In many gateway cities – cities tightly locked into global flows of capital and people – immigration has become the largest component of population growth, and thus a major determinant of housing markets. In Vancouver, the arrival of wealthy migrants, many holding golden visas, plus significant offshore property investment, has contributed to rapid house price inflation. In a recent paper, Lauster and von Bergmann (2023) characterise local resistance to these trends as ‘housing nationalism’, which they consider reactionary and a cultural ‘moral panic’. In contrast, we demonstrate the scale of offshore investment, the economic basis of resistance and policy change, and the broad, multiethnic support behind efforts to limit foreign property ownership. In doing so, we show that the invocation of ‘housing nationalism’ is consistent with growth machine ideology that seeks to undercut opposition. Most cities with this much attention from foreign buyers have much, much larger populations. They are better able to absorb the in-migration. Think New York, think London, think urban resort. (Bob Rennie, Vancouver condominium marketer, speech to the Urban Development Institute, 2012). Most cities with this much attention from foreign buyers have much, much larger populations. They are better able to absorb the in-migration. Think New York, think London, think urban resort. (Bob Rennie, Vancouver condominium marketer, speech to the Urban Development Institute, 2012)
In gateway cities, networked into global flows of capital and labour, population growth is now dominated by immigration, so that housing markets and immigration are tightly bound together (Hiebert Citation2017). In Vancouver, nearly half (47%) of the metropolitan population of 2.6 million were born abroad in 2021 (including 5% who were non-permanent residents), while immigration comprised four-fifths of population growth over the previous decade (Statistics Canada Citation2011, Citation2
Given the concurrent dynamics of high immigration, nativist populism and heightened political contestation around housing, it is understandable that there might be interest in potential overlap between these trends. In a recent article in this journal, Lauster and von Bergmann (Citation2023), hereafter LVB, attempt to make this connection. They posit that a new phenomenon, ‘housing nationalism’, has emerged in Canada since the mid-2010s, and argue that it draws from the same xenophobic motivations as nativist populism. Although they never directly define ‘housing nationalism’, they suggest that ‘reactionary nationalism’ is ‘the strategic framing of problems, taking of positions, and construction of solutions that blame and penalise the foreign while valorising membership in the nation’. Implied in this framing, then, ‘housing nationalism’ is ‘reactionary nationalism’ as applied to housing matters. Using this new concept, they then focus on Vancouver and the province in which it is located, British Columbia.
In this paper, we grapple with similar research questions in British Columbia (B.C.), while taking issue with a depiction of housing politics that posits the rise of ‘housing nationalism’ without adequate attention to a solid theoretical and empirical grounding or to alternate interpretations. It is important to state at the outset that the main political contestation has been around foreign ownership of housing, which we regard as mainly an economic question of flows of capital, rather than cultural attitudes to immigration. Given that foreign ownership is often understood as ‘housing purchased primarily with income or wealth earned abroad’ (Gordon Citation2020), contestation in B.C. involved attempts to limit the role of foreign money in the housing market, not reducing the number of people arriving. Only around 2023, well after the supposed emergence of ‘housing nationalism’, did a Canada-wide debate emerge about immigration levels in the context of record admissions (Kavcic and Kaushik Citation2024; see section 5), which had substantial and unbudgeted housing and infrastructure implications. The definition of ‘housing nationalism’ conflates these distinct debates and concerns, meaning that the politics are mischaracterised, as we show below. Undoubtedly, xenophobia and racism exist in parts of Canadian society, including Vancouver, and for some these motivations will have contributed to their desire to see foreign ownership curtailed, along with immigration more generally. However, the historical record, detailed below, does not support LVB’s contention that these motivations were the basis for the flurry of government housing policies from 2015 onwards, which they term ‘housing nationalism’. Indeed, we show that deploying the ‘race card’ has been a long-standing ideological tactic of the growth coalition in Vancouver to divert critical response.
Among the issues we investigate are the following: When do concerns around foreign ownership emerge in relation to housing, and when do concerns about immigration emerge? When are these concerns acted upon and when are they sidelined politically? We recognise that house price inflation has played out in other gateway cities, from Lisbon to Auckland, with similar debates around foreign ownership and immigration, so these questions have broader relevance than our case study. Indeed, the emergence of more intense policy debates around housing affordability means that it is important for scholars to better theorise the nature of housing politics, including their relation with immigration and growing ethnic diversity. We hope to contribute to this endeavour by presenting and applying a theoretical framework to understand these politics in many liberal democratic, immigrant-receiving countries.
Through a re-examination of the B.C. case, the paper demonstrates: (a) that concerns around foreign ownership, or ‘housing nationalism’, did not emerge as the result of an alleged ‘moral panic’, as maintained by LVB, but rather were a reaction to significant flows of foreign capital into the B.C. real estate market that had seriously harmed affordability; (b) that a sustained strategy of ‘denialism’ was undertaken by members of the regional growth coalition to conceal these effects, including the tactical charge of ‘racism’ and (c) that political pressure for policies to curtail foreign ownership was led by a multicultural group of leftist actors with widespread public support, rather than having ‘reactionary’ or nativist origins harking back to historical anti-Chinese attitudes.f ‘housing nationalism’ is consistent with growth machine ideology that seeks to undercut opposition.....read on https://www.tandfonline.com/