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Abstract
Despite significant structural similarities, Canadian and American Rust Belt cities have very different levels of inner core land abandonment. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland are filled with thousands of vacant lots. No abandonment of this magnitude exists in the Canadian Rust Belt, despite significant deindustrialization, suburbanization, wealth, and localist politics—all factors theorized to be central causes for American Rust Belt abandonment. This paper considers why such a vast difference in land abandonment exists between the two contexts. It centers on the role of racialization, but in a way that challenges Canadian exceptionalist narratives about the ostensible lack of racialization. Racialization took place on both sides of the border, I argue, but only the American form contributed to land abandonment.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Tamara Augsten for research assistance and Joshua Akers, Tenley Conway, Joe Darden, Pierre Filion, Kimberley Kinder, and Elvin Wyly for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. All errors and omissions are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The Fair Housing Act did not end discrimination, but did push it to the shadows. Massey and Denton (Citation1993) argue that the chief (and very much deliberate) weakness of the Fair Housing Act was that it relies upon individuals and fair housing groups independently pursuing cases of discrimination rather than a central governmental body. Given the expense and complication of pursuing such litigation, the actual number of successfully prosecuted fair housing cases is low.
2. Figures can (and often do) exceed 100% growth in cases where the core city lost population.
3. It has also been suggested that the Conservative Provincial Government had hoped to dilute the power of left-leaning Toronto by adding its more conservative suburban voters to its block. If this was the hope, it was generally successful (see: Ford, Rob).
4. The prominent exceptions are Louisville, Columbus, and Indianapolis, all of which have undergone significant annexations in the past 40 years.
5. Derived by dividing each city’s population by its Census Metropolitan Area population in 2006.
6. Derived by involved dividing each city’s population by its MSA population in 2010.
7. Manufacturing statistics for Ontario were derived from Canadian Department of Trade and Commerce (1947) and Canadian Ministry of Industry (Citation2012). American statistics were derived from U.S. Department of Commerce (1947) and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015).
8. “Visible minority” is the term used by the Canadian Federal Government to refer to “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour” (Government of Canada, Citation2006). Because this is a broad category encapsulating national origins and ethno-racial characteristics, this led to an accidental undercounting of Canadian Blacks as one’s declaration of national identity (e.g. French) was mutually exclusive from one’s ethno-racial declaration (e.g. Black). After 1996, this was rectified so Black Canadian counts are considered more accurate after this point.
9. According to Statistics Canada, there are eight partial exceptions to this statement insofar as their populations are composed of >50% visible minorities when all groups are aggregated. But in no case was a single group a majority, and in only one case (Richmond BC) do they constitute more than 40%. Moreover, the most sizeable “group” is “East Asian”—within which there are significant national origin differences. Additionally, all of the Ontario cities (Brampton, Markham, Mississauga, Richmond Hill) in this category are relatively prosperous suburbs (so their residents are not coming to Canada as marginalized in terms of economic class). Still some native-born Canadians have viewed such groups as a threat to their identity and interests. For example, White Vancouverites have voiced frustration that wealthy Chinese capitalists are driving up the cost of “their” real estate and building “monster homes” (Mitchell, Citation2004).
10. They were legally authorized throughout Canada in 1850, but some cities like Toronto never formally adopted the policy.
11. For cross-tabulated and race data, this study used 2006 numbers for Canada, as recent changes to the Canadian Census have rendered the 2011 data less reliable. When possible (as with the income cross-tabulations), 2006 US data is used to make it more comparable.
12. The cities are Brampton (13.5% in 2011) and Ajax, Ontario (16.0% in 2011), both suburbs of Toronto.
13. Incarceration rates are difficult to compare in part because the United States imprisons all groups more actively than any other country in the OECD (Dauvergne, Citation2012). So, as a percentage of the population, Canadian Blacks are incarcerated less frequently than American Blacks (as is the case for all ethnic group comparisons). But as a percentage of the federal prison population in the two countries, their rates of overrepresentation are similar. In Canada, Blacks make up 9.5% of the federal prison population, which is 3.28 times their population percentage (2.9%) (Canadian Office of Correctional Investigator, Citation2013). In the United States, Blacks make up 37.5% of the federal prison population, which is 2.76 times their population percentage (13.6% in 2010) (United States Federal Bureau of Prisons, Citation2015).
14. Importantly the extent of mortgage discrimination is not known, in large part because Canada does not possess an equivalent of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, or the numerous public and private audits of housing discrimination (see Massey & Denton, Citation1993, chapter 4). These measures allow researchers in the United States to document the level of discrimination. All of these acts and data sets are in part the product of significant Black political mobilization against discrimination in the United States.
15. The most common measure of residential segregation, the index of dissimilarity, places southern Ontario cities (Darden, Citation2004) in the “moderate” category (30–60) as classified by Massey and Denton (Citation1993). The Ontario city level is on par with American cities where the Black population is small (see Silver, Citation2015), and the nineteenth-century version of cities that are currently very segregated (such as Detroit), also when the Black population was small (Massey & Denton, Citation1993).