Co-authored with Jens von Bergmann and cross-posted at MountainMath
Commodification of housing: what does it mean? Is it a problem? Can we decommodify housing? Can we establish a baseline for often this occurs in property transactions? Here we draw upon a recent Statistics Canada data release and older Census data to walk through some of these questions.
A round-up of recent sightings on-line (cause where else am I gonna show up?)
June through July saw me presenting at the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) meetings, joining a panel presentation with the Vancouver City Planning Commission (VCPC), and giving an invited talk with the QMI / Urbanarium Urban Lunch Series ahead of the forthcoming visit by Alain Bertaud. Details, Abstracts, Slides, and Video Links (where available) below!
So back in the before time, by which I mean somewhere toward the end of 2019, I happily agreed to join an “author meets critics” panel at the Pacific Sociological Association meetings to discuss Esther Sullivan‘s book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place. The meeting would’ve been in Eugene, Oregon at the end of March in 2020. By February I was already reading the tea leaves and doubting it was going to happen.
I’m currently enjoying Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain. It’s a fascinating book on how British real estate was transformed from estates granted and traded in private transactions bound by custom (think of landed nobility but also the Commons pre-enclosure) into something that could be bought and sold at auction and described in terms of a market, mostly over the course of the late 18th and 19th Centuries.
I was curious about this book for lots of reasons, not least because it seemed British property practices often spread to colonies, as in Canada. But as described by Fitz-Gibbon, this was actually a two-way street, and experiences in real estate at the peripheries of Empire also often informed practices back in England. Continue reading
Guess who’s been playing around with Fire Insurance Maps … again?
This time, let’s use these brilliant old maps to zoom in on a recognizable Vancouver intersection: Granville and Robson. What did the four surrounding blocks look like back in the day (i.e., 130 years ago)? Worth remembering, this is a scant three years after the incorporation of the City of Vancouver, the raging fire that burned it all down, AND the subsequent passage of the City’s first Fire Bylaw (hence the importance of fire insurance maps…) So we’re looking at a very new city in 1889.
By 1889, Granville & Robson was still pretty sparsely developed. Only one corner of the intersection contained a building, with a storefront (S) recorded as “vacant”, just like the storefront next door. But as it turns out, the surrounding four blocks contained a major Vancouver landmark in the brand new (1887) Hotel Vancouver (upper right), as constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The Hotel contained a billiard room and saloon as well as an expansive kitchen and dining hall, with servants’ quarters and a laundry below and rooms extending up a towering five floors above.
Across the street from the Hotel Vancouver were three-story buildings containing eight store fronts, offices, and dwellings, with only a few floors vacant. Though the offerings along Granville grew increasingly spare further away from the hotel, it’s already clear by 1889 that Granville had been targeted to become a commercial thoroughfare, complete with a brand new electric streetcar line. “Mixed use” was the norm, with lodging rooms or apartments frequently appearing over top of saloons and storefronts, generally built out to lot lines on the front and sides. Off Granville, along Howe and Seymour, appear some sixteen houses with smaller footprints. That said, these were not the “single-family detached” houses protected by the zoning of today. Instead, they included semi-detached (wall-sharing) houses (as in the lower left), and multiple shacks mixed in with sheds but used as dwellings on the alley (like the “accessory dwelling units” or “laneway houses” of contemporary policy-speak!)
Browsing the National Archives, we see find the Goad’s Fire Insurance Plan put on-line for 1897, as updated with revisions to 1901. Let’s revisit the block some 8-12 years after our first image and see what’s changed!*
The Granville strip is fleshing out, with the assistance of an expanded streetcar line now extending further beyond the Hotel Vancouver. The left side of the intersection with Robson now contains a butcher, two grocers, a hay & feed store, and a fancy drug store, as well as a variety of other shops. A handful of other shops also now decorate the Granville strip, mixed in with dwellings over top for the three-story Vermilyea Block, though numerous empty lots remain a part of the urban fabric. Closer to Georgia, a brand new “Opera House” is now tucked in next to the Hotel Vancouver, which has also grown considerably in size by way of additions. The Waverly Hotel appears at the lower right corner. Kickstarting higher education in the province, Whetham College took over the upper floors of the building on Granville & Georgia, across the street from the Hotel Vancouver, apparently sometime in 1891, but it only ran as a college until 1893, when one of the real-estate investing brothers who founded the institution died. While the lower floors housed a grocer & offices, the upper floors still bear the College’s name by the 1897 map.
Off the Granville Strip, the number of houses has more than doubled along Seymour & Howe, and despite the demolition of at least one older house, some thirty-nine houses now appear. It becomes more difficult to categorize these insofar as most no longer bear “dwg” for dwelling as an indicator of use.
Let’s jump forward to the Goad’s Fire Insurance Map from 1910, as updated with revisions to 1920 (Vol I). This takes us forward another 8-18 years, passing through an enormous period of growth.
Boom! Not a single lot along the Granville Strip remains empty. Transformations abound. The First Hotel Vancouver has been torn down and replaced by the Second Hotel Vancouver, wrapping around the former Opera House, now turned into the Orpheum Theatre (it would later move down the street). Down the street, the Vermilyea Block has transformed into the Palm Hotel. Across the street, Whetham College has been transformed into the Birks Building, with the Vancouver Block building going up nearby. Uses remain decidedly mixed, with shops, restaurants, bars, plumbers, tailors, and banks below, and offices, lodging rooms and apartments above. New theatres include The Maple Leaf and The Allen Theatre, then under construction, but offering a deluxe new movie experience. Fittingly, Globe Motion Pictures appears to have been housed just down the street near the Palm Hotel. The awesome folks at Changing Vancouver provide more information about the 700 blocks (East and West) and 800 blocks (East and West) of Granville, already a booming thoroughfare for entertainment in Vancouver by 1920.
What about our residential thoroughfares on Seymour and Howe? Houses have been diminished by nearly a third. Though new houses have been built, older houses have been torn down, with only around twenty-seven remaining. New shops, billiards halls, rooming houses and apartment buildings have gone up on the corners with Robson. Tailors, hotels, bakers, apartment buildings, plumbers and tire stores (with rooming house over head) have gone in on Howe & Seymour proper, complicating what had been residential landscapes. Two houses to the left of Robson & Howe appear to have been surrounded and subsumed by commercial outbuildings, including a tailor (with dry-cleaning) and a shop carrying out auto-repairs off the lane in the back.
This returns me to a point I repeat often. Prior to the arrival of use-based zoning later in the 1920s, residential neighbourhoods largely remained part of the urban fabric, open to change. The process of neighbourhood change, often referred to as “succession” by sociologists of the day, was a normal part of urban growth. Use-based zoning would seek to freeze this process in place, in particular in the service of defining and protecting neighbourhoods of single-family detached houses from change. Quoting Harland Bartholomew, the planner hired by the City of Vancouver to assist in modernizing its zoning bylaw:
… Largely to prevent the intrusion of apartment houses in single or two-family residential areas, an interim zoning bylaw was prepared and approved by the Town Planning Commission, recommended to the Council, and became law on 5th February, 1927.
I think this was probably a mistake. As I’ve written in my book, we could do a lot better by re-integrating single-family detached neighbourhoods with the broader urban fabric and returning to the vibrant mixed landscapes of the past. As it is, we’re largely still stuck with the interim zoning map of 1927, though Vancouver has recently re-legalized many of the flexible housing options that once adorned its residential streets (e.g. duplexes & laneways & secondary suites).
But let’s set aside lessons from history for more fun looking back, and animate the four blocks of neighbourhood change surrounding Granville & Robson. Thirty-odd years of neighbourhood change, commence!
Returning back to 1889, apparently the remote location of the First Hotel Vancouver from the original townsite to the east was already remarked upon at the time. Indeed, despite being built and owned by the CPR, it remained some distance down Granville Street from the CPR’s railway station, constituting the western terminus of Canada’s Pacific Railway. But the CPR had in mind a plan to encourage the westward expansion of the city toward its considerable land holdings west of downtown (then centred on Gastown). Over time, it would successfully tug and pull downtown in the direction of it real estate holdings, even as it moved the Third Hotel Vancouver elsewhere, eventually leaving a giant mall in its place. Indeed, now the “Vancouver City Centre” skytrain stop is right outside the old Hotel Vancouver’s door.
What did this stretch look like back in the day?
Sit back and relax with this super-awesome old motion picture taken from the front of streetcars in Victoria and Vancouver back in 1907. Starting at the 3.13 mark, you’re in an electric streetcar right outside the First Hotel Vancouver (on your left) headed toward the old CPR station at the end of Granville Street. See, it really did take awhile to get there!
For urban history junkies, you’ll continue to turn off Granville onto Hastings headed East at 4.30. From there, you’ll stay on Hastings, heading East till around 6.45, making your way toward Carrall Street, at which point the video will jump you further North to Carrall turning onto Cordova, and head you back West, turning onto Cambie toward Hastings (I used landmarks including the Hotel Metropole, the Hotel Eagle, and the Herman House Co. Real Estate, along with the old business directory from 1907 to get my bearings). It’s a sweet ride!**
* Archival Links to full plates excerpted above – zoom in for even more detail:
Also see Goad’s Fire Insurance Map, Vol II, for Eastside Vancouver, and note that the somewhat less detailed 1912 Goad’s has been fitted to VanMap under aerial layers!
** dial back to the beginning of the video to start in Victoria, where after a few turns, you’ll head down Government Street and stop in an admiring pan of the Empress Hotel, Provincial Parliament Building, and Victoria Harbour. [UPDATE: You can also check out a great documentary of the 1907 streetcar ride through Vancouver from the vantage point of 2007, put together by the Vancouver Historical Society)
There’s a talk at UBC Sociology here in Vancouver this week that’s right up my alley! Honorary Research Associate Martin Fuller will be speaking to his research on Baugruppe (see here and here), with a lovely riff on Heidegger for the title of his talk. Come check it out!
Title: Planning Building Dwelling: On the Activities of Housing
Abstract: This talk will outline a sociological approach to inhabitation that treats housing as a verb, housing as an activity. It does so through building up some of the lessons learned from an in-depth case study of a new residential building in Berlin. This building is unique for two reasons, firstly it was produced by a so-called ‘Baugruppe’, a group of people who are involved in the participatory planning of the building that holds their future homes, and secondly this group includes both private owners and a co-operative housing association. This talk looks into some of the dynamics of participatory planning, building and dwelling.
Martin Fuller is a researcher at the Technische Universität Berlin (Berlin Institute of Technology) in the Department of Sociology. His main research interests are in cultural and urban sociology, often looking at the intersections of the two. His PhD was completed at the University of Cambridge and researched early career visual artists in New York and Berlin. Today’s talk draws upon his recent research on housing, architecture, space and home.
The talk will be in ANSO 2107, from 11:00-12:20 on April 25. Lunch will be provided.
After my talk at the Vancouver Historical Society, I’ve been playing around with some of the old fire insurance maps for Vancouver. As it turns out, fire insurance maps are super-awesome resources for historical research. Here I want to explore ways of using them to visualize succession as an urban process.
Succession, meaning the gradual outward expansion of an urban core, was thought by many observers of the early 20th Century to be the key process driving neighbourhood change. For sociologists like Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie, succession was a process of “invasion” from the centre outward through a series of concentrically organized ecological habitats. The central business district (Habitat I) was always attempting to move into the surrounding industrial and commercial areas (Habitat II), which in turn were always invading the areas of dense working class housing beyond (Habitat III), which were always trying to muscle in on the middle class and wealthy residential suburbs on the outskirts of the city (Habitat IV).*
“Succession” was a science-y and neutral sounding concept (having been drawn directly from plant ecology), while “invasion” was quite threatening, especially to the middle class and wealthy suburban neighbourhoods hoping to hold the urban core at bay (very much including its working class & minorities). With the invention, legalization and rapid spread of single-family detached zoning, the middle class managed to mostly surround and contain the urban core, as I describe in my recent talk and book. As a direct implication of halting the process of urban succession, constrained urban cores mostly grow up instead of out, and now we mostly talk about gentrification instead of succession as a key process affecting our cities.
But let’s go back to succession. Can we see it in action? Let’s start with an early residential development consisting of two blocks (subdivided by alleyways into six) on the outskirts of a rapidly growing city in the late 19th century.
The base layer here is an old fire insurance map from the Vancouver archives, though I’ve faded it out a bit to draw over top of it. Let’s highlight all of the houses.
We can see this is pretty much just a residential neighbourhood at this point, with the only non-residential use a church (lower-left). Most of the other buildings are sheds. But wait a minute, are these all single-family detached houses?
Trick question! Those weren’t invented yet! So nobody was recording whether or not single families lived in these houses, nor how they might have been subdivided. That said, it’s clear that four houses in the upper-left block were all connected to each other, making them recognizable as rowhouses. Meanwhile, there were at least two houses connected side-by-side on other lots, making them semi-detached houses (by modern Canadian census categories). Also notable: at least four lots had both houses fronting onto major streets and houses fronting onto alleyways – with the latter now identified as “laneway houses” in Vancouver. Lots of “missing middle” housing!
Importantly, these residential blocks were located on the outskirts of a growing urban core in 1889. What will become of them? Let’s jump ahead 25 years and see…
I’ve highlighted in red all of the buildings that disappear over the course of 25 years. Oh no! There goes our church! Over half of the houses are also gone. Devastation in Habitat IV! But at least the townhouses remain. Let’s fill in the neighbourhood…
Some of those old houses remain, and new ones have been added too, meaning that we don’t see a complete replacement of seemingly middle-class residential uses (Habitat IV). That said, for the most part torn-down houses have been replaced by much larger buildings that take up their lots and add abundant industrial, commercial, and office uses to the neighbourhood. At least three hotels (Alcazar, Cadillac, and Canada) join numerous rooming houses, with the latter being an especially important source of housing for the working class and poor (Habitat III). Industrial uses (machine shop, workshop, numerous printers, warehouse) also crowd the block, along with commercial uses and services (second-hand shop, steam laundry, tailor, restaurant). There’s even an undertaker with lodging above! Lots of what Burgess termed a zone in transition (Habitat II). And offices… so many offices. We can make a strong claim for central business district uses (Habitat I). In effect, the entire urban core has moved into a former middle-class residential district over the course of 25 years, give or take, without completely destroying it. On a first pass, pre-zoning urban succession looks more like urban mixing than invasion and replacement. But maybe we just didn’t give it enough time.
What does this marvelous neighbourhood look like now, some 100+ years later?**
It looks like the two blocks bounded by Pender, Hamilton, Dunsmuir & Richards, right smack in downtown Vancouver. The 19-story BC Hydro Centre Tower dominates these blocks. But remarkably, at least nine of the old buildings that replaced the original houses in the neighbourhood during the 1906-1914 era remain intact! Alas, the townhouses in the upper-left have been replaced by a parking lot. Overall, the neighbourhood still has a mix of low-income housing, commercial and service space, and office space, though probably not a lot in the way of middle class housing (have to seek out some condos nearby for that).
I grabbed the dates on all the buildings I could find from VanMap‘s Assessment data. Old Fire Insurance Maps can be found in the Vancouver Archives.
Here’s the Fire Insurance Map from 1889, with zoomed in panel below:
Here’s the Goad’s Atlas Map from 1910-1920, with zoomed in panel below:
This is a first-pass, of sorts, at drawing upon Vancouver’s old fire insurance maps to get at patterns of urban succession in the days before zoning. I’d welcome suggestions, collaborations, and better visualizations! (This was pretty much all done with powerpoint on the fly). In the meantime, here’s my cheap-o little animated gif of the slides above. Enjoy!
*- The Chicago School of Sociology modeled this process on Chicago itself – though McKenzie, it should be noted, also detoured to Seattle in describing “The Ecological Approach” to the study of The City (1925), in a volume for which Park & Burgess are usually given first billing.
**- The maps date from 1889 and somewhere between 1910 and 1920, which is why I say “give or take” in assessing the length of time that’s passed! Though the Goad’s Atlas dates itself as 1910, it was reproduced (with consolidated updates) in 1920, and includes buildings up to at least 1914, which is why I can narrow it down to around 25 years after 1889.
While putting together slides for my life course class I returned to BC Stats data on age-specific birth rates. It’s really nice data, broken down by local health area. I’ve played with data on the Total Fertility Rate before. This time I wanted to highlight a far simpler transformation in birth rates that I’ll call the Great Wait!
What is the Great Wait? Basically, it’s the transformation in age-specific patterns of childbearing, whereby most women are having children later and later in the life course. When I was playing around with the BC Stats data I accidentally produced a chart illustrating the Great Wait, and I just thought it was too beautiful not to share.
Notice the gradual shift from peak childbearing in ages 25-29 (in 1989) to peak childbearing in ages 30-34 (in from 2003 onward). By 2005, more 35-39 year olds were having children than 20-24 year olds (so called “geriatric pregnancies” – which is like seriously a total FAIL in medical terminology). By 2010, the birth rates for 40-44 year olds began exceeding those of 15-19 year olds. We have fewer and fewer teen moms, and more and more new parents in their forties.
There are many interesting causes and implications of this shift. On average women are taking longer to develop their education and careers before having children than ever before, facilitated by improved contraception and assisted reproduction technology. It may also be that women just don’t feel as ready to settle down into motherhood as they used to – either because the alternatives remain too interesting or because they don’t feel prepared for the job of being a parent yet (I’ve explored this latter explanation with respect to the role of acquiring housing as a stage prop for the role of parenthood here in my academic work).
With respect to the implications, some of the childbearing delayed will inevitably be childbearing denied, as later-life pregnancies are biologically less certain for women, and some new risks are entailed. But on the whole, having children later means parents tend to be more committed and more prepared, with more resources at their disposal to help care for their children. Not a bad thing. On a technical note: the ongoing shifts in the timing of when women have children somewhat artificially inflate the magnitude of recent fertility declines. This is to suggest that 1.4 children (our estimate of the number of children women in BC have on average based on TFR measurement) is likely somewhat lower than the number of children the average of any given cohort of women will ultimately end up with. It’s kind of a demographer fixation.
I’m archiving my syllabi for current and recent undergraduate courses here on the blog, both for (ungated) student use and for public consumption. My courses all combine interactive lectures with student-led reading group discussions and some form of sustained research or building project.
Built Environments (2018) UBC SOCI 364: Syllabus-BuiltEnv2018
Sociology of the Life Course (2018) UBC SOCI 324: Syllabus-LifeCourse-2018
Urban Sociology (2017) UBC SOCI 425-A: UrbanSoc-Syllabus-2017
In the recent past, I’ve also taught graduate level courses (especially in Urban Sociology) and our undergraduate course in Research Methods. For other teaching scholars out there, please send me any suggestions for improvement! I’m especially interested in keeping my readings updated and interesting.
While preparing to teach my sociology of life course class, which is kind of like a sociology of time, I recently stumbled across the data tables (45-10-0014-01) from the Canadian Time Use Survey for 2015. This allows me to answer a very important question: what do Canadians do all day?
Of course different Canadians do different things.* But we can break them into a couple of broad groups to get some sense of the average number of hours they spend doing various things. It’s important to keep in mind that here that the averaging extends across both different people and different days (e.g. of the week, month, and year). Many people don’t record carrying out some of the activities described below at all, but they get averaged in with those who do. Others’ activities (e.g. paid work) may cycle so that active and inactive periods (like weekdays and weekends) average out (so a 40-hour work week averages to 5.7 hours a day).
Since I’ve got this life course theme and we’ve got data on age groups, let’s look at that. How does time use change between young adults, more middle-aged folks, and elders? We can split this out by gender too. I’ve color-coded activities so that sleep and personal care are in purple shades, work and study in green, travel in gray, unpaid homemaking work in orange, and leisured activities in blue. There are usually between one and two hours unaccounted for by this schema, coded in shades of off-white at the top.
Not surprisingly, young adults (age 15-24) spend more time studying than any other group. They’re the ones most likely still in school! But this time is balanced against working. Young men have strikingly more leisure time than young women, and they appear to spend a lot of it using “technology.” I suspect that means they’re playing video games for, like, an average of two hours a day, but there may be other interpretations (see footnote 24 in the original).
Folks closer to middle age spend a lot more time working, both for pay and at homemaking tasks (esp. childcare!) They also appear to spend the most time in personal vehicles. And they get less leisure time and less sleep than at other ages. But once again, men appear to get more leisure time than women.
How about those in retirement ages? Both men and women get a lot more leisure time (which they appear to spend largely watching TV). But do women catch up? Nope. Men still get the most leisure time, and the difference largely seems to come down to how much time is spent devoted to household chores instead. It’s certainly possible that some of those chores might also qualify as hobbies (e.g. cooking), and other things, like “personal care,” also help account for differences in time left over for leisure between men and women. But household chores and carework definitely remain gendered.
So, if you’re a Canadian man looking for a New Year’s resolution, here’s an easy one: take on more housework! (Note: this absolutely includes the author). The other big message for me is: I am not getting enough sleep! I mean seriously, I’m doing better than when my kids were really little, but 8 hours is still entirely aspirational.
*-An important caveat. As is so often the case, the General Social Survey doesn’t cover or claim to represent all Canadians.
The 2015 GSS collected data from persons aged 15 years and over living in private households in Canada, excluding residents of the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut and full time residents of institutions.
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