A few days from now, my adopted hometown of Vancouver in British Columbia is going to elect a new mayor and council. The low turnout in municipal elections here skews toward affluent owners of detached houses who pay the most property tax and grumble about it. Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC (“A Better City”) party, who won the 2022 election, understand their base: they froze property taxes this year after abolishing the living wage for city employees. The ABC administration also implemented a wave of layoffs and promises to repeat the trick next year if reelected. Meanwhile, underfunding has left two-thirds of the city’s community centers to crumble away.

Although ABC has given property developers a free hand to put up towers in the city’s core, they have not touched the zoning regulations that prevent the construction of apartments across most of Vancouver, which interwar planners intended to be a suburban city of detached homes. Sim’s party has also stoked the dread of the transient poor that has always thrived in its more chichi neighborhoods by imposing a ban on new supportive housing and hiking the police department’s inflated budget. Although ABC’s progressive opponents have condemned these actions as cruel, many of them are no keener to challenge homeowners by permitting greater density.

Vancouver is but one example of the property-value politics now widespread across Canada, in which the desires of existing homeowners take precedence over economic development or the common good. The historian Joshua Specht suggests that such politics are even more pronounced in the United States. Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner asks how and why municipal officials, planners, and politicians decided to take the side of homeowners against real and imagined threats to the value of their investment. It emphasizes the accidental triumph as well as the social costs of a narrow cult of private ownership that took off because it promised to maintain moral and political principles dear to Americans.