Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Downzoning, wrote a Hong Kong emigration lawyer to Vancouver Council,
would mean a fall in business immigrants and loss of their real estate invest-
ment. The compatibility of such interventions with the market fixation of
global neo-liberalism is hard to miss.
Interventions, Interpretations, Imputations and Name-Calling
The preservationist ideology of the established Shaughnessy property-
owners is not without historic irony. Following forest clearance, the neigh-
bourhood was settled early in the twentieth century by resource barons and
other business elites on part of the huge land grant awarded to the Canadian
Pacific Railway for pushing its Pacific terminus west to the Vancouver town-
site. Land deals had been integral to the city's business life since its found-
ing and the residents of Shaughnessy as members of the elite had done their
fair share of buying and selling. Dispossession was also part of that heritage,
for the Shaughnessy land settled in the early twentieth century had been
occupied [and to this day is claimed] by Aboriginal bands who had estab-
lished a seniority of several thousand years in patrolling the forest glades.
Now history was repeating itself as the dispossessors were being dispos-
sessed and an existing place and identity was again being thrust aside. The
irony was even deeper, for the elite who had cleared the primeval forest were
now guardians of Shaughnessy's leafy canopy; those who lived from the cut
and thrust of the market in their work-place required a different morality in
their home-place.
24
Such historic reflections while suggestive are not fully appropriate for
they would reify elite culture, presenting a line of continuity and homogene-
ity over the course of a century. The wide-open capitalism and the minimal
state of 1900 has advanced to a welfare state with more complex objectives,
and the modernist shock of the new has been replaced with a preservation
ethic, reflected in strong market demand for older homes and revival
European styles (Dostrovsky and Harris 2008). Shaughnessy residents of
the 1990s should not be prejudged by the values and actions of an elite
living in the same district three generations earlier.
However, some critics of the SHPOA and its allies called forth exactly
this historic continuity. Drawing upon the racist practices of Vancouver's
past, the resistance of the long-established homeowners in the 1990s was
reduced to racism pure and simple. The most persistent of these accusa-
tions was made by the spokesperson for the West Side Builders Association,
an alliance of small contractors who were benefitting economically from the
hot property market. The group's widely reported brief at the public hear-
ing, repeating an earlier letter to Council, denounced the downzoning
