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| Affordable housing in Vienna. |
Louis Shalako
One of the greatest challenges to building affordable,
geared-to-income housing is NIMBYism.
People are all for it, of course, they agree on the
need for it. With one proviso—‘not in my backyard’. They fear it will affect
the character of a neighbourhood. Even though that neighbourhood might not have
much character to begin with. They fear it will bring down the value of their
own property, and as it turns out, family values turn out to be mostly about property
values. If you tried to put such a thing in the south end of this town, right
beside the railroad tracks, people on fucking Campbell Street would object to
it for all the usual reasons. Most of which have more to do with ignorance and
prejudice than any great regard for the facts. As far as the south Christina
St. neighbourhood, it would actually tend to raise the tone of the
neighbourhood, and they would still object to it. In their mind, it’s better
for the county to pay $60,000.00 per year to house an unhoused person in a
motel out on London Line. Where there are no services for all the
#mental_health_addictions you folks keep on ranting and raving about.
Someone, after all, is getting something for free,
even though the same people will tell you there
is no such thing as a free lunch.
I have the solution, which of course no politician
would ever care to acknowledge, let
alone adopt as a serious policy proposal. That’s because they need folks
like you to vote for them, and you are afraid of everything that looks like a
solution.
I
have the cure, ladies and gentlemen.
When a property developer applies for approval for
some big new housing development, say a hundred and fifty-four detached homes
on London Line here in the Sarnia area for example, ten percent of the land
should be designated for affordable, geared-to-income housing. You could put
that at the back to block out highway noises, or you can put it along the front
to block out highway noises. But. You’re
not going to get approval unless the developer agrees to this proviso.
It gets better—and I know some of you are already
raising objections, even though what was once farm fields or a golf course and
is just off a busy commercial and light industrial roadway, somehow, magically,
has character, even though you haven’t actually built it yet.
Proviso number two is oh, so simple, and oh, so
effective. Proviso number two is that the affordable, geared-to-income housing must be built first. You are, after
all, asking the municipality, and the taxpayers, to pay up front, in order to
provide services, including roads, water, sewers, electricity and gas lines in
order to heat and light those new homes…homes which haven’t been built yet, and
the taxpayers are supposed to accept that this will bring further economic
development. Which somehow trickles down, even though it really doesn’t, and
somehow, somewhere, somewhere else,
somebody else will finally get around to building affordable, geared-to-income
housing. Which the provincial government has no interest in doing. County
council talks big, but when the chips come down, they will just dedicate
another five-year study, even though the last one brought exactly zero
conclusions, made no recommendations, and wasn’t even reported in the local
media because everyone in local media knew it was bullshit from the get-go, and
some of them, at least, may still have a conscience. Even though I rather doubt
that, what with living in Twin Lakes and in Bright’s Grove and in the north end
of this town. These are the folks that love stories about going down to the riverbank and burning a candle, in order to raise awareness of the need to reduce stigma...
#fuck_off
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| An unhoused person. |
Just think of it: you’ve built your three-floor
walk-up, with thirty to fifty units, on a piece of land that might have taken
five or six buildings which they call bungalows but are basically
monstrosities, with two or three residents, several dogs, a garage full of
Harleys, a driveway full of pickup trucks and boats and house trailers. That is
what they call character, even though there isn’t a tree or a sidewalk for
miles. (Don’t forget, the bougies hate sidewalks even though municipal services
need a strip of land beside every street in order to provide such services.)
And when that’s up, and when you’ve built your first
detached home, your first townhouse, your first condo development, you get to
do what all the big builders do.
They like to put up a big sign out by the road. It
says, ‘Starting at $479,000.00’ or whatever the price is.
Here’s where it gets good. When the realtor shows that
to a prospect, in order to make full disclosure, they have to tell potential
buyers that there is, in fact, an affordable, geared-to-income building not too
far away—they might even be able to see it from hundreds of metres away, what
with no trees and the fact that it takes a while to fill in such a subdivision.
And if they object, and if they say, “But—but—doesn’t that bring down the price
of my property, which I haven’t even bought yet..???
And the answer, of course, is yes, because it actually does bring down the value of the homes. I
have always wanted to ask such a person just how much such an affordable,
geared-to-income building nearby would actually bring down the value of an existing home—I doubt if they can
even do it. I doubt if a Canadian realtor, still more focused on blowing more
hot air into what is clearly a bubble, could even do it. A certain kind of
person lives in a world where facts don’t matter, for example Sarnia City
Councilor Bill Dennis, who quotes Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and who
spends an inordinate amount of time suck-holing around Donald Trump and Ben
Shapiro, and yes, a bunch of other creeps on Twitter…well, it’s a free country,
or so they say.
***
But, if you feel that strongly about it, you can walk away. You can go down the
road to another municipality, one perhaps not quite so committed to equity and
social development. One without much character, one without much foresight. One
without some kind of a conscience…
The exact same house might cost fifty thousand dollars
more—a good chunk of money, almost enough for his and hers matching Harleys,
although it don’t buy much of a speedboat these days. So, ladies and gentlemen,
you’re saving fifty grand right off the top. Your mortgage payments will be
consequently lower. Due to slightly higher density, there is in fact a greater
chance that the municipality will be encouraged to plant those trees, create
those community amenities, those parks, and yes, those sidewalks. Hell, they
might even put in a nice new school or something.
Interestingly, the affordable, geared-to-income
housing would be professionally managed, and would provide rents (subsidized based on need), for the life of the
building. Detached homes are sold, not rented. Once you’ve made your money,
that’s it—it’s time to move on and grab some more farmland, buy up some old
golf course that wasn’t making money anyways, and do it all over again.
As for the building I live in, the one where I pay rent-controlled but otherwise market rates, the building has been re-mortgaged ten or twelve times in the seventy-five years it has been around. It does provide a stable, predictable to some degree, monthly and yearly income to its owners.
In that sense, it is more of an asset than a liability.
END
Image (Vienna). By Thomas Ledl - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49305377
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