areas in Canada, based on 2011 National Household Survey** results:

MetroMaritalStatusbyAge-2011Data

Effectively, Vancouver fits somewhere between Toronto and Calgary. Hardly the position one might expect if access to ownership of a house was really limiting partnerships. On the whole, all three of these major metropoles look pretty similar. But looking carefully reveals that people tend to partner a little later in Toronto, with a greater gap between the late twenties and early thirties, than in Vancouver. By contrast, Calgarians tend to partner earlier, with over half of those ages 25-29 no longer single. Torontonians are also less likely to spend much time in non-marital cohabitations than either Vancouverites or Calgarians. Interesting little differences which I’d guess speak as much to the multicultural mixes of Vancouver and Toronto as to housing conditions (though, as noted above, it might be the interaction between these that really matter!)

How about Montreal? As always, it’s kind of off doing its own thing. Non-marital cohabitation has been a much stronger feature of partnerships in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution, and it really shows up here. (see, e.g. LaPlante 2006). Lots of material for another dissertation, if anyone’s looking for ideas!

 

*- with apologies for the paywalls – drop me a line if you want access, but can’t get it!

**- basically our best substitute for the Census that year – thanks Harper!

This blog kills fascists

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

Woody Guthrie famously sported a guitar with the words, “this machine kills fascists” scrawled upon it. The American ur-folk hero knew from whence he spoke (below singing Do Re Mi to images from 1941):

But what is Fascism? Why and how should it be opposed?

One response might be: haven’t we settled all this already? After all, the Allied powers defeated the Axis in WWII. After some initial hedging, both America and Canada decided what side they were on, and it was the side of the Anti-Fascist coalition (yes, yes, “antifa”). The Nazis did terrible things, as did the regimes in Japan, Italy, and elsewhere. We won, through overwhelming force (also involving some terrible things), and the Fascists lost.*

Unfortunately, Fascism did not die with the Axis powers. It’s always been around, and today we see it resurgent with the rise of the “Alt-right.” So let’s get back to those questions. What is Fascism?

George Orwell famously answered that by 1944 it already meant far too many things, all conflated together, making it difficult to parse its meaning, except, through its opponents, as: “…roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class.”

I prefer a careful definition more along the lines of Umberto Eco, who grew up in Fascist Italy, and delineated in 1995 the many different components (aligned to those sketched by Orwell above) that tended to hold together in Fascism, each constituting unnecessary but partially sufficient components for its formation. You should read Eco. You really should. The echo of Eco is all around us (sorry).

My takeaway is that Fascism is mostly a style. I think a couple of important points follow:

  1.  As a style, Fascism is not a coherent ideology. It can still be a tool to power and guide actions (indeed, it can be quite potent in this regard). But it remains resistant to reason, intellectual attempts at “de-bunking,” and other acts of persuasion. It freely engages in lying and contradiction as weaponized propaganda.
  2. As a style, Fascism preys upon the weakness of Constitutional Democracy as a system of governance. Constitutional Democracy makes room for discussion of diverse and divergent ideas. Fascism enters discussion disguised in the raiment of its weaponized ideas, under the banner of “free speech,” but with the intent to divide (into those who adhere to style and those who do not) and undermine Democracy itself.
  3. As a style, the proper response to Fascism is not intellectual engagement, but shunning, marginalization, and exclusion. As a Constitutional Democracy, we can not open a debate about excommunicating those already included without fatally destroying Constitutional Democracy itself.**

Now I have never been accused of any great concern for fashion, but if I’m hit over the head with how absurd a particular style makes me look, undermining every important way I’d like to be seen, then I will drop that style. This is the proper response to Fascism. Shunning, marginalizing, making the adherents of this awful style look weak and ridiculous, undermining their every presentation of self.

There are many strategies for pulling this trick off. This past weekend in Vancouver we demonstrated two: 1) Ridicule them 2) And crowd them out of the public sphere, sending them, quite physically, back to the margins. Here are a few of my pictures:

 

People were still streaming in to keep the Fascists out by the time I left! It was a good day.

There are other strategies for marginalizing Fascists, of course, up to and including punching a Nazi (at least if it makes him look weak and ineffectual, rather than sympathetic). I won’t advocate for all of these. But I will note that the most successful strategy is likely to vary by circumstance, with the likelihood of non-violent approaches succeeding vastly improved by making sure lots of people show up.

So go on everyone! Get out there and make sure the Fascists feel bad about themselves! Also read some history. It might come in handy.

 

[UPDATE: meant to note that there are lots of other, smarter takes on this out there too, from people studying this kind of thing longer than me, including several great sociologists cited recently in the New York Times]

*-together with my brother and our friends, we used to regularly re-enact the battles of WWII through the boardgame Axis & Allies.

**-The brilliant and award-winning novelist N. K. Jemison puts this sentiment in its most stark form in her novel The Obelisk Gate, as her earth-shaping protagonist uses the credible threat of violence to shut down what would otherwise appear to be a democratic exercise in voting, uttering the memorable line: “No voting on who gets to be people.” (p. 335)

What we talk about when we talk about a “housing crisis”

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

What do we talk about when we talk about a housing crisis? People doing without any kind of housing? People living in inadequate housing? Crowding together? Spending too much on rent? People struggling to get into home ownership? People not being able to afford ownership of the single-family detached house they always dreamed about?

To me, a “crisis” suggests fundamental needs unmet. But just what’s a “need”? How should this be separated from a “want” or “dream,” if at all? Addressing these questions and trying to figure out how they matter was the subject of my keynote talk at the PartnerLife conference last week in beautiful Cologne, Germany.

I illustrated my talk with my favorite case study: Vancouver. In the process, I ran some numbers to compare how Vancouver is doing relative to other metropolitan areas if we address some of the different things we mean when we talk about a housing crisis. In particular, I was interested less in the kinds of “dream” measures used by organizations like Demographia (oh, it’s painful to even link to them!), and more in the fundamental measures of need (note: I’ve compared rents elsewhere, though I need to update the comparison!).

How is Vancouver, long considered the most unaffordable housing market in North America using Demographia’s single-family detached house measure, doing when we look at homelessness? How about when we look at providing basic standards, avoiding crowding, and insuring affordability?

To answer the first question, we can look at homeless counts. I’ll work on building this measure further, but for now I’ll just compare Vancouver with our near neighbours to the south (Seattle and Portland) and to the east (Calgary). Is homelessness a major crisis here?

The first answer to this question is indisputably: YES. Homeless is a major crisis wherever it occurs, with large effects, for instance, on the risk of dying. But a more nuanced answer, of more use in thinking through solutions and sorting out what’s working, is to consider the relative size of the homelessness crisis. Though it’s far from a definitive comparison, I started looking into this question by comparing homeless count data by relevant population size, across the regions of Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Calgary.* Here’s what I get:

HomelessCountComparison-2

Is homelessness in Vancouver a crisis? Yes. But when compared to other nearby metro areas, Vancouver looks like it’s doing better. This is important in terms of judging the response so far and thinking through how to continue dealing with this crisis.

Let’s address the second question: How are we doing in terms of insuring people are living in adequate housing, not feeling too crowded, and not spending too much money on rent? In Canada, we have a nice comparative measure of “core housing need” that gets at these components of housing crisis. Importantly, these aspects of a “housing crisis” remain detachable, revealing, for instance, different sorts of crises between the North of Canada (where the issue at hand tends to be crowding) and the South (where it tends to be affordability). Overall core housing need is worst in the North and on reserves, where we can talk about some serious housing crises. But here let’s just look at how Vancouver is doing by comparison with other metro areas in Canada given the most recent data available.**

CoreHousingNeedComparison

How’s Vancouver doing by core housing needs? Not so great. We’ve got a lot of people feeling the pain of unmet housing need, as defined by Canadian standards. Mostly these are people spending more then 30% of their income on rent. I’ll be the first to suggest that this is a funny standard, but it still indicates a real problem, especially for those at the bottom of the income distribution. At the same time, by comparison Vancouver is not actually the worst Canadian metropolis. The worst is tiny Peterborough, Ontario! What’s going on there? I’ve no idea, though now I’m quite curious (and it might just be the small sample size of the income survey). After Peterborough, Toronto is also worse than Vancouver.

While both homeless counts and core housing needs remain open to critique in terms of their conceptualization and measurement, they’re also the best measures of need we’ve got. As such, I’d argue they remain the best measures of when we’re seeing a real housing crisis. Using these measures, we can see that there are indeed housing crises at play in Vancouver. At the same time, in comparative context we can recognize that Vancouver’s doing much better at addressing these real crises than it’s typically been given credit for.

Why doesn’t it get credit for what it’s doing right? I think the unaffordability of the single-family detached house in Vancouver sucks up a lot of attention. I’ll continue to argue that this is a very BAD measure of a housing crisis. After all, if we want to reduce the size of our ecological footprints, if we want to support our great cities, if we want to combat isolation and obesity, and arguably if we want to sustain our democracies, then we want to discourage everyone from living in single-family houses. This means not everyone can get what they want. But it’s not a housing crisis if everyone still gets what they need. And by that measure, Vancouver’s doing better than most people think, even if it’s still got a lot of work to do.

 

 

*- It’s worth noting that the administrative basis for count data here varies between metro region (Vancouver), county (Portland and Seattle), and city (Calgary). I’ve used the relevant administrative data from the 2010/2011 census year as the denominator in each case. This means population has been kept constant for comparison purposes, while the homeless population has been allowed to grow, resulting in a slight underestimate of homelessness per 10,000 people in early years and overestimate in later years. Also of note, King County and Multnomah County are smaller than the metro areas of Seattle and Portland (accordingly). The City of Calgary is relatively co-terminous with its metro area. This could bias overall estimates of relative counts for metro areas. But even if we were to just use central cities (where the populations of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland are quite similar at @ 600,000) or metro areas, the overall results would still be about the same – there are a lot more homeless people showing up in other nearby cities and metro areas relative to Vancouver. A caution also remains in the possibility for different definitions and methods in each region, particularly with respect to the meaning and coverage of “transitional housing.” Also of note: the big drop observed in Portland between 2011 and 2015 might be worth following up on!

**- the data here come from the CMHC, and are based on Canada’s income survey rather than census data. It’s possible the sample size of the surveys explains some of the variation, and rankings here should be considered preliminary until we get something more definitive, like the 2016 Census data! In past census years, Vancouver and Toronto usually compete in the metropolitan title for greatest proportion in core housing need, and Peterborough tends to be more middle-of-the-road.