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only as long as their appearance provided landscape continuity with new
facades respecting neighbourhood appearances (Appelbe 1997). Builders
have maintained their preferred strategy of serial reproduction; the new
landscape form is now a version of the Tudor revival style that has always
been a preferred model for older mansions in Shaughnessy. The separate
passage of a tree bylaw offered protection to established trees and some
stability to the district's leafy green canopy.
This solution ended the 'monster house' controversy, providing some
encouragement that democratic negotiation beneath the aegis of Canadian
multiculturalism may lead to satisfactory compromise. Although immigra-
tion from Hong Kong and Taiwan between 1993 and 1996 rose above ear-
lier levels and the immigrant market in Vancouver's Westside neighbourhoods
remained robust, the elite neighbourhoods returned to their earlier political
somnolence, once again protected behind regulatory barriers from unwanted
land use change. In 1998 when I re-examined letters to the City, fewer than
10 complaints about new houses were on file from the previous five years,
in contrast to the hundreds that had been received in the tense years at the
beginning of the decade.
Several conclusions are suggested. The expectation of whiteness studies
that multiculturalism and state administration include inbuilt white privi-
lege is not sustained by the City's actions in withdrawing their downzoning
motion at the public hearing and initiating an inclusive process that incor-
porated the opposing views of Chinese-Canadian residents. That the com-
promise solution allowed landscape continuity satisfied SHPOA and its
allies, and that it permitted ongoing construction of large houses satisfied
new immigrants and builders. Indeed the virtual cessation of complaints
even while immigrant numbers rose in the following years suggests that
much more than crude racism was involved in this controversy. The rapid
disappearance of housing complaints in Shaughnessy, despite growing
immigrant numbers, following the resolution of the landscape question
reinforces a view of intersecting class- and status-based distinction. Wong
and Netting (1992: 121) also see resistance in class terms: 'Most of the
apparent racism is in fact class antagonism wrapped in a racial envelope'.
Moreover, was the essential character of Shaughnessy's landscape its white-
ness, as Li (1995) suggests, or was it anglophilia, a much more specific
English, class-based, ethnicity? This greater specificity matters, for as
Satzewich (2007) points out in reference to this Vancouver conflict, the slip-
page of Englishness to whiteness and whiteness to racism takes too many
empirical and conceptual short cuts.
My principal theoretical objective in this chapter has been to challenge
such short cuts. The intent has not been to deny the existence of racism but
to make charges of racism accountable both to empirical verification and
ideological analysis. In its discussion of race and racism scholarly culture
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