Kluckner: On the Question of Racial Zoning in Vancouver

Further to the comment made by historian Michael Kluckner to this post on racism and zoning in Vancouver, here is some more background on the question of whether zoning in Vancouver, particularly single-family, is or was explicitly racist – not whether the society at the time was racist, as Michael effectively documents.

By Michael Kluckner:

Generalized statements about systemic racism involving property and single-family zoning, like the Mayor of Victoria’s in a recent post about her city, should be weighed against actual historic documents before concluding that they apply to the City of Vancouver. It appears to be only on the North Shore, most notoriously in the British Properties, where there was systemic racial exclusion in the zoning and property titles.  Be clear – Vancouver was clearly a racist society, with numerous civic, provincial and federal regulations, as well as personal biases, targeting non-Whites.

The Bartholomew Plan of 1927–30, which is the basis of all Vancouver planning in the century since, makes no mention of race, and explicitly states that the “residential” areas of Vancouver could be either one family or two family depending on the wishes of the residents. It does, however, clearly state the planners’ preference for detached dwellings, typical of that time when public health epidemics such as typhoid and the recent influenza pandemic were only “treatable” by providing adequate space between families.

Density was equated with slums and crowding – yes, there was a racial or ethnic element to that, such as the many public health complaints in the 1920s about Italians living in crowded conditions in the East End a.k.a. Strathcona. Later, “slum conditions” were used in 1942 by the Vancouver Town Planning Commission to justify the forced sale of Japanese-Canadian properties in the Powell Street area – the owners having been interned in camps in the BC Interior. And much later, in the 1960s, planners used the “blighted conditions” of the East End (Strathcona), which had become a largely Chinese-Canadian community over the previous dozen years, to justify an urban renewal program that would have re-housed the community in towers and apartments in the area.

There was no explicitly racial-exclusion zoning anywhere in Vancouver that I have been able to discover. The cultural sameness of, for example, Shaughnessy Heights, was not enforced by restrictive covenants banning any particular race or religion. The only restrictive covenants appearing on early titles, in their transfers from the CPR’s financial agent Royal Trust to individual buyers, concerned the erection of single-family homes and outbuildings.

The purchase in 1926 of 3351 The Crescent by the Japanese consul general proves the lack of racial restrictions in Shaughnessy Heights. Ironically, because it was held by the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property after 1942, it couldn’t be used as much-needed housing, as seen in this clipping from the Vancouver News-Herald:

The racial exclusivity of that area was at least partly the result of the local economy – at the time, there were few non-Caucasians in the city with either the wherewithal or the desire to try to buy in. Ironically for Shaughnessy, the arrival in Vancouver after the Anschluss in the late 1930s of wealthy anglo-acculturated Jews from Eastern Europe saved the neighbourhood which had become “Mortgage Heights.” The Koerners, Hellers, Sauders (originally Sauzs and Sonnenschiens), and Bentleys (originally Blochbauers) rapidly became part of the province’s business Establishment, mainly through their investment in and development of the forest industry. This was at a time, which continued into the 1970s, when Jews were not able to join many of the City’s private clubs and golf courses.

Prosperous Chinese Canadians, such as Wing Sang (whose home is now Bob Rennie’s art gallery) and Loo Gee Wing (owner of the Loo Building at the corner of Abbott and Hastings), not surprisingly chose to live elsewhere. Produce-store manager Quan Gow bought a house at 147 West 7th in Mount Pleasant for his family. Japantown merchant Sentaro Uchida bought the big house at 2798 Yale Street in 1919 and, yes, lost it to the racist wartime actions of the Canadian government, as noted above.

Yes, there were racist restrictions put on individual titles by owners all over the city. The only “official” attempt I know of to exclude a race from a Vancouver area is Halford Wilson’s petition to exclude Asian people from the 41st and Dunbar area, prompted by Tong and Geraldine Louie’s purchase of 5810 Highbury Street; it was rejected by Council in 1941.

Were people racist? Here’s an example from the 1920s of General A.D. McRae, owner of the “Hycroft” mansion in Shaughnessy (the University Women’s Club since the 1940s): “When I get through paying the butcher, the baker, and candlestick maker, and the staff of ten or twelve which I keep around me, what I have left out of $25,000 at the end of the year would not wad a gun. Incidentally, it is a happy white man’s home. No Oriental has ever been employed within its walls for an hour.”

Were there racially discriminatory laws? Yes, there were many of them, mostly couched in typically slippery Canadian language such as the (provincial) Women and Girls Protection Act of the 1920s, which effectively banned the employment of White women in Chinese-owned businesses. Some were municipal, some provincial and some federal, but that’s a different matter from property ownership and zoning.

Was there economic exclusion? Yes, just like today, but you only have to look at the demographics of the West Side and South Vancouver to realize that “single-family zoning” is not perpetuated just by White people.