The proprietary view: moral regulation of residential land use in Vancouver and Toronto

The cities of Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, are experiencing acute housing and affordability crises. Voices across the political spectrum are calling for increased development and densification, and suggesting policy and planning solutions, while strategic municipal interventions are being proposed and implemented. While research has revealed the origins and dimensions of housing crises in these cities, little is known about the normative moral role that property logics play within local planning and policy processes meant to transform land uses. Thus, in this paper, I interrogate proprietarian logics of neighborhood character and human flourishing, and demonstrate how property logics are deployed within land use planning contestations that affect urban development. Drawing on interviews with housing and planning actors, observations of planning events, and reviews of policy and planning documents, I argue that while proprietarian discourses can open up spaces of possibility in relation to land use transformation, they are limited in their ability to challenge existing private property regimes. I caution that proprietarian advocacy around land use change can also perpetuate a narrow view of “what is possible” while maintaining exclusionary tendencies embedded in planning and property systems. Finally, I gesture to more equitable municipal land use planning advocacy strategies in Canada.