Quotulatiousness

November 2, 2024

Maxime Bernier on Canada’s immigration crisis

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This article has been posted at the Telegraph in the UK and mailed out by the PPC here in Canada, so I guess it’s okay to share it here:

Newsflash: Canada is in the process of falling apart.

No, it’s not because Quebec is once again threatening to hold a referendum on separation, although this may happen again in the coming years.

Our country is experiencing a series of crises because of the deliberate policy of mass immigration instigated by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government soon after its election in 2015.

Last year, Canada’s population increased by almost 1.3 million people, or 3.2 per cent. This was the fastest annual population growth rate since the post-war years. The difference however is that this was not caused by a baby boom, since 97 per cent of the growth was due to international migration, mostly from Asia and Africa.

This includes not only immigrants per se – or “permanent residents” – but also so-called temporary foreign workers, foreign students, and asylum seekers. Although supposed to be temporary, the last categories have in fact become pathways to seek permanent residency.

Because of this, housing in Canada has now become completely unaffordable. Young couples who want to have children just cannot afford to buy a home with a nice backyard where they can raise them any more, with the result that our birth rate has dropped dramatically.

Our hospitals, social services, and infrastructures are being overburdened by this massive demographic tsunami.

Immigration is often justified by its supposed positive impact on the economy. But productivity and wages have been stagnant for a decade in Canada, as cheap immigrant labour is favoured by employers over capital investment and automation.

Canadian politics has been mired for months in scandals over foreign interference, in particular China and India. India has been the largest source of immigrants to Canada for several years. Last week, Canada and India expelled diplomats over allegations by the Trudeau government that Indian diplomats have been involved in attacks against Khalistani militants in our country, including the murder last year of one that India considers a terrorist.

Because of mass immigration, Canadian politics is more and more focused not on actual Canadian issues, but on ethnic, religious, and foreign issues and wars, with establishment politicians spending an extraordinary amount of time courting the votes of minority ethnic groups in suburban marginal ridings.

The third most important national party, the New Democratic Party that has kept the Trudeau minority government in power, is headed by Jagmeet Singh. A Sikh by background, he initially declined to condemn Talwinder Singh Parmar, the mastermind responsible for the 1985 bombing of an Air India plane in which hundreds of Canadians were killed. However Singh did change his stance when a Canadian inquiry concluded that Parmar was definitely behind the outrage.

For his part, the leader of the Conservative Party and very likely our next prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, is known for donning national or religious dress as he panders to members of various communities.

In 2018, as a then Conservative Member of Parliament, I posted a series of tweets that denounced what I called Trudeau’s “cult of diversity” which, I contended, would lead to the Balkanisation of Canadian society, and potentially to violence.

Almost daily scenes of Muslims attacking Jewish institutions, Sikhs burning the Indian flag, and Ethiopian factions fighting each other in the streets of our cities, have proven me right.

Publicly attacking these woke dogmas wasn’t allowed at the time in Canada though, and it provoked a huge outcry. Even my leader and colleagues in the Conservative Party denounced me, which led me to resign and launch a populist right-wing party which is broadly the Canadian equivalent of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.

If you believe that more diversity is always good and always enriches your society, then it’s logical and inevitable that you will end up importing lots of people with incompatible values and attitudes from around the world, including religious fanatics and even terrorists, who can’t possibly integrate in a country with a European, secular Christian heritage.

That’s what we’ve been doing for years, and that’s why everything that historically made Canada what it was is rapidly being destroyed. I know there has been a similar trend in the UK and other European countries, but Canada went way further down this road.

Canada’s demise started when what was already a very diverse country (with Indigenous, French and British founding peoples, and many different regional cultures) fell for this radical version of multiculturalism instead of tempering it with a focus on shared values and attitudes, pride in our history, and in the achievements of Western civilisation.

Now, not only are our democratic institutions, our economy, and our social peace and cohesion, falling apart, but so are our very identity and reason to exist as a country.

All these trends are so overwhelming that, unable to deny the reality any more, the Trudeau government finally announced last week that they would be gradually lowering their immigration targets in the coming years instead of continuing to increase them.

Although this is a massive U-turn for this government, it is far from being a sufficient reduction, and a lot more will need to be done to repair the damage. Otherwise, I don’t believe Canada will survive the 21st century.

September 29, 2024

The “Foundations” essay could apply equally to Canada’s doldrums as it does to Britain

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Earlier this week, I linked to the “Foundations” essay by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman and it struck me that so much of what they discuss about Britain’s stagnation applied at least as well to Canada. In the National Post, John Ivison concurs:

The “Foundations” essay pointed to moribund GDP per capita growth, among other data points, to make the argument that Britain is standing still economically. (Britain’s economy grew 0.7 per cent a year between 2002 and 2022, Canada’s increased 0.6 per cent a year in the same period, while U.S. output swelled 1.16 per cent a year.)

In relative terms, both countries are getting poorer: in 2002, Canada’s GDP per person was 81 per cent of the U.S.; in 2022, it was 72 per cent. The same figures for the U.K. against the U.S. are 78 per cent in 2002 and, 70 per cent in 2022.

The reason for Britain’s stagnation, the authors argue, is that it has effectively banned investment in transportation, energy and housing — “the foundations it needs to grow.”

Sound familiar?

“The most important economic fact about modern Britain is that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand,” the authors write, saying the result is lower productivity, incomes and tax revenues.

They argued that Britain needs a program of reform with the scale and ambition of the liberalization of the 1980s that focused on cutting taxes, curbing union power and privatizing state-run industries.

“This time we must focus on making it easier to invest in homes, labs, railways, roads, bridges, interconnectors and nuclear reactors,” they write.

That’s a difficult proposition for politicians who are able to resist anything except the temptation to use resources for immediate electoral gratification, rather than investing for a time after they have left office.

Both Canada and Britain are laggards when it comes to investment in infrastructure. While China spent more than five per cent of its GDP on roads, bridges and other infrastructure in 2021, Canada invested just 0.5 per cent (down from 1.3 per cent in 2010) and the U.K. 0.9 per cent.

But the lack of dynamism is not simply political expediency. Rather, it is motivated by an indifference, even a hostility, toward building critical infrastructure.

The Foundations report noted that Britain has not built a reservoir for 30 years, yet faces chronic water shortages in the east of England. Its environmental agency has blocked new development on the basis that it could only be supplied with water by draining environmentally valuable chalk streams. The result is that England’s innovation hub, Cambridge, is barred from expanding, which threatens to strangle the country’s life-sciences industry.

Similar impulses are at work in Canada. Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said in February that Ottawa would stop investing in new road infrastructure — a position he later clarified to say meant the federal government would not fund large projects like a highway tunnel connecting Quebec City and Levis, Que.

That same sentiment is reflected in the federal Liberal government’s Impact Assessment Act, passed in 2019, which slowed the pace and increased the cost of major project approvals.

On the housing front, a generation of activists emerged who were intent on preventing urban sprawl yet were also opposed to building mid-rise buildings of the kind that eased housing pressures in continental Europe. Constraints on approval are a major contributor to the 3.5-million-unit housing gap because supply has not kept pace with demand.

The consequence of Canada’s regulatory sclerosis is what business veteran Paul Deegan and former clerk of the Privy Council Kevin Lynch in an FP Comment article earlier this year referred to as “an insidious stealth tax on Canadian jobs and growth“.

Taking each of the “foundations” in turn, the depth of the problem becomes clearer — but so do the solutions.

September 24, 2024

British stagnation – “at some point it becomes impossible to grow when investment is banned”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Economics, France — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ed West reviews a new essay by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman which tries to identify the underlying reasons for British economic stagnation:

The theme running through the essay is that the British system makes it very hard to invest and extremely expensive and legally difficult to build, making housing and energy costs prohibitive.

While we all know we have fallen in status, “most popular explanations for this are misguided. The Labour manifesto blamed slow British growth on a lack of “strategy” from the Government, by which it means not enough targeted investment winner picking, and too much inequality. Some economists say that the UK’s economic model of private capital ownership is flawed, and that limits on state capital expenditure are the fundamental problem. They also point to more state spending as the solution, but ignore that this investment would face the same barriers and high costs that existing infrastructure projects face, and that deters private investment.”

The problem is that “all of these explanations take the biggest obstacles to growth for granted: at some point it becomes impossible to grow when investment is banned”.

Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the industrial price of energy had tripled in under 20 years. Per capita electricity generation in Britain is only two-thirds that of France, and a third of the US, making us closer to developing countries like Brazil and South Africa than other G7 states. Transport projects are absurdly expensive, mired by planning rules, and all of this helps explain why annual real wages for the median full-time worker are 6.9 per cent lower than in 2008.

In one of the most notorious examples, the authors note that “the planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.”

Britain’s political elites have failed, they argue, because they do not understand the problems, so “they tinker ineffectually, mesmerised by the uncomprehended disaster rising up before them”.

Even “before the pandemic, Americans were 34 percent richer than us in terms of GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power, and 17 percent more productive per hour … The gap has only widened since then: productivity growth between 2019 and 2023 was 7.6 percent in the United States, and 1.5 percent in Britain … the French and Germans are 15 percent and 18 percent more productive than us respectively.” The gap continues to widen, and on current trends, Poland will be richer than the United Kingdom by the end of the decade.

Britain began to fall behind after the War, but after decades of relative stagnation, its GDP per capita had converged with the US, Germany and France in the 1980s, and our relative wealth peaked in the early Blair years. (Personally, I wonder if one reason for the great Oasis nostalgia is simply that we were rich back then.) If Britain had continued growing in line with its 1979-2008 trends, average income today would be £41,800 instead of £33,500 — a huge difference.

France is the most natural comparison point to Britain, a country “notoriously heavily regulated and dominated by labour unions”. This is sometimes comical to British sensibilities, so that “French workers have been known to strike by kidnapping their chief executives – a practice that the public there reportedly supports – and strikes are so common that French unions have designed special barbecues that fit in tram tracks so they can grill sausages while they march.” Only in France.

It is also heavily taxed, especially in the realm of employment, and yet despite this, French workers are significantly more productive. The reason is that France “does a good job building the things that Britain blocks: housing, infrastructure and energy supply”.

With a slightly smaller population, France has 37 million homes compared to our 30 million. “Those homes are newer, and are more concentrated in the places people want to live: its prosperous cities and holiday regions. The overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent.” One quality-of-life indicator is that “800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families“.

They also do transport far better, with 29 tram networks compared to seven in Britain, and six underground metro systems against our three. “Since 1980, France has opened 1,740 miles of high speed rail, compared to just 67 miles in Britain. France has nearly 12,000 kilometres of motorways versus around 4,000 kilometres here … In the last 25 years alone, the French built more miles of motorway than the entire UK motorway network. They are even allowed to drive around 10 miles per hour faster on them.”

August 4, 2024

The rise and (rapid) fall of the Levittown model

Filed under: Business, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Virginia Postrel linked to this interesting post at Construction Physics which traces the brief heyday of William Levitt’s “Levittown” model for mass-producing modern housing:

Prefabbed components and appliances for a Levittown home.
Image from Construction Physics.

For decades, people have tried to bring mass production methods to housing: to build houses the way we build cars. While no one has succeeded, arguably the man that came closest to becoming “the Henry Ford of homebuilding” was William Levitt, with his company Levitt and Sons. Levitt is most famous for building “Levittowns”, developments of thousands of homes built rapidly in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. By optimizing the construction process with improvements like standardized products and reverse assembly line techniques, Levitt and Sons was able to complete dozens of homes a day at what it claimed was a far lower cost than its competitors. William Levitt styled his company as the General Motors of housing, and both he and it became famous. Levitt graced the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and Levittowns became a household name.

For a time, it appeared that Levitt might actually sweep away the old way of building and become the Henry Ford of housing through modern mass production techniques. Levitt boasted that he could build more cheaply than anyone else, and for decades Levitt and Sons was the largest homebuilder in the U.S., and probably the world.1 But Levitt’s success unraveled. By the late 1970s, Levitt and Sons had barely escaped bankruptcy, and it emerged as a small, conventional homebuilder, which it would remain until it went out of business for good in 2018. Levitt himself would leave Levitt and Sons in the early 1970s, lose his fortune after a series of failed development projects in the U.S. and abroad, and die penniless in 1994.

Levitt’s model of large-scale, efficient homebuilding using mass production-style methods worked for a brief window in the 1950s, but by the end of the 1960s a changing housing market and increasingly strict land use controls meant that such methods were no longer feasible. And even at its peak, Levitt likely pushed large-scale building beyond what could be justified on pure economic terms. Levittown was ultimately a response to a temporary set of housing market conditions, not the herald of a new, better way of building.

[…]

First Levitt homes at Levittown.
Image from Construction Physics.

At Levittown, the construction process was broken down into 26 separate steps, each performed by a separate crew. Crews would go to a house, perform their required task (using material that had been pre-delivered), then move on to the next house. Within the crew, work was further specialized: on the washing machine installation crew, William Levitt noted that “one man did nothing but fix bolts into the floor, another followed to attach the machine”, and so on. By breaking down the process into repetitive, well-defined steps, workers didn’t have to spend time figuring out what they should do (what Levitt described as “fumbling and figuring”).

In addition to task and product standardization, Levitt and Sons took advantage of machines and mechanization wherever possible. It had its own cement trucks, and operated its own foundation-digging machinery and cinder block-making machinery. Levitt and Sons was an early user of power tools like paint sprayers, power saws, routers, and nailers. The company also made extensive use of what at the time were relatively novel factory-produced materials, like plywood and drywall.

Like any mass production process, the ultimate enemy of building Levittown was delay: keeping construction on track meant a steady, uninterrupted stream of material that arrived at the jobsite exactly when needed. On a typical construction site, as much as half the time was wasted while workers wandered around looking for needed material. In Levitt’s operation, wasted time was close to zero. To ensure timely material deliveries (and to cut out middlemen), Levitt and Sons had its own distribution company, the North Shore Supply Company, which stretched for half a mile along a railroad stop near the jobsite. To avoid delays, North Shore Supply kept a sufficient supply of material on-hand to build 75 houses, and pre-assembled items like plumbing trees, stairs, and cabinets. North Shore was also where lumber was pre-cut to the correct size. By using standardized designs, planned work sequences, and carefully controlled precutting, Levitt and Sons was able to almost entirely eliminate rework during the construction process.

But assuring an uninterrupted flow of material required far more than just owning a distribution company. William Levitt described some of the extreme measures the company went to avoid delays or slowdowns:

    We wouldn’t let ourselves be stopped by shortages. When cement was unavailable in this country we chartered a boat and brought it in from Europe. When lumber was in short supply, we bought a forest in California and built a mill. When nails were hard to come by, we set up a factory in our backyard and made them ourselves.

At its peak Levitt and Sons was completing 36 homes in Levittown a day. And the huge backlog of demand meant that housing was sold quickly. Months before the first Levittown homes were completed, families stood in line for the opportunity to rent one (roughly the first 2,000 Levittown homes were built as rentals). On a single day in 1949, Levitt and Sons sold 1400 homes, some to families who had been waiting in line for days. At $7,990 for a 800 square foot home, Levitt boasted that he could sell his houses for $1,500 less than the competition and still make $1,000 in profit.2

[…]

William Levitt tried harder than anyone else to make housing mass producing happen, and for a brief moment it looked like he might succeed. But Levitt’s dreams were predicated on a particular set of housing market conditions — a huge backlog of demand, relatively few competitors, compliant building jurisdictions and little public opposition — that quickly dissipated. In The Merchant Builders, Ned Eichler notes that as early as the mid-1950s, the Levitt model of a single, enormous project built rapidly with mass production-style methods no longer made sense. Says Eichler, “There simply was no market in which an appropriate site could be bought cheaply enough or in which demand was great enough to sustain such a pace”. Many of Levitt’s innovations — slabs instead of basements, power tools, drywall and plywood — did not require large volume production, and were adopted by other, smaller builders (and have since become standard). The enormous increase in land use controls starting in the late 1960s only further inhibited the sort of large-scale developments that Levitt favored.

    1. Levitt and Sons was at least the largest in the U.S. in 1950, and was in 1968 when it was acquired by ITT, and probably for some years after that.

    2. The first Levittown demonstration homes were sold for $6,990.

May 16, 2024

QotD: Modern parenting in open-concept houses

Filed under: Architecture, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… our era does seem to be peculiarly marked by careless design. Few of the men who built middle-class versions of the Craftsman bungalow or Colonial Revival in the early twentieth century were trained architects, and they often adapted or simplified their designs to cut costs, and yet they somehow managed to get their proportions right. They might have used fewer columns than the more expensive examples of their styles, but what columns they did employ were the right shape, while today’s are liable to be too skinny (if Classically-inspired) or fat and stubby (if Craftsman). I won’t pretend I have an explanation for this — it seems a small aesthetic piece of a much broader societal failure, just one more case of chucking tradition out the window. Architect Léon Krier suggests that once the language of traditional design had been intentionally destroyed by architecture schools, it was very hard to recreate or rediscover because our new and exciting construction materials do not punish us for our errors the way wood, stone, and lime do. (“Even a genius,” he writes, “cannot build a lasting mistake out of nature’s materials.”)

But the real crime of most new construction isn’t the exterior details. It’s inside, and it’s walls. They’re missing.

Open floorplans are bad. They’re bad for entertaining and they’re bad for families. Sure, that photo looks great (if you’re allergic to color and texture) and the HGTV hosts love ’em, but imagine actually living in that room with children. Seriously, just try: how fast are the cushions coming off those couches? How fast are your neutrals drowned beneath colorful toys and backpacks? (Unless you’re inflicting the same sad beige color scheme on your children.) How much visual clutter can a room of that size accumulate, and how much help will a small child need just figuring out where to start tidying up?

How many times do you have to ask the monster truck vs. dinosaur battle by the fireplace to pipe down so you can talk to Daddy over here by the stove, for Pete’s sake?

There’s a school of American parenting that says every moment with your child should be spent intensively nurturing his or her precious individual development. At lunch, for instance, you should make eye contact with your ten-month-old and describe the texture and flavor of each food (perhaps in French!) while Baby carefully grinds it into her hair. Your child’s quiet drawing time will surely be enhanced by his mother hovering at his elbow: “Tell me about your picture, honey! Uh-huh, and how do we think the villagers feel about Gigantor devouring them? Gosh, you sure gave him some big teeth!” An open floorplan is a tremendous boon to this sort of parenting: your child is always visible, so you can always be engaged.

It is completely impossible to raise more than maybe two children this way.

I don’t know which way the causation goes — do parents who were already inclined to be a little more laid-back and hands-off find their lives have room for more kids, or does sheer number of children force you to alter your tactics? — but either way, small families and intensive parenting go together, and they live in an open-concept house with 1.64 children.

Walls and doors, on the other hand, are God’s greatest gift to large families. Of course it is wonderful to be together. It’s important to have spaces that will fit everyone. (We were very sad when it was no longer possible to pile everyone into a king-size bed, even with elbows.) But it’s just as important to be able to be apart: because your little brother is practicing piano while you’re trying to do algebra, or a blanket fort combines poorly with an elaborate board game, or just because LEGO spaceships are a noisy business and your mother is reading to your sisters. (Or, God forbid, reading a book herself.)

Because at the end of the day, houses are just the stage where life happens. This isn’t to say that the stage-dressing is irrelevant — there is real worth and value to surrounding ourselves with order and beauty, and understanding how your house or neighborhood got to be that way can illuminate new things about the world. But ultimately, what matters most is how you make it a home.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia Savage McAlester”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-12-05.

March 13, 2024

QotD: Filthy coal

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Health, History, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… coal smoke had dramatic implications for daily life even beyond the ways it reshaped domestic architecture, because in addition to being acrid it’s filthy. Here, once again, [Ruth] Goodman’s time running a household with these technologies pays off, because she can speak from experience:

    So, standing in my coal-fired kitchen for the first time, I was feeling confident. Surely, I thought, the Victorian regime would be somewhere halfway between the Tudor and the modern. Dirt was just dirt, after all, and sweeping was just sweeping, even if the style of brushes had changed a little in the course of five hundred years. Washing-up with soap was not so very different from washing-up with liquid detergent, and adding soap and hot water to the old laundry method of bashing the living daylights out of clothes must, I imagined, make it a little easier, dissolving dirt and stains all the more quickly. How wrong could I have been.

    Well, it turned out that the methods and technologies necessary for cleaning a coal-burning home were fundamentally different from those for a wood-burning one. Foremost, the volume of work — and the intensity of that work — were much, much greater.

The fundamental problem is that coal soot is greasy. Unlike wood soot, which is easily swept away, it sticks: industrial cities of the Victorian era were famously covered in the residue of coal fires, and with anything but the most efficient of chimney designs (not perfected until the early twentieth century), the same thing also happens to your interior. Imagine the sort of sticky film that settles on everything if you fry on the stove without a sufficient vent hood, then make it black and use it to heat not just your food but your entire house; I’m shuddering just thinking about it. A 1661 pamphlet lamented coal smoke’s “superinducing a sooty Crust or Furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest Stones with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphure.” To clean up from coal smoke, you need soap.

“Coal needs soap?” you may say, suspiciously. “Did they … not use soap before?” But no, they (mostly) didn’t, a fact that (like the famous “Queen Elizabeth bathed once a month whether she needed it or not” line) has led to the medieval and early modern eras’ entirely undeserved reputation for dirtiness. They didn’t use soap, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t clean; instead, they mostly swept ash, dust, and dirt from their houses with a variety of brushes and brooms (often made of broom) and scoured their dishes with sand. Sand-scouring is very simple: you simply dampen a cloth, dip it in a little sand, and use it to scrub your dish before rinsing the dirty sand away. The process does an excellent job of removing any burnt-on residue, and has the added advantage of removed a micro-layer of your material to reveal a new sterile surface. It’s probably better than soap at cleaning the grain of wood, which is what most serving and eating dishes were made of at the time, and it’s also very effective at removing the poisonous verdigris that can build up on pots made from copper alloys like brass or bronze when they’re exposed to acids like vinegar. Perhaps more importantly, in an era where every joule of energy is labor-intensive to obtain, it works very well with cold water.

The sand can also absorb grease, though a bit of grease can actually be good for wood or iron (I wash my wooden cutting boards and my cast-iron skillet with soap and water,1 but I also regularly oil them). Still, too much grease is unsanitary and, frankly, gross, which premodern people recognized as much as we do, and particularly greasy dishes, like dirty clothes, might also be cleaned with wood ash. Depending on the kind of wood you’ve been burning, your ashes will contain up to 10% potassium hydroxide (KOH), better known as lye, which reacts with your grease to create a soap. (The word potassium actually derives from “pot ash,” the ash from under your pot.) Literally all you have to do to clean this way is dump a handful of ashes and some water into your greasy pot and swoosh it around a bit with a cloth; the conversion to soap is very inefficient (though if you warm it a little over the fire it works better), but if your household runs on wood you’ll never be short of ashes. As wood-burning vanished, though, it made more sense to buy soap produced industrially through essentially the same process (though with slightly more refined ingredients for greater efficiency) and to use it for everything.

Washing greasy dishes with soap rather than ash was a matter of what supplies were available; cleaning your house with soap rather than a brush was an unavoidable fact of coal smoke. Goodman explains that “wood ash also flies up and out into the room, but it is not sticky and tends to fall out of the air and settle quickly. It is easy to dust and sweep away. A brush or broom can deal with the dirt of a wood fire in a fairly quick and simple operation. If you try the same method with coal smuts, you will do little more than smear the stuff about.” This simple fact changed interior decoration for good: gone were the untreated wood trims and elaborate wall-hangings — “[a] tapestry that might have been expected to last generations with a simple routine of brushing could be utterly ruined in just a decade around coal fires” — and anything else that couldn’t withstand regular scrubbing with soap and water. In their place were oil-based paints and wallpaper, both of which persist in our model of “traditional” home decor, as indeed do the blue and white Chinese-inspired glazed ceramics that became popular in the 17th century and are still going strong (at least in my house). They’re beautiful, but they would never have taken off in the era of scouring with sand; it would destroy the finish.

But more important than what and how you were cleaning was the sheer volume of the cleaning. “I believe,” Goodman writes towards the end of the book, “there is vastly more domestic work involved in running a coal home in comparison to running a wood one.” The example of laundry is particularly dramatic, and her account is extensive enough that I’ll just tell you to read the book, but it goes well beyond that:

    It is not merely that the smuts and dust of coal are dirty in themselves. Coal smuts weld themselves to all other forms of dirt. Flies and other insects get entrapped in it, as does fluff from clothing and hair from people and animals. to thoroughly clear a room of cobwebs, fluff, dust, hair and mud in a simply furnished wood-burning home is the work of half an hour; to do so in a coal-burning home — and achieve a similar standard of cleanliness — takes twice as long, even when armed with soap, flannels and mops.

And here, really, is why Ruth Goodman is the only person who could have written this book: she may be the only person who has done any substantial amount of domestic labor under both systems who could write. Like, at all. Not that there weren’t intelligent and educated women (and it was women doing all this) in early modern London, but female literacy was typically confined to classes where the women weren’t doing their own housework, and by the time writing about keeping house was commonplace, the labor-intensive regime of coal and soap was so thoroughly established that no one had a basis for comparison.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.

    1. Yeah, I know they tell you not to do this because it will destroy the seasoning. They’re wrong. Don’t use oven cleaner; anything you’d use to wash your hands in a pinch isn’t going to hurt long-chain polymers chemically bonded to cast iron.

January 19, 2024

Canada “as a white supremacist genocidal settler state” also somehow has an immigration problem

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson documents what she characterizes as a collapse of the pro-immigration consensus that has been a major part of Canadian political affairs for generations:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province.

Canada created a durable and lasting consensus on immigration by leaning on a shared national mythology: that from a colonial past, we forged a principled multicultural nation in which people from around the world are able to honour their heritage and traditions while building a prosperous and successful life for themselves and their descendants. This narrative requires that all of us — regardless of our divergent ideologies or religious views — cohere around a shared set of post-enlightenment principles: the equality of man, the rule of law, tolerance, and the rest. We take this highly abstract concept of nationhood so for granted that we’ve forgotten how historically rare it is.

This is not to say Canada ever imagined itself to have an unblemished history, but rather that this is a nation that saw itself as a fundamentally good and noble project, and therefore some place worth immigrating to, and a culture worth integrating with.

The last nine years of Liberal government have undermined that vision. Under the Trudeau Liberals, instead what we have been regularly subjected to Canada as a white supremacist genocidal settler state. And, hey, to what extent that historical reckoning is good or necessary is not for me to say: but if “Canada is bad, actually” is the starting position, by what delusion do any of us presume to perpetuate it?

A post-modern nation state that has no sense of itself, and no belief in its own inherent value, is not an experiment worth continuing, now is it? How do we expect to welcome and integrate 500,000 new Canadians annually into a corrupt national project? If “Canadian” isn’t something worth being, why should anyone sublimate their ethnic or religious grievances into this vicious national identity?

I think this is the tension that lies at the heart of this growing unease around immigration, and it’s going to be the most difficult one for the Conservatives to navigate. There will be those within the party that follow this thread directly into white grievance and conspiracies like great replacement theory, the xenophobic fear that “elites” are trying to demographically and culturally replace white people through mass migration.

I think that theory is insane, to be clear, but I’m also noticing it wend its way into politics in weird and destructive ways.

A small example: before the holidays, certain conservative social media circles were put into a state of high uproar over the construction of a 55-foot statue of the Hindu deity Hanuman on a private temple complex in Brampton.

Initially, I was baffled and confused and even a bit amused by the upset. After all, this wasn’t a publicly funded monument. It was on private property, and isn’t respect for private property a sacrosanct value for conservatives? This wasn’t rational.

The controversy was only explicable when we examine the emotional subtext of the complaints: that there was something deeply menacing about Hanuman to these people. They saw him overlooking the suburbs of Brampton with a colonial intent. (Irony abounds!) One of the most telling tweets came from one angry individual who said something to the effect: “They tore down our John A. Macdonald statues, but, sure, Hanuman is great.”

To this gentleman: the fine devout Hindus of Brampton did not tear down your John A. Macdonald statues — and I highly doubt they would any pick bones with historic or civic monuments.

We, Canadians, tore down our own statues (or allowed them to be torn down) as part of an internal process of historical reckoning. Again, immigrants are not doing anything to Canada. They are Canada, and as such, they share in this country’s problems, which are largely self created.

December 17, 2023

How RFK, Jr. helped destroy British Columbia’s resource-based economy

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson found herself added to one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s fundraising mailing lists:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.

I am on RFKJr’s campaign mailing list, probably through Children’s Health Defence and they asked me for money, and I said sure, just as soon as he fixes the catastrophe he caused in the province where I live.

Got a message back!

It read, “Elizabeth, I am sure Robert would fix whatever harm he caused, can you explain?”

No problem, I said.

1. In British Columbia, we had the largest industrial forest in the world

2. It paid for education and universal “free” health care.

3. The environmental left decided to shut it down.

4. The reason for their protest was that the government, as was common practice, had sold cutting permits with long leaseholds. A new socialist government announced it was pulling the permits and taking those forests back.

5. In order not to lose all the invested money, which they had not only paid for upfront and in annual leasing charges, but paid taxes on, some for decades, lessees immediately clear cut their lands. Clear cuts are ugly. (but they are fire breaks)

6. That triggered the protest.

7. RFK Jr came in under RiverKeepers and supercharged the protest. His celebrity and glamour made the protest major international news. I was in London, I heard about it. More kids joined the protest. And then more and more. Until the government caved. Would it have happened without his presence? I do not think so. He gave very young people who had no access to power, nor any hope of it, ever, a very heady hit of significance and their lives took on huge huge meaning. For many it remains the high point of their lives. Because for the province, it was all downhill from there. All promise vanished and a grinding slow growth followed.

8. Over the ensuing ten years, cutting was diminished and heavy regulation covered the rest. By 2002, written regulations piled on top of each other stood seven feet high, taller than a man.

9. Forested communities died.

10. 100,000 families lost their livelihood.

11. Resource jobs have huge multipliers, not only forested towns died, so did regional metropolitan centers. Greens, replete with success, hit other resource industries – mining, ranching – which died. More families bankrupted.

12. They were told to go into tourism.

13. Which pays minimum wage and can only support a family if everyone, even the children, work. And, it’s seasonal.

14. Over time, the unmanaged forests became clogged with overgrowth, little trees like carrots pulled all the water from the forest floor, desiccated the soil and then pulled water from aquifers. The forests became tinder. And increasingly every summer, they explode in fire.

15. The government needed money.

16. Casinos provided it.

17. Asian cartels – you cannot imagine how violent they are – moved in and used the casinos to launder most of the drug money from North America. They bribed immigration, they bribed city government, they threatened anyone who tried to stand in their way.

18. They were so successful, human trafficking and child sex trafficking shot up. We have the second largest port on the west coast of North and South America. Through it streams container loads of drugs and trafficked children and women. At the port, you just stand aside, if you want to live. You think most of the fentanyl comes in through Mexico? Nope. It comes in through us.

19. The cartels do pay taxes. You think Black Rock is bad? These guys kill if they don’t get what they want. They are buying every business they can, to launder money through. The cartels also launder money through real estate in the city. That means housing is insanely expensive and property taxes are sky high. Canadians can’t afford to buy houses or live in the ones they own. A family making a median income has to pay 100% of income to buy a median priced house.

20. Crime is a) a driver of the economy and b) a principal source of government revenue.

21. Green has destroyed the province.

And that, I am afraid, is what celebrities do. It is why they are so hated, and one of the reason Hollywood is dying. They destroy the lives of ordinary men and women, and then move on to greater heights. Their lives are so privileged, they have absolutely no idea how people make money. And RFKJr, mind-numbingly privileged from birth, is the same. When asked about climate change, he says it’s happening but taxes won’t work. “Regenerative agriculture” he says, vaguely. It is true, regenerative agriculture could capture a lot of carbon, the amount debatable but it has promise. But cutting regulation? He has no, zero, absolutely no idea of how regulation punishes the non-elites. His is a black hole of ignorance and that is common; a majority have zero idea. Zero.

December 8, 2023

The development of the American suburb

Filed under: Architecture, Books, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest book review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, Jane Psmith discusses A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised): The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture, by Virginia Savage McAlester. In particular, she looks at McAlester’s coverage of how suburbs developed:

After some brief but interesting discussion of cities,1 most of the page count is devoted to the suburbs. It’s a sensible choice: suburbs have by far the most varied types of house groupings, and more than half of Americans live in one. But what exactly is a “suburb”? It’s a wildly imprecise word, referring to anything that is neither truly rural nor the central urban core, and suburbs vary tremendously in character. As a working definition, though, a suburb is marked by free-standing houses on relatively larger lots. (If you can think of a counter-example that qualifies but is “urban”, I’ll bet you $5 it started out as a suburb before the city ate it.)

This means that building a suburb has a few obvious technological prerequisites, which McAlester lists as follows: First, balloon-frame construction, which enabled not just corners but quick and inexpensive construction generally and removed much of the incentive for the shared walls that were so common in the early cityscape. Second, the proliferation of gas and electric utilities in the late nineteenth century meant that the less energy-efficient free-standing homes could still be heated relatively inexpensively. Third, the spread of telephone service after 1880 meant that it was much easier to stay in touch with friends whose front doors weren’t literally ten feet away from yours.2 But by far the most important technological advances came in the field of transportation, which is obviously necessary if you’re going to live in the country (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and work in the city.

The first of these transportation advances was the railroad. In fact “railroad suburb” is a bit of a misnomer, because most of the collections of houses that grew up around the new rail stops were fully functional towns that had their own agricultural or manufacturing industries. The most famous railroad suburbs, however, were indeed planned as residential communities serving those wealthy enough to pay the steep daily rail fare into the city. Llewellyn Park near New York City, Riverside near Chicago, and the Main Line near Philadelphia are all examples of railroad suburbs that have maintained their tony atmosphere and high property values.

The next and more dramatic change was the advent of the electric trolley or streetcar, first introduced in 1887 but popular until about 1930. (That’s what all the books say, but come on, it’s probably October 1929, right?) Unlike steam locomotives, which take quite a long time to build up speed or to slow down again, and so usually had their stations placed at least a mile apart, streetcars could start and stop far more easily and feature many more, and more densely-placed, stops. Developers typically built a streetcar line from the city veering off into the thinly-inhabited countryside, ending at an attraction like a park or fairground if possible. If they were smart, they’d bought up the land along the streetcar beforehand and could sell it off for houses,3 but either way the new streetcar line added value to the land and the development of the land made the streetcar more valuable.

You can easily spot railroad towns and streetcar suburbs in any real estate app if you filter by the date of construction (for railroad suburbs try before 1910, for streetcar before 1930) and know what shapes to look for. Railroad towns are typically farther out from the urban center and are built in clusters around their stations, which are a few miles from one another. Streetcar suburbs, by contrast, tend to be continuous but narrow, because the appeal of the location dropped off rapidly with distance from the streetcar line. (Lots are narrow for the same reason — to shorten the pedestrian commute.) They expand from the urban center like the spokes of a wheel.

And then came the automobile and, later, the federal government. The car brought a number of changes — paved streets, longer blocks, wider lots (you weren’t walking home, after all, so it was all right if you had to go a little farther) — but nothing like the way the Federal Housing Authority restructured neighborhoods.

The FHA was created by the National Housing Act of 1934 with the broad mandate to “improve nationwide housing standard, provide employment and stimulate industry, improve conditions with respect to mortgage financing, and realize a greater degree of stability in residential construction”. It was a big job, and the FHA set out to accomplish it in a typical New Deal fashion: providing federal insurance for private construction and mortgage loans, but only for houses and neighborhoods that met its approval. This has entered general consciousness as “redlining”, after the color of the lines drawn around uninsurable areas (typically old, urban housing stock),4 but the green, blue, and yellow lines — in order of declining insurability — were just as influential on the fabric of contemporary America.

A slow economy through the 1930s and a prohibition on nonessential construction during the war meant that FHA didn’t have much to do until 1945, but as soon as the GIs began to come home and take advantage of their new mortgage subsidies, there was a massive construction boom. With the FHA insuring both the builders’ construction loans and the homeowners’ mortgages, nearly all the new neighborhoods were built to the FHA’s exacting specifications.

One of the FHA’s major concern was avoiding direct through-traffic in neighborhoods. Many post-World War II developments were built out near the new federally-subsidized highways on the outskirts of the cities, so the FHA was eager to protect new subdivisions from heavy traffic on the interstates and the major arterial roads. Neighborhoods were meant to be near the arterials, but with only a few entrances to the neighborhood and many curved roads and culs-de-sac within it. Unlike the streetcar suburbs or the early automobile suburbs that filled in between the “spokes” of the streetcar lines, where retail had clustered near the streetcar stops, the residents of the post-World War II suburbs found their closest retail establishments outside the neighborhood on the major arterial roads. Lots became wider, blocks longer, and sidewalks less frequent; houses were encouraged to stay small by FHA caps on the size of loans. And although we tend to assume they were purely residential areas, the FHA encouraged the inclusion of schools, churches, parks, libraries, and community centers within the neighborhood.

    1. America doesn’t have many urban neighborhoods that predate 1750, and even fewer that persist in their original layout, but if you’ve ever visited one it’s amazing how compact everything feels even in comparison to the rowhouses of the following century.

    2. McAlester’s footnote for the paragraph that contains all this reads: “These three essentials were highlighted in an essay the author has read but has not been successful in locating for this footnote.”

    3. This is still, I am told, how some of the more sensibly-governed parts of the world run their transit systems: whatever company has the right to build subways buys up the land around a planned (but not announced) subway line through shell corporations, builds the subway, then sells or develops the newly-valuable property. Far more efficient as a funding mechanism than fares!

    4. This 2020 NBER working paper points out that redlined areas were 85% white (though they did include many of the black people living in Northern cities) and suggests that race played very little role in where the red lines were drawn; rather, black people were already living in the worst neighborhoods.

October 25, 2023

Housing for Hamas leadership … in London

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the non-paywalled part of a post from Ed West, we have a look at the terrible conditions leaders for Hamas and other terrorist organizations have to put up with in the embattled suburbs of … London:

Barnet, to those unfamiliar with this corner of the world, is the most Jewish borough in Britain, an area of north-west London often described as “leafy” and including both pleasant inner suburbs like Finchley as well as areas of genuine countryside. The migration of eastern European Jews in the capital followed an anticlockwise direction from impoverished Whitechapel in east London up through Hackney and Haringey in the north, with Barnet the next stop.

It is also, strangely, home to a leading fundraiser for Hamas, the terrorist group responsible for the murder of 1,400 people in southern Israel earlier this month and quite explicitly committed to the eradication of Jews in the Holy Land.

What with London house prices being what they are, you wonder how he managed it, but of course Muhammad Qassem Sawalha, who “ran the group’s terrorist operations in the West Bank”, according to the Sunday Times, managed to buy his property with help from the council.

Despite being a known and wanted terrorist, Sawalha was allowed to settle in Britain in the 1990s and obtain British citizenship. He continued to work for Hamas, holding talks about committing terrorist acts and laundering money for the group, according to the US Department of Justice. In 2009 he signed the Istanbul Declaration which praised God for having “routed the Zionist Jews”, and called for a “Third Jihadist Front” to be “opened in Palestine alongside Iraq and Afghanistan”, according to the paper.

All the while he was benefitting from Britain’s social housing system. In 2003, Barnet Council made him a council tenant and he was housed in a two-storey property with a garden and garage in the borough, where he still lives.

Two years ago, Sawalha and his wife used the Right to Buy scheme to acquire their home for £320,700, with Barnet Council giving them a £112,300 discount on its market value.

This is despite the fact that in 2006 Panorama reported that Sawalha was “said to have masterminded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” and that, “although he was known to MI5, the ‘authorities let him operate freely here'”. Not just let him operate freely, but sort him out with a house – and if you think this sounds insane, it is not at all uncommon.

Sawalha’s old comrade, the famous hook-handed hate preacher Abu Hamza, was also given a huge house courtesy of the British taxpayer. The Egyptian was allowed to live rent-free in a five-bedroom house in what the Mail described as “upmarket Shepherd’s Bush”, a phrase I would have found astonishing to read as a teenager in west London.

Shepherd’s Bush is next door to super-rich Holland Park, and private property is extremely expensive there – but it also has high levels of social housing, as with much of central London, so “upmarket” might be stretching it.

October 22, 2023

The “Green New Deal” is great … for the well-connected wealthy elites

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson — who lives in British Columbia, hands-down the “greenest” province in Canada — somehow isn’t a fan of the way our kakistocratic “elites” are pushing us all toward their utopian “green” world:

A few years ago when I was building my house, I attended a “green” building conference in San Francisco. Gavin Newsom and Bobby Kennedy, Jr. were giving keynote addresses, and across the conference floor were strewn hundreds of booths of builders, engineers, architects, visionaries, and commercial interests selling every manner of material, equipment, skill sets, and propaganda. Buildings, I was told, emit 59 percent of carbon emissions, and green builders would shut that down. And it would be profitable.

At the time I was neutral but dubious. I had completed a “green” subdivision and had promised puzzlingly powerful members of “the community” that I would build a “green” house. It wasn’t a requirement but it was an acceptable challenge and I knew I would be fascinated by the exercise.

I followed the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum template, contracted the job myself. I wanted to build a healthy house, which meant as little chemical off-gassing as possible. Despite my savings, which were considerable, it still cost 40 percent more than a traditional stick-frame. The geothermal system cost $35,000 more than traditional heating and no, I have not “made back that money.” Today that cost would be north of $150,000.

We’re all in this together, right?

The only reason I am not bankrupt is that where I live is so restricted as to land use, housing prices have skyrocketed. Only the rich can afford to live here. My property with its “improvements,” which is to say my money and labor, is now worth 30 times my initial investment. This is known as old-fashioned economics, wherein you restrict supply and prices, via demand, go up.

This too is a perfect micro-illustration of the “Green Economy” or the the “Green New Deal.” It is “green” only for the wealthy or privileged by virtue of education. It is very, very “green” for those who profit from it. The people who took my extra money, other than the giant suction hose of government, were mostly those demanded by “green” theology: engineers (5), lawyers (3), surveyors (2), wildlife consultants (2), and permitting bureaucrats. Those requirements have doubled in the intervening years.

Today, life is very green for the hosts of eager young professionals at that conference who have in the intervening years insinuated themselves into every government structure, inserting siphons whereby they literally suck money out of the system in torrents of green. When I think of that conference, full of bright-eyed (expensively educated) enthusiasts, who were hell-bent on selling their ideas to the wider culture, I think: who the hell brought you up? Because this is a moral question, a profoundly ethical question. And everything you do is profoundly immoral.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected an appeal that would overturn the econometrics of carbon pricing, i.e. that the Biden administration is placing too high an estimate on the future social cost of carbon emissions. Who can know the social cost of carbon emissions? But it means shuttering 450,000 shale jobs because think of the future.

September 14, 2023

Canadians’ opinions have flipped on the immigration issue this summer

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper covers the rapid change in public opinion from majority in favour of the Liberal government’s expanded immigration targets to majority opposed in recent polling:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing PPC leader Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Province – https://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

A majority of Canadians now seem to think that immigration is too high, according to a recent Nanos poll. Of respondents, 53 per cent said that the government’s plan to accept 465,000 new permanent residents was too high. It’s a sharp turnaround from just a few months prior, when a similar Nanos poll in March found that only 34 per cent of Canadians thought immigration was too high.

Canada has long been one of the most pro-immigration countries on earth, and since at least the 1990s the mainstream Canadian position on immigration levels was that they were just fine. On the eve of Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in 2015, an Environics poll found that a decisive 57 per cent of Canadians disagreed with any notion that there is “too much immigration in Canada.”

But if this sentiment is changing, it might be because Ottawa has recently dialled up immigration to the highest levels ever seen in Canadian history. Below, a quick guide to just how many people are entering Canada these days.

Immigration is nearly double what it was at the beginning of the Trudeau government (and way more when you count “non-permanent” immigrants)

In 2014 — the last full year before the election of Justin Trudeau — Canada brought in 260,404 new permanent residents. This was actually rather high for the time, with Statistics Canada noting it was “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years”.

But last year, immigration hit 437,180, and that’s not even accounting for the massive spike in “non-permanent” immigration. When the estimated 607,782 people in that category are accounted for, the Canadian population surged by more than one million people in a single calendar year. Representing a 2.7 per cent annual rise in population, it was more than enough to cancel out any per-capita benefits from Canada’s GDP rise for that year.

It’s about on par with the United States (a country which is eight to 10 times larger)

Proportionally, Canada has long maintained higher immigration than the United States. But in recent months immigration has gotten so high that Canada is even starting to rival the Americans in terms of the raw number of newcomers.

Last year, while Canada marked one million newcomers, the U.S. announced that its net international migration was about the same. Given the size of the U.S. (331 million vs. 40 million in Canada), this means that Canada is absorbing migrants at a rate more than eight times that of the Americans.

When these trends first began showing themselves in early 2022, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal credited it with driving down Canadian wage growth. “The last time I checked, the U.S. is 10 times larger than we are,” he said.

May 26, 2023

How domestic use of coal transformed Britain

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jane Psmith reviews The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything by Ruth Goodman:

… Even today, few people record the mundane details of their daily lives; in the days before social media and widespread literacy it was even more dramatic, so anyone who wants to know how our ancestors cleaned, or slept, or ate has to go poking through the interstices of the historical record in search of the answers — which means they need to recognize that there’s a question there in the first place. When they don’t, we end up with whole swathes of the past we can’t really understand because we’re unfamiliar with the way their inhabitants interacted with the physical world.

The Domestic Revolution is about one of these “unknown unknowns”, the early modern English transition from burning wood to coal in the home, and Ruth Goodman may be the only person in four hundred years who could have written it. With exactly the kind of obsessive attention to getting it right that I can really respect, she turned an increasingly intensive Tudor reënactment hobby into a decades-long career as a “freelance historian”, rediscovering as many domestic details of Tudor-era life as possible and consulting for museums and costume dramas. Her work reminds me of the recreations of ancient Polynesian navigational techniques, a combination of research and practical experiments aimed at contextualizing what got remembered or written down, so of course I would love it. (A Psmith review of her How To Be a Tudor is forthcoming.) She’s also starred in a number of TV shows where she and her colleagues live and work for an extended time in period environs, wearing period costume and using period technology1, and because she was so unusually familiar with running a home fired by wood — “I have probably cooked more meals over a wood fire than I have over gas or electric cookers”, she writes — she immediately noticed the differences when she lived with a coal-burning iron range to film Victorian Farm. A coal-fired home required changes to nearly all parts of daily life, changes that people used to central heating would never think to look for. But once Goodman points them out, you can trace the radiating consequences of these changes almost everywhere.

The English switched from burning wood to burning coal earlier and more thoroughly than anywhere else in the world, and it began in London. Fueling the city with wood had become difficult as far back as the late thirteenth century, when firewood prices nearly doubled over the course of a decade or two, and when the population finally recovered from the rolling crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the situation became dire once again. Wood requires a lot of land to produce, but it’s bulky and difficult to transport by cart: by the 1570s the court of Elizabeth I found it cheapest to buy firewood that had been floated more than a hundred miles down the Thames. Coal, by contrast, could be mined with relative ease from naturally-draining seams near Newcastle-upon-Tyne and sailed right down the eastern coast of the island to a London dock. It already had been at a small scale throughout the Middle Ages, largely to fuel smithies and lime-burners, but in the generation between 1570 and Elizabeth’s death in 1603 the city had almost entirely switched to burning coal. (It had also ballooned from 80,000 to 200,000 inhabitants in the same time, largely enabled by the cheaper fuel.) By 1700, Britain was burning more coal than wood; by 1900, 95% of all households were coal-burning, a figure North America would never match. Of course the coal trade itself had consequences — Goodman suggests that the regular Newcastle run was key in training up sailors who could join the growing Royal Navy or take on trans-Atlantic voyages — and it certainly strengthened trade networks, but most of The Domestic Revolution is driven by the differences in the materials themselves.

The most interesting part of the book to me, a person who is passionately interested in all of human history right up until about 1600, were the details of woodland management under the wood-burning regime. I had, for instance, always assumed that early modern “woodcutters” like Hansel and Gretel’s father were basically lumberjacks chopping down full-grown trees, but actually most trees aren’t killed by removing their trunks. Instead, the stump (or roots, depending on the species) will send up new, branchless shoots, which can be harvested when they reach their desired diameter — anywhere from a year or two for whippy shoots suitable for weaving baskets or fences to seven years for firewood, or even longer if you want thick ash or oak poles for construction. This procedure, called coppicing, also extends the life of the tree indefinitely: an ash tree might live for two hundred years, but there are coppiced ash stools in England that predate the Norman Conquest. (My ignorance here wasn’t entirely chronological provincialism: the pines and other conifers that make up most North American timberland can’t be coppiced.)2 The downside to coppicing is that the new shoots are very attractive to livestock, so trees can also be pollarded — like a coppice, but six or eight feet up the trunk,3 quite a dramatic photo here — which is harder to harvest but means you can combine timber and pasture. This made pollarded “wood pasture” a particularly appealing option for common land, where multiple people had legal rights to its use.4 The woodcutters of the Grimms’ tales probably had a number of fenced coppiced patches they would harvest in rotation, ideally one fell for each year of growth it took to produce wood of the desired size, though a poor man without the upfront capital to support planting the right kind of trees could make do with whatever nature gave him.

There’s plenty more, of course: Goodman goes into great but fascinating detail about the ways different woods behave on the fire (hazel gets going quickly, which is nice for starting a fire or for frying, but oak has staying power; ash is the best of both worlds), the ways you can change the shape and character of your fire depending on what you’re cooking, and the behavior of other regional sorts of fuel like peat (from bogs) and gorse (from heathland). But most of the book is devoted to the differences between burning wood and burning coal, of which there are three big ones: the flame, the heat, and the smoke. Dealing with each one forced people to make obvious practical changes to their daily lives, and in turn each of those changes had second- and third-order consequences that contributed to the profound transformations of the modern period.

The most obvious difference is the fire itself. The flames of wood fires merge together to form a pyramid or spire shape, perfect for setting your pot over: the flames will curl around its nicely rounded bottom to heat it rapidly. Coal, on the other hand, forms “a series of smaller, lower, hotter and bluer flames, spaced across the upper surface of the bed of embers,” suitable for a large flat-bottomed pot. More importantly, though, burning coal requires a great deal more airflow: a coal fire on the ground is rapidly smothered by its own buildup of ash and clinker (and of course it doesn’t come in nice long straight bits for you to build a pyramid out of). The obvious solution is the grate, a metal basket that lifts the coal off the ground, letting the debris fall away rather than clogging the gaps between coals, and drawing cold air into the fire to fuel its combustion. This confines the fire to one spot, which may not seem like a big deal (especially for people who are used to cooking on stoves with burners of fixed sizes) but is actually quite a dramatic change. As Goodman explains, one of the main features of cooking on a wood fire is the ease with which you can change its size and shape:

    You can spread them out or concentrate them, funnel them into long thin trenches or rake them into wide circles. You can easily divide a big fire into several small separate fires or combine small fires into one. You can build a big ring of fire around a particularly large pot stood at one end of the hearth while a smaller, slower central fire is burning in the middle and a ring of little pots is simmering away at the far end. You can scrape out a pile of burning embers to pop beneath a gridiron when there is a bit of toasting to do, brushing the embers back into the main fire when the job is done.

In other words, the enormous fireplaces you may have seen in historical kitchens aren’t evidence of equally enormous fires; they were used for lots of different fires of varying sizes, to cook lots of different dishes at the same time. The iron grate for coal, on the other hand, is a fixed size and shape, like a modern burner — though unlike a modern burner the heat is not adjustable. The only thing you can do, really, is put your pot on the grate or take it off.

    1. Several of them are streaming on Amazon Prime; I don’t much TV, but I did watch Tudor Monastery Farm with my kids and we all loved it.

    2. Some firs can be regrown in a related practice called “stump culture“, which is particularly common on Christmas tree farms, but it’s much more labor-intensive than coppicing.

    3. If you live in the southern United States, you’ve probably seen pollarded crape myrtles.

    4. Contrary to the impression you may have gotten from the so-called tragedy of the commons, the historical English commons had extremely clearly delineated legal rights. More importantly, these rights all had fabulous names like turbary (the right to cut turves for fuel), piscary (the right to fish), and pannage (the right to let your pigs feed in the woods). I’m also a big fan of the terminology of medieval and early modern tolls, like murage (charged for bringing goods within the walls), pontage (for using a bridge), and pavage (using roads). Since the right to charge these tolls was granted to towns and cities individually, a journey of any length was probably an obnoxious mess of fees (Napoleon had a point with the whole “regulating everything” bit), but you can’t help feeling that “value added tax” is pretty boring by comparison. I suggest “emprowerage”, from the Anglo-Norman emprower (which via Middle English “emprowement” gives us “improvement”) as a much more euphonious name for the VAT. Obviously sales tax should “sellage”. I can do this all day.

May 25, 2023

Victoria’s housing market is Canada’s housing market in microcosm

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson explains some of the driving factors for ever-rising housing prices in Canada:

“Victoria, BC” by abdallahh is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A friend of mine is building four high-rise condo and rental towers in Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, where I live. It is a charming city, founded in the 1840s, its core an almost classic English village around which a modern city was slowly built. Not so slow now. It’s the warmest, prettiest city in Canada, surrounded on three sides by ocean, and retirees are flooding the place. Young families are choosing the city to raise their children because it is still small, relatively crime-free and filled with charming neighborhoods.

Here is a view from the marketplace by someone who borrowed $150 million to build housing for the newcomers:

    Green energy policies have added maybe $700 a month to the cost of a one bedroom rental unit. It takes over two years to get approval for a rental building in Victoria. Then, another year after initial approval to final approval. That adds another sum. Maybe $300? So rents in theory could be $1000 a month less. That is $1,000 that could go to piano lessons, hockey gear. Private school? And so on. Then Justin let in ONE MILLION people last year into Canada. All unvetted. Canada builds various amounts of housing each year. But 275,000 units is a reasonable average. One million people require 350,000 or so housing units. You want to see upward price pressure on rents? You have not seen anything yet

In fact, “we are two to three million houses short”, says Wendell Cox of Demographia, which has been tracking housing affordability for 25 years across the world. Canada’s two principal cities, Toronto and Vancouver, are among the top four most unaffordable cities in the world, Hong Kong and Sydney being the other two. In my region, everywhere you look, we have tent cities and trailers parked by the side of the road; our economy has been strangled by Covid, debt, inflation, and regulatory madness, so like nearly everywhere, we have a substantial complement of the desperate, despite living among a stunning abundance of resources and talent. Throw in the sharp rise in interest rates and the solution moves from difficult to impossible.

Despite the almost preposterous costs added by “green” energy, “green” land use is the greater reason housing is so constrained in every western democracy. Here’s the crux of the matter: construction costs are only 20 percent lower in a smaller city, but the land in a smaller city would run $90K, while in Toronto or Vancouver or San Francisco or Dublin, it would be upwards of one million dollars.

A green belt is wrapped around every major and minor city. They are called Urban Containment Zones. Much of that land is conserved, in principle to save agricultural land, but in Canada, as elsewhere, urban areas only use 2.5 percent of arable land. World Economic Forum/U.N. rules concerning land use have been adopted by every western democracy, and these rules are disseminated across the world through planning associations. The planner cult is messianic. It hates sprawl, suburbs and cars and while the obvious solution is to build on green belts, the PR unleashed against the idea is vituperative in the extreme. Ontario premier Rob Ford has managed to swap out some green belt land, and is building 50,000 new houses. The press’s reaction against the plan has been vicious, accusing Ford of bribery and paying off his funders.

Yet, there is a ten-year waiting list for public housing in Toronto. British Columbia, like all regions run by the Left, is committed to subsidized housing. But there is a five-year waitlist for any current family housing, and rents for a one bedroom, are almost exactly $1,000 less than in the private sector, meaning that without the green-energy rules, which are ridiculous in such a cold country, private-sector housing could accommodate the less privileged without any cost to the taxpayer, who as it is now pays twice.

Further, the buildings assigned to low-income housing are built to lower standards. There is a happy dancing peasant communitarian aspect to these complexes, but that can degrade very quickly, as Chicago, Detroit, London, have proved. Almost all such complexes end in drug trafficking, single motherhood and kids running wild. The most recent B.C. government failed its promise to build more by 75 percent and its administering agency was found to be corrupt.

April 16, 2023

The short-term mindset in architecture

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 06:00

Our house was built in the first half of the 19th century, although we’re not sure exactly when. We know it was here in the early 1840s but it could be 20 years older than that … in the first half of the 1800s, you didn’t need to get a building permit in Upper Canada before you started, and there was minimal government record-keeping at the time. Our house isn’t anything special architecturally, but it was built extremely solidly. It was intended to stand the test of time. This is not at all true for most of what we build today:

“Princes Street, New Town, Edinburgh, Scotland” by Billy Wilson Photography is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 .

I have had some work done on my house recently. For context, it’s an Edwardian terrace with a rear extension built sometime in the 1980s. Oddly fascinating for me was the sheer difference in build quality between the original section of the property and the newer part at the back. The older part of the house is sturdy, solid and lauded by the workmen as a “proper building”. The newer section has been a huge source of ridicule and contempt: shoddy timber placement, wobbly floors, dangerous electrical wiring, crumbling cement and poor brickwork plague it.

The tradesmen’s comments had me thinking a lot about the general quality of our infrastructure, both national and local, and how we sometimes take for granted the fact that a huge portion of what we use every day is so old. Not only that, but a lot of it is almost universally considered very beautiful and important to our shared cultural heritage.

Take a stroll through any city in Great Britain, and you are more than likely to at some point come across the “old town”. Despite the Luftwaffe’s (and post war town planner’s) best efforts, a lot of pre-war buildings still inhabit the centres of our towns and cities. These prove to be fine examples of the world we used to live in. Even in the poorest of cities, my own town of Hull for example, there exists a great plethora of dramatic and beautiful buildings which were constructed, almost exclusively, by the late Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians. Take a trip to London, Edinburgh, central Durham and a number of other places, and you will see that even the lampposts are adorned gorgeously, with striking and intricate ironwork.

Why is this? Why did they bother to do such a good job? Why do we still heavily rely on their work for our own sense of cultural identity and our basic infrastructural needs? Why can’t our own contemporary efforts compete, despite great advances in the field of civil engineering and construction materials? I think the answer boils down to one thing: civic pride.

The Victorians were building for eternity; we build for temporary needs in a utilitarian fashion. They knew their “mission”, and they saw it an absolute necessity to make everything they did permanent; we do not. They designed buildings to be functional and beautiful; we seek to make buildings which will be functional for 50 years before they are “recycled”.

Speak to a modern student of architecture about their course, and you will find that very few opportunities exist for those who want to pursue a path for traditional design techniques. Their learning aim is to make things which can be used temporarily, then pulled down for something else. This is an attitude which would be totally alien to the Victorians who designed and built the lecture halls these students now learn in.

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