Gordon wrote last week about land use Zoning in British Columbia, and how his writing about zoning in this province has been misaddressed. You can take a look at Gordon’s article here which corrects some assumptions and extrapolations made about Harland Bartholomew’s 1928 “Plan for the City of Vancouver including Point Grey and South Vancouver”.
Artist and historian Michael Kluckner who has written many books on Vancouver notes in the comments on Gordon’s article that “People like the Mayor of Victoria should take the time to read the historical Vancouver documents. Bartholomew’s Plan for example, makes no mention of race, and explicitly states (page 432) that the “residential” areas of Vancouver could be either one family or two family depending on the wishes of the residents.
There was no explicitly racial-exclusionary zoning anywhere in Vancouver that I have been able to discover – as an example, note First Shaughnessy, where the Japanese consul general moved to The Crescent in 1926.”
That’s not to say there was no racism in Vancouver-some property owners had restrictive covenants placed on property to say who it could or could not be sold to.
While women got the federal vote in 1919, Asian Canadians were not given the right to vote until 1947. There was also a Federal Head Tax imposed from 1885 to 1923 for any immigrant from China. In 1901, the tax was $100 and in 1903 increased to $500, which is the equivalent of two years wages for a labourer. In 1923 all Asian Canadians including those people born in Canada had to register for “immigration and colonization” cards. Curator Catherine Clement has been researching this important and painful era.
But this prejudice was not embedded in the land use zoning.
While it is a populist concept to view so called single family neighbourhoods as exclusionary, that really is a 21st century interpretation about Metro Vancouver’s land use.
In the 1920’s an extraordinary streetcar network made accessibility to lots in the Metro Vancouver region within the realm of any working person. By 1928 there was 183 kilometers of track extending out to Steveston and to New Westminster People could purchase a lot, and either build a temporary cabin or a house for a family. It is estimated that by 1929 eighty percent of workers owned their home in the Vancouver region. Blue collar workers as well as professional workers could buy lots and build simple cabins and wood frame cottages, using the streetcar to access their employment. In the post war era after the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic open space, and single or duplex housing was seen as the preferred building form.
Vancouver was unusual in having rental apartments above retail stores along the commercial streets that followed the streetcar routes. It was an early way for people to live and work in commercial areas, and also meant there were people in the area during the evenings. Speculative developments took advantage of the cloistering of different streetcar lines, like Burnaby’s highly advertised Montrelynview which was promoted in the 1912 period.
Vancouver never followed other early examples in the United States that used zoning to exclude people, and a review of the Bartholomew Plan which is open access at the Vancouver Archives proves that. What were separated were heavy industrial uses, with the idea (so 1920’s) of great vistas and drives, with houses on boulevarded streets with sidewalks. Higher density housing was already located along streetcar lines and commercial areas.
In the United States San Francisco did try to use zoning to eradicate Chinese-owned laundries in neighbourhoods in 1885. That did not go over very well and a Supreme Court challenge threw that regulation out in 1886.
Los Angeles was an early adopter of land use regulation to keep industrial uses out of residential areas in 1909. This of course offered developers a better chance to sell homes that would have land values go down due to the location of noxious industries, as Amanda Erickson describes in this Bloomberg CityLab article.
But it really was the horrifying impact of the Molasses Flood that was one of the catalysts for zoning, used to separate land uses, not people in North America.
The Boston Molasses Disaster on January 15 1919 was in a busy northend high density residential neighbourhood of 40,000 souls. On that day 2.3 million gallons of molasses at the Purity Distilling Company ruptured out of a holding vat, causing 12,000 tons of molasses to go through neighbourhood streets at over 55 kilometers an hour. Over 21 people smothered in the molasses, and 150 were injured. Cold temperatures turned the molasses into a viscous mass, crushing people and horses, pulling buildings off foundations and tipping over a streetcar.
Molasses boiled into alcohol was a primary ingredient in TNT and dry powder. The factory was located in an area that had a high density of apartments and homes along the streets.
While there were building codes and regulations at the time, there was no separation of use, meaning that this factory could exist in a residential neighbourhood. Fearing that consequences of this tragedy the company insisted it was a bomb or sabotage that had caused the terrible disaster. In 1925 the Court of Massachusetts established that the tragedy was entirely the fault of the Purity Distilling Company which had built the tank without proper safeguards. The company was required to pay one million US dollars in costs.
This court finding meant that businesses could be found liable for deadly negligence and sparked the development of zoning laws to separate industries from dense residential neighbourhoods. In Boston plans had to be signed off by professional engineers before permits could be considered.
You can take a look a this video of the history of the Molasses Flood. This disaster and others like it precipitated land use regulations to separate incompatible land uses to ensure citizen safety. The Bartholomew Plan for Vancouver commissioned for Vancouver in 1928 and revised in 1929 can be viewed here.
From Rotherstein’s The Color of Law: “According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into “finer residential districts… by colored people.” He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, “where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by colored people.”
The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building’s occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread.
The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court’s Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments. With no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew’s survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations.” It’s remarkable that Bartholomew was able to completely set his racism aside when creating Vancouver’s similar plan. A remarkable triumph of “scientific planning.” I wonder which ethnicities were concentrated in the poorest 20% who got to pushed towards industrial zones instead of away?
Was the motivation for zoning in Vancouver to protect people from industrial hazards though? “When Bartholomew asked what abuses he should consider in the interim zoning by-law of 1927 he was preparing, the chairman replied that ‘the only serious abuse… is the intrusion of undesirable apartment houses into residential districts'” (Zoning and the Single-Family Landscape, p. 60)
Author
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. For other people’s reference, Richard Rothstein’s book is based upon the US experience and is here.
The thesis you are referring to is Barbara Petit’s thesis here.
The takeaway is that in this time period of the early 1900s to 1960 there were Federal, Provincial and Municipal policies that were unjust to people from elsewhere, pointedly towards minorities including Asians and South Asians. While the zoning code may not be prejudicial, a review of the newspapers and policy history of the time, as well as the lived experience of those individuals crafts the sad narrative. It was also not until 1950’s that a person of Asian background was hired to work at the City of Vancouver.