Highrise and Superprofits
An Analysis of the Development Industry in Canada
Barker, Graham
Publisher: Dumont Press, Kitchener, Canada
Year Published: 1973
Pages: 178pp Dewey: 334.1
Resource Type: Book
Cx Number: CX6316
Abstract:
-
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Capital Concentration and the Growth of Canadian Cities
Chapter 2: The Development Corporation
I. History of the Housing Industry
II. Growth and Consolidation: The Route to Superprofits
III. A Prime Example: Trizec Corporation
Chapter 3: The Financial Institutions and Development
I. The Context
II. The Business: Savings and Loans
III. The Institutions
IV. The Impact of Financial Capital on Development
V. The Dynamics of Big Deal Partnership
Chapter 4: The Impact of Imperialism on Development
Chapter 5: The Role of the State
I. Introduction
II. The Functions of the State
III. Three Government Studies
IV. Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation
Chapter 6: Contradictions in Development
I. Continuing Concentration of Capital
II. Urban Land as a Commodity
III. Housing as a Commodity
IV. Residents' Response
Chapter 7: Towards a Socialist Strategy
Appendix A: Taxation: Who Pays and Who Gets
Appendix B: A Guide to Corporate Research
Excerpts:
In fact, in metropolitan centres between 1968 and 1970, three times as many apartment units have been built as have single family dwellings.
Canada has had a long history of chronic capital shortage. Big capital has been primarily tied up in resource extraction, transportation and manufacturing. Consequently, the housing field was left wide open for small real estate entrepreneurs and construction firms. No great amount of capital was required to put up a few houses and the risks, once the mortgage was obtained were fairly low. It was just the right kind of business for petit-bourgeois businessmen and family partnerships. Small contractors and firms remained the norm in the early growth of Canadian cities until the 1950's.
In fact, war housing, built by the state, was only intended as a temporary measure. It was put up with great haste using cheap materials. The fact that it is still in use today, thirty years later, is an indication of how severe Canada's housing shortage has been.
Technological advances in building materials and construction tools and techniques made highrise buildings quicker and less costly to build than in pre-war years. The bigger the building, the less it cost per unit built.
Developers and government economists tell the public that labour is the main component of increased housing costs. Cost increases are allegedly attributed to low productivity and high wage settlements. This is actually a union-busting tactic which divides the working class and diverts attention from the main sources of cost increases - profiteering by land speculators and finance capitalists.
The developer is operating on the assumption that in 25 years the project will no longer realize a rate of profit as high as what the demand for that piece of land will bring on the market. So there is no point in making the building any sturdier than is minimally necessary. As people who live in highrise apartments know, the condition of many of them is appalling.
The impact of finance capital on development can be boiled down to this: Developers cannot build what finance capitalists will not fund. That is how development is determined.
Here then, we can see that the government functions designed to relieve capitalism of some of its most acute social tensions, tend to contradict themselves in the process.
Toronto Alderman John Sewell gathered statistics on the loss of family housing in that city over the last decade. He showed that 9,725 residential family units (three or more bedrooms) had been torn down. Less than half of these were replaced and the majority of new units built were the more profitable bachelor, one and two-bedroom units-over 45,000 of them.
This stratification of the work force by neighbourhoods (inner-city and suburbs) and by type of accommodation (single-family and highrise) has increased the parochial nature of tenants' and citizens' groups struggles and has inhibited unified action across the class.
As developers go about deteriorating a neighbourhood to encourage homeowners to sell, they are sometimes able to use municipal housing inspectors as patsies to hassle holdouts and make their lives miserable until they finally sell out.
Shopping centres, which are more and more frequently included as an integral part of highrise developments, are an example of spatial design which inhibit social leisure and play and promote commodity fetishism. It should be no surprise that teenagers hanging around shopping centres are in constant conflict with shop-owners and police. Their very presence is a violation of the economic imperatives of the space they are using. They are an incipient challenge to the intended activity of commodity consumption.
The potential for mass tenant unions also introduces the possibility of tenant rent strikes co-ordinated against corporate landlords on several levels, i.e. broadening a strike from just one building to all the buildings owned by a developer, and spreading strike action from one city to a national scale. Since the very nature of a rent strike is that the accommodation is occupied against the rules of private property, they tend to take on a militant character at the outset.
An interesting way to glean a little inside information and have some fun doing it, is to buy a share of a development corporation which lets you attend shareholders' meeting. This gives you the opportunity to ask the directors the kind of questions which most shareholders don't usually ask.
Subject Headings
