Open Collections

Abstract

The class and capital-based inequities in access to home ownership are solidifying. Household autonomy in residential choice decisions can extend only within the bounds of the housing and financing network that planners and lenders have created. By drawing on Bourdieusian capital, this research aims to extend theorization on how urban planners and mortgage lenders have orchestrated the capital of the neighbourhoods in their portfolios. These actors have continuously reproduced and, through selective gatekeeping, introduced new class and capital inequalities when distributing access to housing ownership in Vancouver, Canada and London, England, in 1950–90. First, this research contextualizes the case studies by outlining key historical moments, including the changing local institutions, turbulent political regimes, and new technological innovations. Then, this research uses an archival dataset (n=201) and abductive content analysis to determine how planners and lenders were responding to their changing history. Ultimately, the findings suggest that urban planners began this timeframe with high-modernist and top-down approaches to planning that inspired them to undertake big development projects in housing and transportation. Meanwhile, lenders were important and active community members who employed a bottom up approach of conducting personalized interviews with potential borrowers. This allowed both groups to conduct more intentional evaluations of the household and its capital. Planners and lenders have converged to a stable “middle-ground” of neither top-down nor bottom-up. Instead, they were disempowered and deskilled. The community evaluations once made by planners and lenders have been respectively replaced by an overreliance on status quo measures championed by community consultation and credit score technology innovations.