Not In My Back Yard: the Cure for NIMBYism. Louis Shalako.

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

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

Louis Shalako has books, stories and audiobooks available from Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

 

What Would A Basic Minimum Income For Ontario Look Like?

http://wallpapercave.com/w/AhN6BZh

Louis Shalako

What would a basic minimum income look like for Ontario?

It’s very hard to say without knowing what the government’s pilot project actually looks like. 

Hopefully we’ll get more information on that very soon.

Let us assume the goal is to get every citizen at least up to the poverty line. While this number varies according to location across the province, living in Toronto and other major cities being more expensive than living in some other places, let us assume this is about $20,000.00 per year for a single adult.

In Switzerland, they’ll be voting on one such proposal on June 5. If you look closely, you’ll see that the program will be funded approximately 75 % by new taxes and the rest is expected to come from savings in other social programs. We are comparing apples to oranges here, but Switzerland, like Canada and the Province of Ontario are capitalistic, socialist states. They’re relatively affluent, not only in natural resources, but agriculture, technology, and their present state of development.

In Kenya, as little as $250.00 to $400.00 a year can make a big difference in health and welfare outcomes.

In Ontario, the only thing really under discussion is a pilot program, much like the one in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. If you take a small community, the cost of a pilot program is much less than the institution of such a program over an entire province or country.

Under such circumstances, one could have a very successful pilot program, one costing five or ten or twenty million dollars without ever having to justify it politically, without ever even speculating as to where all the funding might actually come from. Back then, the one in Dauphin cost $17 million overall—pocket change by modern, budgetary standards.

While I have no doubt that the government is prepared to make such a social experiment, (heading to the polls a short time later), one has to wonder just how serious they are at pursuing this to a logical end—or whether this is just another cleverly disguised attempt to gut the Ontario Disability Support Program, or Ontario Works, or whatever.

Proponents usually contend that such programs will be funded entirely by savings in other programs—or they sure don’t mind being misinterpreted along such lines, but if so, then such programs must inevitably be underfunded, for surely the government social programs they are intended to replace have always been underfunded. This has been true since day one, and that includes the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, and a hundred other programs administered by this government.

Here’s an Ontario Works (welfare) rate chart. A single person would receive, per month, $305.00 for their basic needs and $376.00 for shelter costs—which is about half what I pay for rent, although I’m not on welfare. In this province, benefits are divided into ‘basic needs’ and ‘shelter costs.’ If you don’t have a home, (or at least an address), then you don’t qualify for shelter costs. (The government did away with moving benefits some time ago, although start-up benefits may still be available depending on program. For the most part, these programs have been fiscally gutted by this very same government.)

Back to our point.

That’s $681.00 a month to keep body and soul together. Inevitably, most of that will go for rent, and that’s why people on welfare line up at food banks. They end up homeless and on the street, and they end up in a whole host of unenviable social situations such as divorce, court, jail and in other programs largely dedicated to mental health and addictions. How much of this will be alleviated by living in less stressful social conditions, and how will this translate into sufficient savings and efficiencies to justify the basic minimum income social program?

That’s a real good question and one worth asking.

It’s as much about people as it is about saving money or redistributing income in an era of growing inequality and degenerating social justice.

It’s a simple equation.

Where there is no hope there is no incentive. Life is hard at the lowest socio-economic strata. 

People are the same everywhere. They all need the same things. And it’s just what they can’t get. They’re not going anywhere and they know it. And the day is long—very long. I know that from personal experience. Filling that day leads to social problems largely stemming from boredom, desperation and availability.

The $681.00 a month adds up to $8,172.00 a year. This is approximately $12,000.00 below the poverty line, which I make out to be about $20,000.00 a year in anything but a major city. 

I am referring to Ontario, Canada, 2016, just so we are defining our terms accurately.

Assuming the goal of an anti-poverty program is to bring people up to the poverty line, this is $12,000.00 that has to come from somewhere—somewhere else, as the taxpayers are no doubt already saying.

That’s an additional $1,000.00 a month, which would admittedly change people’s lives. The problem is that there are something like 750,000 clients of the ODSP program in the province, and probably another 125,000 families on Ontario Works. This does not address the numbers of unemployed and underemployed family members who fall below the poverty line. 

Neither does it include the millions of Ontarians working full time hours for minimum, sub-poverty wages. Just for the record, I know a lot of these people personally. My own bias has been disclosed.

Ahem.

If their family income went up, it is entirely possible that their taxable income would also go up—a fact often overlooked by commentators who have never experienced the challenges. 

Basically if you want to tax the poor, first you have to give them a raise. But it is entirely possible that middle class taxes could go down or be reduced under such a system.

The real question is, would that new life cause or incur savings in other areas, to the tune of $1,000.00 a month, or greater, from the ‘mean average’ or median individual in question. 

This is the question the taxpayers should be asking.

For parents with children, or for adults with dependent adults in the household, the no-questions-asked aspect of the proposed basic minimum income has to sound pretty good.

For a single person on disability, (ODSP) it has to sound pretty good. In my own case, I can honestly say that an additional eight or nine hundred bucks a month would make a big difference in my diet, my clothing certainly—and communication, transportation and entertainment. It would allow me to invest a small amount each and every month into my business and maybe even into some kind of savings program.

I’ll be of retirement age in another eight years. After that, the ODSP has no hold on me. It would be nice if the benefits could remain in force even when a recipient went out of province or even out of the country—perhaps for up to six months at a time.

Here’s a funny thing, and I don’t think it’s a contradiction at all. But I get a pension, and I also work full time as a writer; which is admittedly one of the most marginal professions going.

The problem, is that I don’t make enough money in this new abundance economy. That problem is only compounded for people with a family to feed and a home to make and a shit part-time job in some scab industry which is already being subsidized by scab wages, an abundance of unskilled labour and this crazy mind-set that somehow work brings dignity. The truth is that leisure and the arts bring dignity.

The problem is that this is only a trial balloon, never meant to actually float.

You heard it here first.

There’s not enough good jobs to go around, but there’s nothing we can do about poverty per se. There are only so many skills to go around—and colleges and universities and training programs also cost this province a lot of money and there aren’t always enough jobs for those graduates.

But here’s an interesting thing. The federal government already pays Harmonized Sales Tax rebates. They already pay or contribute to Child Daycare Tax Credits. They already pay pension benefits to the elderly and there are federal disability programs. (And it’s a crock of shit because I didn’t qualify.) The province pays plenty to the almost universally excoriated Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

They’re already spending hundreds of billions between the two levels of government for bloated and inefficient bureaucracies, and yes, this includes the police, court and prison systems. This already includes the medical, hospital and mental health systems. It also employs a lot of people at a relatively high level of income and status. This is a concern that will have to be addressed, to the tune of much angst no doubt.

It is only by bringing in a much smaller government apparatus, and perhaps some incremental increase in tax assessment rates that this program has a hope of succeeding universally, in the long term.

There are already mechanisms in place to pay the money—the federal and provincial income tax systems come to mind. With modern algorithmic systems and self-reporting, with verification through existing channels, the program could be made to work if the political and social will actually exists to do so.

You sort of have to wonder.

END