Unit 2
2:2 Unaffordable Home
Eating on a Board of Wood – Imagine balancing it with your legs
“The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners’ knees when food was served. Over time, the wood board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It also explains why lodgers are called boarders.”
-Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Home as we know it today in North America has had a relatively short history. As the travel writer Bryson goes into detail in his book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, the Victorians first came up with the thought of the private home. One with separate living quarters for its occupants, a bath, a kitchen, and an eating space. Perhaps even a garden out the front or back. A home with locked doors, only the occupants could have full access.
Those without a home are considered lacking, ‘homeless’ being the exact though not the most intuitive word. It carries significant connotation, often being associated with vagrancy, filth and even mental unfitness or laziness (by the more conservative folk). The term ‘boarders’ has taken on new meaning, usually referring to people on holiday or students studying away from home. With the invention of Airbnb it often means temporary dwellers who are paying for their stay in a standard way (Lee 230). At one point, boarding was a hospitality service, where people paid for the services by exchanging through helping with work around the house so they could have a roof over their head for the night.
We live in a society with locked doors. Where we only open them up to people we know (sometimes), and only let strangers in to stay if the financial means and fortune of having a credit card with good credit history.
Why the context for this particular history of the home? There are many definitions for having a sense of home, or how one defines a dwelling space (arguably one can have a ‘home’ without having an actual space, it could be a feeling of comfort and security). Such diversity in meaning leads me to my own anecdote on living spaces, one based on affordability and security.
As I’ve hinted at in previous posts, I am a western transplant to the province of Ontario. Though I came to this province for different reasons, one of the reasons I have settled in Hamilton, ON is due to the cost of living. Though the GTA is beginning to have an effect on the local housing and rental market upward mobility for someone with limited connections is a lot more possible in this city than in Vancouver .
Accessibility is important to me in a city. Hamilton is currently in the midst of a gentrification process because of the Toronto influence, and it is interesting to see local NGO’s or small businesses fight to keep the diversity that makes this working class city so special. As a soon to be Yuccie, I am likely a part of this gentrification process as much as I would not like to be.
As Chamberlin noted in If this is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?, my life has been a series of displacements, which in turn has displaced other people. Seizing opportunity is one perspective of the events, a buyout of a Canadian company my father worked for in interior BC, which led to our family moving to the United States. Financial restraints to attend university in the US led me to return to Canada for postsecondary education (conversely it is also financial opportunity and physical ability to live on my own in a city separate from my family). An experience of gendered violence displaced me again, to move from Vancouver to Ontario.
I have had the fortune of being able to establish new homes in different geographical areas despite various life events that have been the cause of the displacement. Perhaps that is the most succinct definition I can muster for affordability of the home – it is not always a financial one – but a home is a place of security and sanctuary that a person can recreate despite displacement.
Works Cited:
Bryson, Bill. At Home. New York: Doubleday, 2010. Print.
Buzz, Vancity and Lauren Sundstrom. “A Generation Of Young People May Leave Vancouver Because They Can’t Afford To Stay: Poll”. Vancity Buzz. N.p., 2016. Web.
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2004. Print.
“Hamilton Housing Prices See Biggest Jump In Canada”. Thespec.com. N.p., 2015. Web.
Lee, Dayne. “How Airbnb Short-Term Rentals Exacerbate Los Angeles’s Affordable Housing Crisis: Analysis And Policy Recommendations”. Harvard Law and Policy Review 10.1 (2016): 229-235. Print.
Tuttle, Brad. “The Yuccie And 2 Dozen Other Ways To Categorize Millennials”.MONEY.com. N.p., 2015. Web.
Examining other blogs in this course, I have noticed an overlapping theme of redefining home based on one’s location. Or perhaps when one has a coming of age, and then the ability to move to a centre that more closely matches a person’s values and could feel more like home.
Building off of this, there is a distinction that Laryssa Legan makes about how one’s roots can differ from the place they call home. Focusing on the importance of place and cultural values, Laryssa feels that Kelowna provides a different sense of home as it is where she is choosing to make her adult life. I can relate to having multiple homes (and also my grandparents home in the North Okanagan in Armstrong) being my original, most perfect, ‘nostalgic’ home.
Family Home
I can also relate to having a binary to my identity, similar to Senae. Though both of my parents are Canadian, I spent half of my childhood (and adolescence) in the United States. Defining my identity as Canadian never crossed my mind until living in the US – where my peers had assumptions about life in Canada (we all live in igloos right?) – and in a way that was isolating to an extent, I was branded as the ‘Canadian’. Friends assumed I came from a people of pasty, pale skin (which negates a large portion of the diversity in Canada), who are polite, bilingual in French and English, and everyone has access to great health care (which is not always true).
As a child when one is relocated there is little choice in home. Rebuilding connections and establishing meaning is the only choice for creating comfort in where a person lives.
2:6 Paper Tigers and Roaring Maps
In order to address this question you will need to refer to Sparke’s article, “A Map that Roared and an Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, and the Narration of Nation.” You can easily find this article online. Read the section titled: “Contrapuntal Cartographies” (468 – 470). Write a blog that explains Sparke’s analysis of what Judge McEachern might have meant by this statement: “We’ll call this the map that roared.”
A narrative of a landscape is often portrayed by a map. Humans are visual creatures, and in order to interpret meaning within space, we have used maps to assign borders or allocate resources that are deemed useful to us.
In the instance with the Gixtsan and Wet’suwet’en and their map which shows their proximity to resources that have been ‘defined’ by colonizers, it is an example of using the colonizer’s language and reappropriating it for the colonized perspective.
Judge McEachern referred to the Gixtsan’s attempt as, “the map that roared,” meaning the map is ineffectual, or as Eades thinks of Sparke’s analysis of the situation, that it was a reference to paper tigers. In this instance, McEachern meant that their attempts are ineffectual, which is why the Gitxsan’s land claims were overturned and they had to proceed with the Supreme Court of Canada.
This contrapuntal form of cartography is powerful, reappropriating the knowledge so that it is useful for Gitxsan as opposed to the tool being used for colonising purposes.
What I admire about the statement from McEachern is the irony in his word choice. Referring to the map that roared references a Chinese translation of ‘paper tiger’. McEachern professed his love of traditional conservative thought (a great fan of Hobbes for example) though his use of a communist statement that critiques an Imperialist, capitalist state is priceless. Reappropriation is prevalent on both sides of the legal argument, though the Gitxsan’s intentional use is noteworthy.
References:
Eades, Gwilym Lucas. Maps And Memes. Print.
Sparke, Matthew. “A Map That Roared And An Original Atlas: Canada, Cartography, And The Narration Of Nation”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88.3 (1998): 463-495. Web.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/1950-08-Paper_Tiger.png (Image)