The Hongcouver | Vancouver’s ethnic enclaves are growing fast, but is that really a problem?
Minorities in Vancouver are almost three times more likely to live in enclave neighbourhoods than they were in 1996, study finds
The experience in Vancouver upends a lot of traditional notions about immigration and ethnic enclaves that prevail in, say, Europe and the United States.
High levels of education and home ownership in many of the city’s enclave neighbourhoods belie these conventions. But deprived or not, there remains a fundamental debate: good thing or bad? A necessary stepping stone to integration into mainstream society or unnecessary (dangerous, even) repositories of cultural isolation? And what drives the formation of these enclaves?
It’s a delicate subject but it’s one to which UBC geography professor Dr Daniel Hiebert has devoted years of study. His latest peer-reviewed paper on the subject, released last month, argues that while such neighbourhoods are increasing in prevalence in Canada’s major metropolitan areas (witness the city of Richmond, the most-Chinese city outside Asia), they are very different “from the areas that are seen as deeply problematic” elsewhere, such as Europe.
In fact, Hiebert said in an interview on Tuesday, “some of the enclaves in Vancouver are in our most desirable areas…the city is full of them.”
In 1996, the proportion of visible minority members in Vancouver who lived in either such enclave was 13 per cent. By 2011, that had risen to 36.8 per cent. In the same 15 years, the proportion of the city that was made up of visible minority members went from 31.1 per cent to 45.3 per cent. So not only did the proportion of minorities in the city increase by about half, their tendency to live in enclaves just about tripled. The numbers are about the same for Toronto - however Vancouverites are far less likely to live in mixed-minority enclaves, just 3 per cent of the total population doing so in 2011 compared to 7.4 per cent in Toronto.