Social geography » Ren Thomas

Elite? or just educated?

Having spent some time working in the US and frequently immersed in American academic journals and conferences, I am well aware that there is a latent anti-intellectual bias that tends to rear its head during, oh…say national elections, or on the eve of major policy reform. Canadians, apparently, share this apprehension of “minority elites”.

The recent media storm over the Canadian census long form (see my previous post) has ignited a seemingly latent populace that believes that research, and researchers themselves, are pointless exercises in readin’, writin’, book-learnin’ and other geeky pursuits that don’t matter: that data will only be used in order to harass and over-tax the less-educated, privacy-minded general public. (Have a look at some of the articles posted in every major Canadian news outlet concerning the recent Census developments, and more to the point, have a look at some of the comments the “general public” posted.) But it’s not just your “average Canadians” who question the educated population. In today’s Globe and Mail (“Tories stall census probe, ask to hear from average Canadians”), Industry Minister Tony Clement has “already dismissed the controversy as one that only occupies “some of the elites in our country,” a phrase he also used when Canadian academics criticized the federal government’s decision to prorogue Parliament.

Maybe in countries where a university education costs more than a Bentley, it would be correct to state that educated people are a bunch of rich snobs who might be a tad removed from the fray (I said maybe). The vast majority of Canadian universities are public schools, meaning they have government-subsidized tuitions that are considerably lower than their American counterparts. Although tuitions have risen steadily in the last fifteen years or so, Canadian student loans are still readily available to most students. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) offers fellowships for Masters and PhD students. Admittedly, these have become rarer in recent years due to the Harper government’s decision to prioritize PhD topics directly related to the economy, and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) just announced it would drop its Doctoral Fellowship program this year. However, it would seem that funding scarcity hasn’t had much of an effect on our already high education levels.

Higher education is fairly well-distributed among gender, ethnic groups and income levels in Canada. During the 1930s, a quarter of Canadian women were university educated, and to look at graduate schools now you’d be hard-pressed to find a majority of men in any discipline: women have out-numbered men in university admissions since 1981. In the 2006 Census, 25% of the Canadian population had a university degree higher than Bachelors level. By the way, this is lower than the 31% of Americans with this level of education. Almost half of the Canadian population (49%) has a college diploma, trade certification, or university degree. Of OECD countries, Canada has the highest percentage of the population (from 25 to 64 years old) with a post-secondary education (46%), slightly higher than the Japan (40%) and the US (39%), and considerably higher than the OECD average of 26%.

Many immigrants enter the country with educations far superior to those born in Canada. And because the vast majority of population growth in Canada is due to immigration, these university-educated immigrants have a major impact on our cities, our labour market, and our education systems. In 2006, 51% of recent immigrants to Canada had university degrees, compared to 19% of the Canadian-born population. Immigrants also out-perform native-born Canadians in prose, document literacy, numeracy and problem-solving, according to the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey. Even more importantly, immigrants raised in China, India, or the Philippines (Canada’s three largest source countries for immigrants) know the importance of education and instill it in their children. Let me be clear: it is well known in the poorer parts of the world that education offers an escape route out of poverty. In most cases, the only way out. Many of my classmates at the University of Toronto were the children of immigrants who had only been able to complete high school educations or, occasionally, community college. We were the first generation to attend community colleges and universities en masse, and it was expected that we do so, because our parents could not afford to go themselves when they were our age. Despite their scrimping and saving, many of us were unable to pay tuition without government-subsidized public schools, government-funded loans, scholarships and fellowships.

While a university attendance is lower among the low-income population, Statistics Canada published a study in 2007 that found lower rates of attendance were due to differences in academic performance, parents’ level of education, parents’ expectations, the high school attended, and other such factors. Only 9.5% of the youth in the study reported that financial constraints were a barrier to university attendance. While this is still cause for concern, it is somewhat reassuring that the rapid ascent of tuitions in the 1990s have not have more serious effects.

I’m not sure that it’s accurate to describe this one-quarter of the Canadian population with Bachelors degrees as elite, or “the most powerful, best educated or best trained group in society” (Cambridge Dictionary). Can the half of the population with post-secondary educations, or the half of recent immigrants with university degrees, all be considered elites? While there are some groups in Canada who are under-represented in higher education (only 8% of Aboriginals have university degrees, but 41% have post-secondary educations), we are generally an educated bunch.

Perhaps that’s the real crisis in the Harper government: realizing yet again that Canadians aren’t as dumb as his 2008 re-election might suggest. First, we rose up in the tens of thousands to protest proroguing Parliament, and now that over 200 groups have protested the removal of the Census long form, he’s had to personally speak out on what he probably considered a minor technical issue that would only concern “elites”. After both of these crises, the Conservatives dropped in the polls, creating considerable distress for Harper’s minority Conservatives. An educated populace is a problem when your government acts more like a monarchy than a democratically-elected minority government that could topple at any time.

Housing unaffordability is historically the norm

“Why doesn’t the president of the United States ever get up and say, ‘You can be a full-fledged American citizen and rent an apartment — it’s OK.” David Wessel, economics editor, Wall Street Journal

Americans now pay more for housing than ever before, according to a report by Harvard’s Joint Centre for Housing Studies. In its annual report The State of the Nation’s Housing 2010, researchers write that 18.6 million Americans spend more than half their incomes on housing, up from 13.8% in 2001. While this figure includes both owners and renters, 45.1% of renters are in the bottom income quartile. Homeownership is at a historical low, household income barely increased in the past decade, and rental vacancies are at a historical high. No wonder the authors are calling calling the first ten years of the 2000′s “the lost decade.” But housing “unaffordability” isn’t anything new, nor are our solutions to the problem.

While the Harvard researchers blame falling wages and high unemployment (9.9% in April 2010), high rental vacancy rates and low supply of the most affordable and smallest units are also major issues. Fewer homes were built in the US in 2009 than in any year since WWII, particularly multifamily homes: 62% fewer multifamily developments were begun in 2009 than in 2008. Demolition and conversion of existing low-income rental units is also a major cause for concern. Lower immigration rates are also taking their toll: there was a sharper decline in the number of foreign-born households under the age of 35 than in native-born households from 2009 to 2010. Minority households have been hit hard by the mortgage crisis. In 2009, minorities accounted for 37 percent of householders aged 25–44 and 39 percent of those under age 25. The minority homeownership rate is still expected to increase by 2020, despite lower incomes among foreign-born and minority households and lower immigration rates due to the economic recession.

Some progress has been made in terms of rental housing: rental conversions from foreclosed housing has already been done in many cities, but Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considering introducing market-rental units into its publicly-funded affordable housing developments in order to help pay for much-needed maintenance on the buildings. And the pro-homeownership policies keep coming, including the renewal of the federal tax credit for first-time homebuyers (and its expansion to repeat homebuyers) and Federal Reserve purchases of mortgage-backed securities to help keep interest rates low. But with the expiration of the tax credit program in April 2010, Harvard’s Joint Centre for Housing Studies warns that any good news may not be long-lasting. The problem, they say, is that there is unusually low demand for new homes. The ratio of housing and transportation costs to income has risen steadily over the past fifty years (see Figure 30 and 31 of the report).

As I’ve written before, without massive government programs to support homeownership and assistance for low-income renters, housing has ever been a good deal. Check out the CBC’s digital archives on the development of suburbs. In a video clip from 1954, the narrator explains how expensive homes are for the average person and how far people have to live (up to 50 miles from the city center) to afford them. In 1953, the average Canadian earned $971/month before taxes. Don Mills, the first suburb in Canada, had house prices beginning at $11,000 all the way up to $100,000. Rental rates at that time were $300/month for the average apartment in Toronto (already hovering around 30% of the average Canadian’s income, the level most housing authorities classify as affordable) and $100/month for a basic three-bedroom in the city centre. In the new market-rate high-rise apartment complexes in the suburbs of Toronto, apartments went for less than $100/month. In Montreal, then the largest city in the country, 70% of homes were apartments and the going rent was $70-100/month, only slightly more than the rents in Winnipeg ($80/month). A house in Vancouver was $2,000 cheaper than in the east at the time. While 1950s housing solutions (demolition of existing older housing to make room for low-income public housing developments in city centres, massive concrete high-rises in the suburbs) may have been questionable, they were quite desirable at the time: the wait for affordable housing, like the still-under-construction Regent Park) was 2 years for a $29-90/month rent-geared-to-income apartment. The average rent at Shannon Heights, a 1950s assisted rental development in Halifax, was only $90/month. Commuting to the city became a new drag, and buses quickly replaced streetcars and trains, steps were taken to make commuting more enjoyable. A 1963 video clip records a housewife saying that the lack of transportation options in the suburbs mean she spends considerable time driving her teenagers around; another says her family moved to the suburbs because that’s where they could get a mortgage.

Whatever housing problems we face today, whether it’s affordability or commute distance, they’re nothing new. Solutions to these problems, like artificially stimulating homeownership through tax incentives and policies, are likewise nothing new; housing affordability problems persist. Recently, researchers at the The New York Times compared the cost of living in a suburban house to an urban apartment in the New York City metro area, and found that the suburban option cost a surprising 18% more (“High-Rise, or House with Yard?” July 2, 2010): the big difference was the higher property taxes, and their comparison didn’t include the cost of home repairs. Even the The Wall Street Journal is publishing articles saying homeownership doesn’t work (“Is the Homeownership System Broken?”, June 22, 2010): WSJ economics editor David Wessel is quoted as saying, “So now we have a system where a lot of people own homes but don’t have any equity in them, which means you don’t get any of the virtues of investing in them. And the government has been forced to take over the mortgage financing system, which suggests that it wasn’t a very strong one if the government has to take it over.” This is quite a turn of events. Could North Americans be forging a new path in housing policy?

The Philippines: the new China/India?

It seems that I may no longer have to answer the question, “Why are you doing a case study of Filipinos?” Ever since the 2006 Census showed that Filipinos were the largest immigrant group entering the country, there has been increased interest in the status of the Filipino population in Canada, with a major focus on those who have entered the country under the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP). It’s gotten to the point that to say you’re working with the Filipino population is to invite harassment at parties by people wanting to know why nannies aren’t allowed to bring their family members to Canada with them (an excellent question, but one outside of my field of study).

In June, the Vancouver Sun featured a special five-part series on Filipinos in BC, trying to paint a broader picture of the Filipino population than their reputation as “nannies and maids”. However, the articles succeeded only in painting a somewhat grim picture of the challenges new immigrants face, even well-educated Filipinos who are usually fluent in English. Many of the more recent Filipino arrivals came to Canada on temporary worker visas. This program started in 2001 and was intended to fill labour shortages in technology, such as jobs in the burgeoning oil sands in Alberta. It was then extended to all kinds of other areas such as nursing, trucking, construction, fast food industry, and retail. There have been complaints about the program as it is vulnerable to human rights abuses, although some temporary workers may now apply for permanent residency after two years. Still, as I found out during my fieldwork in Toronto, Canada offers a better deal than other countries: it takes ten years to qualify for residency in Germany and in Saudi Arabia, it is impossible to get permanent residency. There are many other challenges for newcomers, which is why many choose to move to the major cities, where substantial Filipino populations, cultural associations, and community groups can provide support.

As many of you know, my dissertation focuses on the housing and transportation choices of Filipino immigrants in Toronto. I am particularly interested in how these choices have changed over time as the city grew and changed. What kinds of jobs did new immigrants find when they entered the country? Where did they live? How did they travel? Structural changes in immigration policy have played a key role in these choices, such as the introduction of family class sponsorship in the 1970s, the creation of the LCP in the 1980s, and the temporary worker category in the 2000s. I will be writing more on my dissertation topic as I finish up my data analysis in the next few months.

Vancouverisms

rain: a type of precipitation that is common in Vancouver from September to May, but is not acknowledged by Vancouverites. Ex.: a non-Vancouverite needs protection from this type of precipitation, such as an umbrella or raincoat, but Vancouverites rarely need these.

snow: a type of precipitation that rarely occurs in Vancouver but is uniformly acknowledged by Vancouverites, as it causes all traffic to cease. A very cold, dense mix of ice and water falling to the ground in clumps, occasionally persisting for 20 minutes before melting.

suckerhole: a patch of clear blue sky that often appears about an hour before sundown on a rainy day, tricking you into believing the next day might be sunny. Often occurs within a 7-to-10-day stretch of rain.

summer: var. a. a season that lasts from July to August, with clear skies and temperatures in the mid-20s. Rain persists until the end of June, when the skies begin to clear, only to cloud over again by Labour Day. Occurs for two out of three years, often following a relatively dry winter. var. b. a season that lasts from May to September, with clear skies and temperatures in the mid-20s, with a week or two in the high 20s. Little rain. Occurs about once in three years, often following a very wet winter.

Grouse Grind: not, as the Granville Island lager ads confirm, a dirty dance move, but a hike up Grouse Mountain deemed necessary for outdoor enthusiasts. The vast majority of the “trail” is paved and involves steep stairs; despite this it has a cult following. Cult followers get a time stamp at the bottom of the Grind and compete for the shortest time.

Kitsilano: alternately considered one of Vancouver’s most/least popular neighbourhoods, formerly housing hippies and now home to some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Kits culture includes yoga studios, dog walkers, coffee houses and strident environmentalists, which tends mask to mask the neighbourhood’s unique history and geography.

Commercial Drive: the last bastion of “working class” Vancouver, with a mix of shops, services, and interesting industrial land uses that predate the current Starbucks trend. That’s all Vancouverites want you to know about it. Anything else and you might want to move there…and you just don’t understand the unique culture, history and geography of the Drive.

East Vancouver: alternately considered one of the most/least popular neighbourhoods in Vancouver, with strong working class roots and humble dwellings, until recently quite affordable. Very stable, long-term community activists and vocal residents have led to a sort defensive stance about the community, a sort of “reverse snobbery” mostly directed to Westsiders who can’t possibly understand their neighbourhood, its unique history and geography.

Main Street: a formerly working class neighbourhood, now a hipster hangout with high-end, though independent, stores and restaurants. Socially-aware student types mix with a range of independent activist types, creating a unique culture, history and geography.

hipster: a middle- to upper-class individual who deeply identifies with the working class. Generally prefers to dress in second-hand clothing, currently with a heavy dose of retro 80s such as mullets, large clear plastic frame glasses, skinny jeans and plaid shirts. Musical taste features obscure local bands as well as well-known, but commercially less successful, Canadian bands. Interest in documentary films, bicycling, and pot culture required. Hipsters gravitate to Main Street, East Van and the Drive, having been largely displaced from Kits, Dunbar and Kerrisdale.

lifestyle: a melange of outdoor activities, beautiful scenery, mild climate, yoga, healthy eating, beach activities, self-righteous political and social advocacy, which is being threatened by outsiders moving to Vancouver. Syn. granola. Adj. livable: laid-back, scenic, with access to beaches, various outdoor activities, high-end condo living, and gourmet cuisine, but only for the wealthy.

fur babies: usually refers to dogs and cats who are kept as household pets and treated as the family’s children. A number of shops and services reinforce this image.

coffee shop: a small, independently-owned enterprise that supplies fair-trade coffee, a variety of herbal teas, and homemade treats, frequented by locals. Ant. Starbucks.

affordable housing: a form of shelter that is extremely rare in Vancouver, but is peppered throughout certain neighbourhoods and in adjacent municipalities such as Port Coquitlam and Surrey. Ant. most housing in Vancouver.

fleece: refers to both a fabric and a garment (usually a zippered jacket) that can be worn in any weather, any season, and on any social occasion. Usually worn with jeans, fleece is typically forest green or navy in colour with a prominent logo (eg. Columbia, North Face) on the front placket.

casual dress: typically jeans and a fleece (winter months) or khakis and a T-shirt (summer months). Hiking shoes or rubber sandals, often with velcro closures, complete the look. For women, yoga pants and tank tops, as well as capri pants, are common variants. Worn on all but semi-formal occasions, approximately 362 days of the year. Retail options: Mountain Equipment Co-Op, North Face, Lululemon.

semi-formal dress: a rare requirement in Vancouver, consisting of long-sleeved shirts and jeans or khakis (for men). Ties are not acceptable, nor is a jacket. For women, a skirt and a T-shirt with sandals, or occasionally low heels. Retail options: Spank, Aritsia. Ant. Dresses, especially long dresses or those made from silk, satin, or velvet.

great value for food: euphemism for some of the most overpriced food in Canada. Vancouver has many exclusive, gourmet restaurants, a smaller number of middle-range restaurants, and very little at the affordable end. Poor service can persist even to the high end. Similarly, grocery stores are uniformly overpriced, although some deals can be had at the smaller green grocers and in Chinatown.

Expo ’86: an international transportation fair held just after the worst recession in BC history (1981-83), which led to Vancouver’s rapid growth and development. Widely credited with being the best and worst thing to ever happen to the city.

2010 Olympics: an international sporting event discredited by most native Vancouverites, many of whom vacated the city for the 10-day period, leaving the Games to be celebrated by national and international tourists. Although locals disparaged the event, they did not lose a second in renting out apartments and condos to tourists at exorbitant rates.

11:00 pm: last call for bar patios on many of Vancouver’s main streets, except the bar-laden three-block section of Granville downtown. Time for bed so you can get up early for that hike tomorrow morning!

Toronto: Yoko to Vancouver’s Beatles, ie. the source of all discord in Lotusland. Some Torontonians have moved to Vancouver and infected it with their urban, workaholic, corporate vibe.

Ontario: Toronto.

Canada Day: a holiday largely celebrated by tourists in Vancouver.

High homeownership bad for Canada?

I’ve often felt that homeownership is not the rosy American Dream that it claims to be. I find homeownership limiting, both economically and geographically: my parents and their friends, and now friends my own age, seem to sacrifice anything and everything in order to make mortgage payments. The years I worked at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, taught me how the federal housing agency was created partly to help sell the idea of homeownership right after WWII and enable it through a series of government-backed programs and policies. Then there’s my own research in the area of immigrant settlement and housing choice, which included a serious look at Canadian federal housing policies that have slowly eroded rental housing, co-op housing and social housing as options while supporting homeownership through numerous incentives. Let’s just say that it’s no surprise that at age 36, I’m still a renter, bucking the DINK and yuppie trends, a little cynical about the myth that renting is just “throwing your money away.” After all, renting has allowed me to remain flexible, pick up and move to different cities, travel, and live in neighbourhoods I never could have afforded if I had bought.

It appears that Richard Florida agrees with me. Higher rates of renting, public transit use and residential mobility are all key themes in Florida’s latest book, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, released two weeks ago (read a review of the book, and other Florida works and quirks, on Urbanophile). Florida belies the myth that housing is a good investment, particularly when it’s held for 20 or 30 years: the rate of return on housing in the US has generally been quite low, in fact from 1890 to 1990 it was exactly zero. We’ve all seen how difficult it can be to sell a house in recent years in the US, and in earlier recessionary times in Canada: my parents’ current house was bought for $20,000 less than a similar house a few blocks away because the owner had lost her job in the 1990s recession and had to sell quickly. A friend’s parents sold their house in 2007 for almost the same price they paid for it in the early 1980s because the mill in their town had closed, leaving most of the residents out of work.

Overinvestment in housing has decreased investment in other areas like medical technology, software and alternative energy. Florida has written before about the dangers of putting too many eggs in one basket: at the height of the mortgage crisis in the US (in a November 28, 2009 article in the Globe and Mail), he wrote that the mortgage system was directly responsible for the crisis, and that the era of overinvestment in homeownership and car ownership were over. Interestingly, Florida also applies his argument to individuals: Canadians carry more mortgage debt as a percentage of their disposable income than Americans, meaning we have far less to spend on other things. A friend of mine who works in mutual funds and investments tells me the average homeowner pays for their house two and a half times due to interest. This is probably no surprise to those of us living in the country’s biggest cities, where housing prices are astonomical and have not shown any decline in growth since the US mortgage crisis. In fact, housing prices in Canada increased 20% last year.

Florida argues that in cities with higher homeownership, unemployment is also higher because homeowners are less likely to pick up and move when things get tough. He believes that mobility is often the key to employment, and more flexible housing choices are key in times of economic instability. It seems there are other people out there like me, who prefer the flexibility of renting because we want to remain mobile and have no desire to live in one place for twenty years. We aren’t all that uncommon either: 40.1% of the Canadian population moved within the past five years, according to the 2006 Census; 14.1% moved within the last year. Florida correctly predicted that rental housing would play a major role in stabilizing the US economy after the mortgage crisis: families were able to move into foreclosed properties that were renovated and re-marketed as affordable rental housing. This was because the Obama administration wasted no time in investing $4.25 billion on the creation of tens of thousands of federally-subsidized rental units using the federal Making Homes Affordable program.

Vintage 1950s matchbooks featuring real estate ads

In his May 3rd article in the Globe and Mail, Florida goes as far as saying that “home ownership is an impediment to Canada’s long-term prosperity” because high house prices, low interest rates and lax government policies in Canada could spell trouble for the housing market. Even though people have been talking about the “bubble” for over fifteen years, Edward Jones’ recent report predicts Canada’s is about to burst. The federal government recently made it more difficult to get a mortgage and is considering other measures to tighten mortgage availability in order to protect the market from collapse. They eliminated the no down payment mortgage option before the US crisis began, but there is still a 5% down option. What is particularly interesting to me as a non-economist is how the housing market has historically been used to maintain or even increase consumer spending to stave off or recover from economic recession: besides the post-war era, we saw low interest rates brought in after the 1989 stock market crash in Canada and after 9/11 in the US to encourage people to keep buying homes. I guess there’s a fine line between “removing barriers to homeownership” to encourage spending and bringing on an economic meltdown by letting anyone with a a couple of bucks buy a house.

Massive marketing was required to sell the idea of homeownership as a stable, more respectable lifestyle choice. Let’s not forget that those first homes were practically given away at very low prices and low mortgage rates, their construction highly subsidized by federal governments in both the US and Canada. Those cherubic children, war brides and returning vets in 1940s suburban home ads were so convincing that most of us still believe homeowners are somehow better than renters: even Florida hints that switching from homeownership to renting might have “unforseen social costs” for cities and regions. Our own values and biases about homeownership drive the market. Yet a mere 60 years ago, renter households were the majority in both our countries.

The classic French text Un chez-moi à mon coût (2000) (edited by Eric Brassard), which I read at the urging of a fellow renter working at CMHC, carefully dissects all the economic myths of homeownership, arguing that it is often the non-economic factors that are the most influential. The book presents case studies of housing choices of a variety of professionals, both renters and owners, who argue that there is no sound economic argument for homeownership or against renting: it just comes down to personal preference. But we’re so invested in the homeownership ideal that investing in rental housing, or convincing middle-income families to rent, would take a lot of work. The tide may be turning in the US, but with high housing prices and fairly easy access to mortgages, we may not see this shift in Canada until our own mortgage crisis rears its ugly head.

Measuring well-being

It’s so rare that I see a headline on my parents’ home state of Kerala that I couldn’t resist writing about this article in the Globe and Mail. For those of you who don’t know, Kerala (pronounced CARE-ah-la, and not cur-AH-la) is a mass of contradictions. It has the highest literacy rate in India but still has arranged marriages. The population of the state is the same as that of Canada, but Kerala’s birth rate is lower that the US rate, thanks to the intense family planning advocacy that’s gone on since my parents were children in the 1950s. A relatively high quality of life is contradicted by a very low GDP. And most paradoxical, the state has a Communist history: democratically-elected Communist governments.

This last point is the key to all the others. Since 1957, the Communist party has been democratically elected and in office, either alone or working with other left wing parties. The leftist governments prioritized public services, small scale co-ops and rural land reforms, resisting rabid globalization and the corporatization of agriculture. In other words, the governments have built upon Kerala’s strengths rather than following popular, often disastrous, employment trends. Strong labour unions are also responsible: workers of all stripes go on strike regularly in Kerala, with the result that the state has some of the best working conditions in the country.

Most importantly, Kerala illustrates one of the classic postwar economic paradoxes: it has a very low GDP but excellent labour conditions, lower poverty than the rest of the country, very strong women’s rights, and excellent health outcomes. How can that be when the state governments haven’t bought into the ideas of neoliberalism, globalization and corporate agriculture? For one, the excellent public health initiatives in Kerala are a direct result of a strong, affordable, health care system that was only possible with consistent leftist governments. Ditto education, which is the key to women’s economic and social independence. State education in Kerala, including free public and high schools, mean that Kerala doesn’t have untouchables: the caste system barely exists at all in the state. It has a very low incidence of religious intolerance (Hindus killing Christians, Muslims killing Hindus, etc.) The strength of the public sector balances out the lower employment in niche areas like traditional Kerala crafts and small-scale manufacturing and production.

All is not sunshine, however: the traffic and pressure on local roads is growing by 10% each year and the rate of road accidents is the highest in India. And unemployment, particularly among youth and women, is fairly high (a handy side effect of strong labour unions and a very well-educated population). This has resulted in massive emigration of Kerala’s population to the Arabian Gulf, the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia. More than 50% of Kerala’s population relies on wells for fresh water, which are still responsible for water-borne diseases such as typhoid, dysentery, and hepatitis. Environmental conditions are no picnic either: Booker Prize winning author Arundati Roy (The God of Small Things), who hails from Kerala, famously donated her prize winnings to fighting the Sardar Sarovar Dam project across the Narmada river.

Nevertheless, Kerala has achieved a remarkable amount with, measurably, very little. The state is just one more example that money may not be the key to happiness after all.

Vancouver: the rebellious teenager

Now that Vancouver is awash in Olympic madness, it’s time to reflect on the city and its unique personality: its extraordinary natural beauty, polarized social classes, laid-back attitude and multi-million dollar condos. Combined with its unique geography, with a downtown “core” surrounded by water, its various municipalities linked tenuously together by a few bridges, Metro Vancouver is one-of-a-kind.

A great article in The Walrus (Gary Stephen Ross) contrasts “the Vancouver you see and the one you don’t.” Vancouver might have “world-class” restaurants, but it’s impossible to hail a cab after 10pm or have a drink on upper Granville Street after midnight. Environmentally-conscious thinking is serious out west, and the City of Vancouver often initiates innovative policies and programs. But Ross rightly points out that Vancouver is missing several indicators of “civic heft and maturity”: until the Canada Line’s opening last fall, there was no public transit line to the airport; the main train terminus at Pacific Station does not present the city’s best face; there’s no downtown university campus with an adjoining student neighbourhood, no major civic square or broad pedestrian promenade. Ross recalls a 1960s trip to Vancouver, when the city was little more than a frontier town; compared to the more cosmopolitan Toronto and Montreal, Vancouver was a lightweight. He points out that this is still the case: with a population of about 600,000, the City of Vancouver’s analogues are more likely to be Charlotte, Memphis, and El Paso than Chicago or New York.

The first full day of competition illustrated some of these complexities. While tourists lined the streets and hung out at Robson Square to see the events unfold, protesters smashed in the windows of Bay’s Georgia Street store, where the entire main floor is devoted to Olympic merchandise. Anti-Olympic sentiment has evidently not faded in Vancouver, where many residents have left the city altogether to get away from an event they didn’t want in the first place. After Expo 86, a world exposition that many people attest “put Vancouver on the map,” international attention focused on Vancouver. Almost immediately after the event, Hong Kong developers bought up acres of prime real estate at the waterfront, and by the 1990s the city was glittering with high-rise condos. Housing prices shot through the roof and the sleepy town’s well-kept secrets of soaring mountains and underused waterfront were now offered up to the highest bidders.

Vancouver grew almost overnight, and the complexities that Ross presents in his article are characteristics of a city still in its youth, one that has not yet come to terms with its “world-class” label. It’s easy to forget that until Expo, Vancouver was a mid-sized city at best. Vancouverites who grew up here attest to this, even those who are too young to remember the 1988 Calgary Olympics. To them Vancouver should still be as it was in the old days of the early 80s: a natural wonderland that was relatively unknown even among Canadians. They resent the crowded hiking trails, the high-rise condos that populate Yaletown, and the implication that others might want to live in their city. Unfortunately, this makes it a city with deep social rifts. The city is home to both the richest and poorest postal code in the country. Labour strikes, whether they involve public transit workers or the City of Vancouver staff, last for months on end because the two sides are so polarized. Pervasive homelessness is a never-ending topic, as it is in Toronto, but it’s complicated by what are often the highest property prices and rental rates in the country. The region’s aboriginal peoples may have been fairly well represented in the Olympics Opening Ceremony, but there are still major tensions between them and the provincial and municipal governments around land claims.

While Ross is indeed correct in implying that many of these characteristics remain unseen and unheard, they go a long way in explaining its citizens’ lukewarm attitudes towards migration, commercial ventures and tourist attractions. So while the many spectators, athletes and media representatives focus on the Olympic events, they can’t help but be intrigued by the complexities of Vancouver and its inhabitants. In time Vancouverites may be happy to host world events and embrace immigration and migration to its shores, but it’s still too young to appreciate growth and change.

Healthier cities in the US?

December 24, 2009 will become a date to remember: today the US Senate passed its landmark health care legislation in the first Christmas Eve vote since 1895. I wrote earlier on Canada’s rough ride to Medicare, and Bill HR 3962 (the Affordable Health Care for America Act) passed in the House of Representatives in another post. It’s an electrifying issue which is exciting regardless of where you stand on this complex issue. Health care, and the delivery of health services, are crucial issues for cities in the US. While there is a lot of debate about the differences between the Senate and House bills and the numerous concessions required to pass the Senate version (Bill HR 676, the National Health Care Act or Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act), the legislation is a particular success for the still-young Obama administration. According to the White House, the main goals of the bill are to reduce long-term health insurance costs for governments and companies, ensure a choice of doctors and health insurance, prevent bankruptcies, invest in patients and wellness, improve patient safety and quality of care, ensure quality affordable health care for all Americans, maintain coverage when people change jobs or leave work, and end barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing health conditions.

Earlier this week, the Senate narrowly agreed on Bill 676, which they endorsed 60-40 at 1am on Monday. Sixty votes are required to bypass a lengthy debate (filibuster) and the Democrats have 58 Senate seats, so they need every vote plus the two Independents. Nebraska Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson was the keystone in cementing the 60-40 vote. Critics feel the bill is too expensive (CNN’s David Frum), delivers too little, and excludes too many (Michael Moore). Republican critics maintain that health care will be “rationed” and overall patient care will suffer: House minority leader John Boehner said it “puts bureaucrats in charge of decisions that should be made by patients and doctors.” Many Democrats are still divided on the issues of abortion represented in the bill (Huffington Post’s Judy Patrick) while others say it diminishes choice by forcing Americans to buy heath insurance. Most agree that the bill was diluted significantly in order to ensure its passage, citing the exclusion of a government-run insurance option that had been included in the House bill, but as Michael Tomasky wrote for the Guardian, “Half a loaf is better than none.” Nelson, in particular, held out for concessions like a federal contribution to Nebraska’s Medicare program. The “Senate test” on Monday was said to predict the passage of the bill today.

It is somewhat troubling that US health insurance companies like Aetna Inc., Signa Corp. and Humana Inc. instantly posted stock market increases, and Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman (CT) got major contributions from these and other insurance companies to fight the bill. While the bill is expected to cover 30 million Americans who were previously uninsured (the population of Canada, by the way) the Congressional Budget Office reported earlier this year that there were 45.7 million uninsured people in the US. Although this number has been disputed, there will still be millions uninsured in the US, since health insurance will still be tied to employment and the government option has been eliminated. But it is encouraging that the bill bans discrimination of insurers based on pre-existing conditions and mandates employers to provide health insurance, providing tax breaks for small businesses and penalties for large ones.

Today’s Senate vote required the agreement of all 58 Democrats and 2 Independents to achieve the 60-39 win. Four different administrations have tried to pass health care bills in the US. This particular bill, HR 676, was introduced in 2003 by Representative John Conyers (D-MI), and has been reintroduced in every congress since. However, the release of Michael Moore’s Sicko (2007) focused attention on the country’s inadequate health coverage, in particular discriminatory treatment of insured people and the business ethic that pervades Health Management Organizations (HMOs). American friends told stories about the aftermath of seeing the movie in the theater: afterwards, audience members lingered the lobby, saying, “We’ve got to do something about this.” The DVD release of Sicko included a segment entitled “Sicko goes to Washington” which promoted the health care bill. Although the original bill suggested a single-payer system for universal coverage, public opinion was divided: most Americans are against government-run health care, although the American Medical Association favours the option. The single payer option was dropped from in the Senate bill (it still exists in the House bill). The next step involves harmonizing the Senate and House of Representatives bills, which may take until February.

While everything in HR 676 isn’t perfect, legislation rarely is. We’re currently awaiting the proroguing of Canadian parliament (the termination of the current session) which is how our Conservative Prime Minister deals with the fact that he doesn’t have the agreement of the whole House of Commons. This would mean all bills proposed and worked on in committees would die, including the long-awaited affordable housing act (Bill C-304), which has been introduced three times already. So Merry Christmas to our neighbours to the South, and celebrate your imperfect legislation!

Boomburb to boombust

The US mortgage crisis is having all sorts of spin-off effects on cities and regions, including differential growth patterns, a federal initiative to create low- to middle-income rental housing, and surging public transit rates. Currently, the long-standing tradition of booming suburbs has been turned on its head: almost half of the most rapidly-growing suburbs in the US are now losing population. Typically, this occurs in regions where the population is aging and where real estate has been the main economic generator.

Robert Lang, professor of sociology at the University of Nevada (Las Vegas) coined the term “boomburb” to describe these bedroom communities that grew rapidly as their adjacent major cities grew. But he says that the latest post-mortgage crisis trends may indicate that bedroom communities may have to become more village-like, with higher densities and clustered development, if they want to keep growing. In other words, they need to go beyond single-use residential zoning, and offer some of the mixed-use development and services that cities offer.

While the mortgage crisis is definitely the main cause of this shift, latent demand for more mixed-use, transit-oriented development, increasing concerns about climate change, and generational change are also influencing housing location and types. People’s housing preferences seem to be changing, and the mortgage crisis has increased the trend towards smaller homes, more central locations, and shorter commutes. Smaller cities (between 20,000 and 50,000) have trouble retaining college graduates during poor economic times as people move to cities for better access to job opportunities.

There is some evidence of this shift in the Vancouver region: although the outer municipalities like Port Coquitlam and Abbotsford still show growth rates higher than Vancouver, inner municipalities such as Richmond and Burnaby have seen a stabilization in rates. Richmond’s Housing Strategy notes that it has seen residents’ demands shift from larger to smaller homes, while Vancouver has approved laneway housing and secondary suites, both inherently smaller housing types, in the last few years.

Nate Berg reported on Planetizen that in the US, the largest increases in public transit commuting from 2006-2008 have been in the metropolitan statistical areas of Charlotte, NC; Detroit; Riverside, CA; Phoenix, Minneapolis, Sacramento, St. Louis, Denver, San Antonio, and Seattle. High oil prices and targeted public transit improvements are credited for the major increases in these areas. In particular, Charlotte and Minneapolis recently opened brand new commuter rail lines. In many cases, more middle-income people began commuting by transit, likely as they got rid of the second car or stopped driving it as much. It remains to be seen whether higher transit commuting levels in these areas will persist over 2009, as many American transportation authorities have had to slash budgets to cope with the recession. Still, as Berg writes, the increases “suggest the possibility of a more transit-tolerant future.”

There is a lot of variation among regions and municipalities but there seems to be a general trend towards smaller, more centrally located homes and transit access, trends that also appeared during the oil crisis of 1973-74. The late 1970s was the beginning of urban gentrification of inner city and inner-suburban neighbourhoods in many Canadian cities, as households decreased their car dependence and opted for smaller homes and properties. Suburban living ain’t cheap, especially during tough economic times. If the American trends persist, they could lead to a regrowth in small to mid-sized towns near major cities, much as one finds in England. These towns, while they have a variety of shops and services, housing types and clustered development along a main street, still retain a small-town feeling which we really haven’t managed to do well in North America. Small towns tend to stagnate as they avoid anything that might seem too urban, while cities have grown rapidly, struggling with soaring housing and service provision costs. There is a real need for this kind of in-between small to mid-sized town with a bit more of an urban feeling and zoning flexibility to achieve a more compact urban form and some economic stability.

US ushers in its new health care bill

In what has been called “a hard-fought victory for President Obama“, the Affordable Health Care for America Act (HR 3962), passed November 7, 2009 in the House of Representatives. The vote was 220:215, an extremely narrow victory (218 votes were needed to pass the bill). Among other things, the bill prohibits insurers from charging different rates or refusing treatment based on a patient’s medical history or gender, requires most employers to provide health insurance, increases Medicaid eligibility to cover more low-income people, a subsidy plan for low- to middle-income people to buy insurance, a central health insurance exchange where people can compare plans and rates, as well as a government-run insurance program.

In an earlier post, while the US was gearing up for its health care talks, I wrote extensively about some of the myths concerning public health care provision. Among these was the claim that public health care is much more expensive than private health care, which is simply not the case. In addition to the data I provided in that post, the Canadian Institute for Health Information’s annual report on health care spending was released today. According to their figures, Canada’s health care costs rose by 5% to $183.1 billion in 2009 compared to 2008. Canada’s per capita costs are highest at the early and late stages of life: $8,239 for an infant under one year old, and up to $17,469 for an adult over 80 years old. For those aged 1-64, the per capita cost is only $3,809 per person. There are also interesting regional differences, with Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador having the highest per capita costs and BC and Quebec having the lowest. Our costs are in the top 20% worldwide: presumably the 20% with socialized health care systems, since our costs compare to France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria.

How do we compare to the US? The per capita cost in the US is $7,290 US, almost double Canada’s average of $3,895 and the highest of 26 countries surveyed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). While Canada’s increased from 10.8% of the GDP in 2008 to an estimated 11.9% in 2009, the CIHI reported that the US was forecasting a similar increase in spending, up to 17.6% of its GDP. Interestingly, they also write that health care spending spikes during economic recessions.

The battle isn’t over yet in the US, which plans to take their health care bill to the Senate. Only one Republican in the House of Representatives voted for HR 3962, and 39 Democrats voted against it; the Democrats will need 60 of 100 votes in the Senate to end debate and bring the legislation to a vote. This was in part due to some controversial amendments at the last minute that added in some flexibility for states in dealing with abortion. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi compared the passage of the bill to the 1935 passage of Social Security, but it will be a rough run at the Senate if the abortion issue remains unsolved.

M.A., Ph.D. Candidate (Planning, UBC)

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