Indigenous Resentment and Housing

Canada is currently facing a housing affordability crisis. Housing prices continue to rise as demand outpaces supply (Boynton, 2022) and Scotia Bank’s Chief Economist has recently argued that a considerable problem standing in the way of improved housing affordability is local opposition to new housing development (Labine, 2022). Many Canadians express support for policies that encourage housing construction and increase affordability yet we know that this support weakens among those with high anti-immigrant sentiments and, in the US, those with strong feelings of racial resentment (Rivard et al., 2024). There is a growing literature examining the factors that increase support or opposition towards housing development in Canada and internationally (Doberstein et al., 2016; Handy et al., 2008; Hankinson 2018; Lewis and Baldassare, 2010; Wicki and Kaufmann, 2022) but the literature has yet to properly consider the role of racial resentment in housing attitudes and the relationship between public and elite attitudes on local housing policy (with the exception of Trounstine 2020, 2023). Research suggests that support for development can increase when respondents are made aware of the potential of public benefits (Doberstein et al., 2016). Yet opposition increases when respondents are told the development might harm their neighbourhood character, strain public services, make parking more difficult, when the proposed development is closer to respondent’s place of residence, and among those concerned about the “type of people” moving into the new development (Hankinson, 2018; Lewis, 2015; Whittemore and BenDor, 2019). In Canada, racial resentment—or feelings of resentment/antipathy/racism towards a visible minority group—is best characterized by Canadian-born non-Indigenous peoples’ feelings towards Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Indigenous resentment has been shown to be an important predictor of policy attitudes in Canada (Beauvais, 2022) and is also associated with greater opposition toward government spending on policies that are deemed to benefit Indigenous peoples (Beauvais and Stolle, 2022). In December 2019, 87% of Squamish nation members voted to approve the Sen̓áḵw development. The project is presently being built by a collaboration between the Squamish and Westbank, a commercial property developer. The Sen̓áḵw project is an ideal case to study the effects of support for development within a real-world context. Studies that look at support for a housing project generally rely on a hypothetical project, asking the survey respondent to “imagine a housing development was being proposed near you”. In contrast, the Sen̓áḵw is a real-world example of a large-scale, controversial housing project being led by an out-group—the Squamish nation who, despite being the first inhabitants of the land, are now an ethnic minority group in Vancouver and whose ethnic origins differ from the city’s majority population. This project will advance our knowledge of (i) racial resentment, (ii) opposition to new housing, and (iii) reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous peoples more generally. Inspired by the Sen̓áḵw project, this paper looks at the extent to which opposition/support towards a hypothetical housing development is affected by whether the project is spearheaded by a local Indigenous nation and the extent to which Indigenous residents make up the share of the new residents.

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