Gene Miller

Just read Patrick Condon’s piece on “missing middle” housing and re-read Ken Roueche’s and my own (above).

While many informative points are made/raised in all three pieces, none (though Ken’s comes closest) really explains with the force it deserves that missing middle is tantamount to a social revolution. While it doesn’t prohibit continued single-family home ownership/occupancy, it challenges (and threatens) the idea of single-family neighbourhoods; that is, it rejects the idea that any zone in the city protects the exclusivity of single-family living and social entitlements—that I may, with confidence, stand in my front yard and wave to my fellow single-family home owners flanking and surrounding me.

I use dramatic words like “challenge” and “threaten” and “social revolution,” but, of course, it’s all a matter of perspective. There are endless streets in Victoria where former single-family homes have been converted to suites (just count mailboxes) and it appears that the world hasn’t ended for adjacent single-family dwellers. And while Ken Roueche may be technically correct about possible allowable suite sizes and building heights, do a walk or drive past 417 Vancouver Street, a relatively new eight-plex that stays low, parks all of its cars on-site, and does no visual damage to the street.

I think, though, that Roueche is invoking technical features as code for the transformation of a street’s or neighbourhood’s tone and feel; and it’s my point in this note to raise this matter to the surface. I don’t take a position, but only wish to give the reader a clear sense of the potential profound transformation in the social characteristics of our neighbourhoods. 

Missing middle is nothing more (or less) than a strategy for distributed density. Given the monstrosities that are springing up around Downtown, I’m inclined to feel that MM comes too late. Regarding affordability, I’m entirely with Patrick Condon, and believe that affordability comes from one place only: government policy and funding. The market will never deliver affordable housing to anyone who can’t ‘afford’ to pay market rates.

On 2021-06-23 at 11:48 PM, Guest Uddhi said:

What a preposterous article. How dare you compare the "scars" of the homeless camps in beacon hill to the 215 child victims of Kamloops' residential school, and then, as if that wasn't ridiculous enough, to the nazi genocide?! No retort of mine is worthy enough to encompass this ignorant attitude.

Hi Uddhi,

I agree with so much of what you write. The prose is mellifluous and privileged; the comparison between the homeless impact on Beacon Hill Park and the First Nations child deaths or Nazi genocide is, on its surface, preposterous; the column reeks of ‘colonial’ sensibility.

But you over-credit and mis-read the purpose, or purposes, of the column. I’m not trying to solve the world’s problems here. I’m not calling people to the fight. I’m simply projecting melancholy over a slight but noticeable increase in the quality of social risk here. It’s a scary world; social safety is not such a trivial condition, but one to be treasured.

My father, born in America, changed his name from Pfau to Miller. When I was young and asked why all of our wider family socializing was on my mom’s side (she had four sisters, and everyone lived in New York), he explained to me that the majority of his family, all Jews (like me), had remained in Germany and been caught. I cite the First Nations deaths and the Holocaust not to compare them to a park mess, but simply to illustrate my belief that loss is ruinous, loss diminishes.

Victoria’s physical beauty and safety aren’t only colonial. They are also social facts. Also, they exist alongside a tremendous amount of social activism in this city and I ask: doesn’t social activism exist, in part, to more widely spread the gifts of social safety and beauty?

I’d like to know what you’re up to and would be pleased to have good conversation with you; if you wish, get in touch (gene@newlandmarks.com) …so we can hook for coffee, or a walk in the park.

Gene Miller