An Indigenous capital switch? First Nation real-estate development and the provision of social housing in Vancouver

In Vancouver, Canada, almost all housing is provided through private market development from which the municipality ‘captures’ social housing units. The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations are currently emerging as major actors in this dynamic as they develop the massive Heather, Jericho, and Sen̓áḵw housing projects on central land parcels. By describing these developments’ role regarding housing provision in Vancouver, I aim at highlighting two interrelated dynamics in this paper. First, I describe an Indigenous capital switch as First Nations develop high-density real-estate and use Vancouver’s high-price environment to accrue much-needed revenue that might provide their membership with housing detached from market pressures. Second, I describe some of the developments’ broader consequences for (social) housing provision in that a fundamentally profit-oriented development model that mainly provides market housing with a factored-in number of below-market units is reproduced by First Nations. Development is bound to switch massive amounts of capital into Indigenous communities, but it also reinforces a development model that claims to create affordable living conditions by providing market supply. Consequently, actors that operate both as parastatal and profit-oriented private entities are bound to become the region’s largest housing developers and its largest social housing provider.