Valuing Land: Welfare State Disinvestment, Inclusionary Zoning, and Justice

Abstract

This research asks what happens when the measures that will provide needed housing to the poor are also those that will displace other precariously housed people and disrupt valued social relations in neighbourhoods. To answer this question, it examines political and economic shifts in the welfare state, urban scale, and urban land use, through the lens of an inclusionary zoning land use policy in Vancouver, Canada. This policy trades additional land development rights to real estate developers in exchange for funds for public amenities, increasingly social or low-income housing. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic research in three neighbourhoods in Vancouver, this project finds that the land use policy in question has contradictory results. The policy produces small amounts of new low-income housing units in a time of diminished public funding. Yet, it also produces large condominium developments that contribute to speculation in the land and housing market, rising land values and rent rates, displacement of homes and communities, urban inequality, and urban conflict.

This project argues that disinvestment measures have resulted in a rescaling of the city as an arena of welfare state funding enacted by assembling land for investment and development. Further, it argues that while urban residents articulate alternative, often non-market, understandings of the value of land and place, the effect of these articulations is impeded by new state forms that rely on private capital. Throughout I examine the work of land use planning in assembling urban land into an investable commodity despite its existing uses. This work leads to conflicts between residents, real estate developers, non-profit housing agencies, and city government over competing conceptions of the value of land and place. As neighbourhoods change through new land investments, residents’ place making activities are overwhelmed, particularly those of residents who experience race and class inequality. In addition, since this policy implicates social housing providers in the gentrification of neighbourhoods, it also contributes to resident distrust of the remaining institutions of the welfare state, potentially undermining collective action toward more robust public services.