Cult Smashers: Part Seventeen

When they got back into the Jaguar and headed out into traffic, Sally announced that Nate had an appointment with a tailor. “We’re going to get you some clothes that will help you make the right impression.”

They drove around to one of the smaller neighbourhoods off “the main drag” and parked in front of a branch of one of the old established banks. Sally walked Nate over to an ordinary-looking door and tapped on an intercom. “Hey Nadine, it’s Sally. I’ve got that kid that I talked about on the phone. We need you to take some measurements and look at cloth.” The door buzzed and she opened it.

Behind the door was a set of very old wooden steps that had wrought iron treads screwed onto them to halt the wear that had already scalloped the wood. She bounded up them two steps at a time, with Nate hustling to keep up. She was in pretty darn good shape! They stopped at the top landing and went in a door with a number on it and a faded, fly-specked sign that said “Tailoring”.

They were greeted by a 60ish blonde woman with stooped shoulders, pinz nez glasses with a fine chain pinned to her vest, and, a tailor’s tape hanging around her neck and down her shoulders. She saluted Sally with a smile “Great to see you.” and turned her gaze to Nate. “So this is the turnip you want dressed up into a truffle?” Nate didn’t have a clue about her accent other than to place it in the Eastern part of Europe. “Well, first we get some measurements.” She pulled a moleskin notebook out of a side pocket and a mechanical pencil from another.

“OK. Stand still while I size you up.” She wrote something in her book. “Lift your arms to your sides. Good.” She mumbled something unintelligible and scribbled some more. “Now snarl at me so I see all your teeth and the pupils of your eyes---like this.” She made a fierce face. “Hmmm.” More notes. “OK.”
Nate asked her “Aren’t you going to take measurements?”

She laughed, “Honey, when you’ve done this as long as I have, all you need to do is look.”

Then she addressed Sally, “Now let’s look at cloth.” She walked over to a long table with various bolts on it. “Sally, what do you think about this for a suit?”

“I see what you are thinking, but I’m not sure. He needs something to make him look impressive but also ‘free-spirited’ at the same time.”

“Yes. I thought you might. As you can see, there is a bold print---but the colours are muted. More importantly, this type of cloth keeps a crease well and drapes just like an conventionally expensive suit. I was thinking a two piece suit with a four button top. He could wear a tailored silk shirt with a Nehru collar under it. Think Madame Blavatsky mixed with Conrad Black.”

“Yes. You get what I’m looking for. Why not make three different suits following your own ideas?”

“Fine. Will that be all?”

“No, we also need some ‘dress down’ and ‘at home’ clothes. I’m thinking home clothes and work out togs. Not everything needs to be ‘power presentation’---but they have to be expensive quality and ‘out there’ enough to present the image that he’s a man of mystery.”

“OK. How about a couple cheongsams for ‘at home’ wear? I can knock out a few with expensive cloth. I can also add in a couple matching pill-box hats, trousers, and, an embroidered vest.”

“Yeah. That would work. And for exercise clothes?”

“I’ve got some pictures. How about this French cheese-maker’s smock? Only instead of the tough denim in this picture, we can use a fine linen. We can make matching, draw-string pants out of rough linen, in a different colour. I’d say earth tones---green tops and brown bottoms.”

“It’s certainly worth a try. How long do you think it will take you to be ready for the first fitting?”

“Well, I’m moderately busy---but for the Elders I will put these to the top of the list if necessary.”

“It is.”

“OK. How about the second Thursday of the next month?”

“That will do fine. See you then.”

“Always a pleasure. See yourself out.”

When they’d got back to the car Nate was a bit concerned. “Really, you want me to wear all that stuff? I think I’d feel like a clown wearing that get-up.”

“Of course you would. That’s why I am going to bust your ass with work to get you to the point where you will act as if you are totally at home wearing that sort of nonsense!”

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Housing Revisited: Report of Ontario Affordable Housing Task Force, Part Two

In the first part of this article I reported on a broad range of suggestions that the Affordable Housing Task Force put forward. In this second part I'm going to something of a different tack to deal with one last set of recommendations---how to cut 'red tape'. After that, I will move onto some general comments on the report-as-a-whole. 

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It's taken me a fair amount of rumination to decide how to explain the issue of red tape because it's one of those things that I find excites strong opinions in people. I've written a couple articles in the past where it came up, but it requires a lot of nuance to avoid falling into the easy and sloppy cliche of dismissing it as nothing more than evidence of sinful socialism. That's because conservatives love to complain about red tape and usually suggest that the only real solution is to unleash the "invisible hand of the market place".

The problem with this trope is that a great many of the issues that red tape deals with come about as a result of very significant problems. What sometimes gets dismissed as "unnecessary red tape" are rules and regulations designed to protect the public from the "invisible hand of the marketplace".  If society really got rid of all "red tape", it would probably end up in the sort of "free market utopia" that Upton Sinclair described in his novel The Jungle. That was a world where a small number of individuals got very rich working a lot of poor people to death in dangerous meat-packing plants so they could sell tainted food to the masses. 

This is what you get if you totally remove all "red tape" from an industry. Public Domain image c/o McClures Weekly Magazine.

 

 

Having said that, there is a tremendous "opportunity cost" that comes from having a bureaucracy that simply cannot do things in a timely fashion. Canada is absolutely rife with this sort of thing. To cite a minor personal example, when I went through the process to change the status of my home from an illegal duplex to a legal one, part of the procedure was to get a fire inspection. This involved a SIX YEAR delay between application and a fire officer actually showing up. At that point, the officer told me to contact the Electrical Safety Authority (ESA) to get a mandatory electrical inspection.

I found out that at that time the only way to do this was by making a telephone call. Unfortunately, I found the line to the ESA office could be busy for hours on end. At that time, I only had a pay-as-you go smartphone---which meant that I would burn through my prepaid minutes and spend lots and lots of money more if I wanted to get through to book an inspection. So, instead I installed a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) system on my laptop so I could call the ESA office for free. I put the laptop on my kitchen table with the volume on high and went about my daily business to wait to get through. After several hours I did and made my reservation. (I asked in passing how contractors deal with this sort of wait time. The receptionist said that they have a fax number instead. I later found out that if an electrician has a good reputation, they just fax the paperwork into the ESA and it's "deemed as having been inspected"---even if it wasn't.)

This is just one example of the totally out-of-control bureaucracy we all have to deal with. I've mentioned this to several other people and almost invariably I get a somewhat similar example thrown back at me. What has really surprised me is when I have mentioned the need to speed up process times in situations like this and gotten back the bland response from elected officials that it never occurred to them that it was their job to make stuff like this more efficient. Instead, they thought this best left to the professional staff.

To be fair to politicians, I suspect that this attitude is an artifact of the division between elected officials and government agencies---which is a very good thing. We really don't want to have our politicians directly meddling in the delivery of individual government services. But having worked for an institution that I used to jokingly call "the Last Outpost of the Soviet Union", I would like to point out that paid staff in large public institutions learn to follow different directives than "serve the public" or "get the job done". Instead, there seems to always be a tendency to instead "cover your ass". That is to say, the job of the civil service often isn't to serve the public good as efficiently as possible, but rather to avoid being seen as having made a mistake. Bureaucracies often become incredibly risk averse, and this dramatically degrades the service they offer.

There are reasons why this comes about. For example, I've read several articles by experts that suggest a great deal of what happens at border crossings and airports since 9/11 isn't very good at keeping the public safe. Instead, it is not much more than "security theater". The suggestion given why it is so intrusive---if not effective---is because managers are obsessed by the idea that they don't want to be the person who was in charge "when a terrorist got through". So if we are lined up in security hours before our airplane departs and it takes forever to get through it's probably because management is "covering its ass". 

This collective fear of "getting caught with our pants down" shouldn't be confused with a concern about actually "getting the job done". If there really was a big chance of my duplex turning into a deadly inferno, for example, making me wait six years for an inspection would hardly have been a good idea. This is another thing I learned where I used to work. Filling out the paperwork often seems to become more important than the actual task at hand. Even if what they do doesn't even work, if they can be seen to be doing it---and there's a paper trail---their ass is covered!

This isn't the way the world has to operate. As I pointed out in a previous article, Estonia decided that they were going to make stream-lining it's bureaucracy into a national priority. It did this because it thought that if it cut out as much unnecessary red tape as possible, it would give the country a competitive advantage over other nations. They pay their taxes, charge out library books, ride the bus, get a fire inspection, electrical inspection, etc, with one single piece of plastic. ("One card to rule them all and with the blockchain bind them".) Different parts of the entire government bureaucracy share information, based on the rule that no citizen should ever have to give the same piece of info to anyone more than once. 

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A lot of journalism that I read is formulaic. The editor assigns a story based on research that says what does and doesn't generate ad revenue. The writer does some quick research and then hammers out a short text with graphics based on his or her ability to emotionally engage the reader. As a result, you usually end up with something that is just recycling conventional wisdom---generally with some sort of human interest angle. 

I don't do that. I spend a lot of time reading appallingly boring documents until I can get some sort of familiarity with the subject. Then I spend days obsessing about it until I feel like I have found the "nub" of the issue. Then I go through rewrite over rewrite in order to try to come up with the best way of expressing what are often really complex ideas that many of my readers will probably never have heard before. 

This is work. I'm happy to offer the results for free. But if you think what I do has merit and you can afford it, why not subscribe? Patreon and Pay Pal make it easy to do.

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It might seem I've gotten a bit off tangent with regard to housing. But from reading the Task Force report, it would seem that home builders have much the same sort of complaints about how hard it is to get an OK to build housing that I have had about getting my house registered. The difference is that all these delays cost developers a lot of money, and this gets passed onto buyers---which is part of what puts owning a home out of a lot of people's price range. 

The Task Force points out how out-of-control red tape has gotten in Ontario with a variety of startling statistics and illustrations:

One of the strongest signs that our approval process is not working: of 35 OECD countries, only the Slovak Republic takes longer than Canada to approve a building project. The UK and
the US approve projects three times faster without sacrificing quality or safety. And they save home buyers and tenants money as a result, making housing more affordable.

 

An Ontario Association of Architects study calculating the cost of delays between site plan application and approval concluded that for a 100-unit condominium apartment building, each additional month of delay costs the applicant an estimated $193,000, or $1,930 a month for each unit.

Another report---quoted several times by the Task Force report---is the BILD Municipal Benchmarking Study of September 2020. One of the more startling images it provided was a table of different types of studies that various municipalities require from developers before they will OK a proposal. (Click on the image to get a clearer version.)

And one last anecdotal comparison from the Task Force report.

Then: In 1966, a draft plan of subdivision in a town in southwestern Ontario to provide 529 low-rise and mid-rise housing units, a school site, a shopping centre and parks was approved by way of a two-page letter setting out 10 conditions. It took seven months to clear conditions for final approval.

And now: In 2013, a builder started the approval process to build on a piece of serviced residential land in a seasonal resort town. Over the next seven years, 18 professional consultant reports were required, culminating in draft plan approval containing 50 clearance conditions. The second approval, issued by the Local Planning Appeals Board in 2020, ran to 23 pages. The developer estimates it will be almost 10 years before final approval is received.

Just think about the last statement. There's an oft repeated story from climate activism to the extent that if you put a live frog in a pot of cold water and slowly heat it up, it will just sit there until it is cooked. (I understand that this isn't actually true, but it illustrates the point.) I'd suggest that our society is just a like a frog that is already well-done and well on it's way to become soup stock. Only people who have been absolutely beaten into submission would just accept that in the middle of a housing crisis it is acceptable to force developers to wait ten years to find out if the city will allow them to start building.

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I'm not going to get into the specific recommendations by the Task Force to cut red tape. There are a lot of them, and many quite technical. But I think it is possible to suggest some key factors to consider when we citizens think about these sorts of reforms.

• when a rule gets passed, assessing all opportunity costs must be part of the decision-making process
• when appropriate, computer technology should be used to stream-line the process
• attempts to involve the "triple bottom line" must be realistic and based on a willingness to trade off minor issues in favour of major ones
• appeal procedures need to be sufficiently onerous that they won't be entered into frivolously
  

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In economics an "opportunity cost" is the price you pay for pursuing one way of doing things versus another. With regard to the way municipalities and the province deals with housing, the reports that a developer has to commission and deliver in order to get a building permit come at the expense of the time it takes to get "shovels in the ground". If a large, numbers-driven institution---like a city or province---doesn't assign an actual specific cost to an activity, the natural tendency is for it to expand dramatically. When it does so, it can become a significant impediment to actually getting the job done.

One solution to escalating opportunity costs is to introduce "full cost accounting". That's a process where an attempt is made to itemize all the different elements of a specific activity in order to understand the opportunity costs. It's often used in environmental assessments in order to evaluate an activity. For example, where I used to work a decision was made to bring in a Star Bucks coffee bar to the library and charge the chain a fee for the privilege. A full-cost assessment would have included an evaluation of how this would impact house-keeping and building maintenance. (Shortly after the restaurant opened, the amount of garbage in the building dramatically increased. Coffee stains also became a huge issue with regard to the carpets.) If the university made $1000 off the coffee shop, but found itself spending an extra $2000 in garbage pick up and carpet cleaning, it wouldn't really make sense to bring in the franchise. 

Full cost accounting need not just be about money. It can also take into account time. If A process adds an extra $2000/unit/month to the cost of a home, or, delays building much-needed housing for 10 years, the logical option would be to either stream-line or eliminate it. 

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As I mentioned earlier, there are examples where computer technology can help speed things up. In my silly example with the Electrical Safety Authority, the logical thing to do would be to set up a web-page and allow people to email an application. (I'd be surprised if this hasn't already been done.) 

With regard to housing, the Estonian example would suggest to me that if you are dealing with largish businesses, it should be possible to squeeze some efficiencies out of the system. I would suggest, however, that this sort of thing be done carefully. A lot of bureaucracies have already suffered from things like cyber attacks and ransomware. So it won't do to try to do things "on the cheap". Moreover, there needs to be an appreciation that while privacy is important, efficiency and ease of use shouldn't be traded off by a risk-averse bureaucracy which has lost all sense of urgency. 

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One of the more important things our society has been doing over the last few decades is to introduce an appreciation of the need to consider "externalities" in its economic decision-making. This is a type of opportunity cost that involves one type of economic activity being subsidized by a decline in some public good. For example, when a timber company logs a stream bed and destroys a salmon spawning bed the timber companies profits are said to be subsidized by lost income from fishermen. 

This sort of analysis can also happen with regard to social problems. For example, I sat for a short time on the municipal committee tasked with finding a proper site for the casino that Mike Harris had decided to impose on Guelph. At the first meeting, several local charities told us that they refused to accept any money from a proposed casino because they said that a significant amount of the cash would come from people with gambling addictions---who would end up in poverty and cause problems for their entire family. (The rep from the Guelph Police services said that from what they'd heard from other police agencies this was absolutely correct. I've come to the same conclusion as a result of my article on gambling addiction.)

This is where the "triple bottom line" idea comes from. A project shouldn't be pursued unless it:

1. Can make a profit.
2. Can do so without imposing an opportunity cost on the environment that is higher than the profit in part "1".
3. Can do so without imposing a social cost on the human community that is higher than the profit in part "1". 

This principle is easy to understand in theory, but like a lot of economics, becomes very difficult to put into practice. For example, with my hypothetical example of the clear-cut forest and the salmon fishery, how do we measure the cost to the fishery? Should we limit the lost income to just the lifetime of the existing fishermen? Or should we include all the future generations of fishermen that cannot fish? If we do include the children's, children's, children---what about the cultural impact? If a vibrant local community of First Nation fishers gets destroyed because the fishery goes under, does that mean that the cost includes generations of people ending up with alcohol abuse and welfare dependency? 

Housing is something of a special case for the triple bottom line because one of the issues that is traditionally considered an "externality" (the impact on society), can and should be part of the "profit" section. That is to say, providing housing is actually a public good. This means that if society decides to not build an apartment tower because of fears that it may destroy habitat for the Jefferson salamander, not only do the developers not make a profit, workers and the local economy don't get money to build it, and, people who don't have a home cannot live there: protecting one part of the triple bottom line damages the other two.   

At this point municipalities who are in favour of the triple bottom line are on the horns of a dilemma. Do they treat each leg of this-three legged stool as something that needs to be considered and assign trade-offs that best address the concerns of each of the three concerns? Or do they see the process is one of achieving a consensus with profit, the environment, and, social issues each having an absolute veto? 

The problem with allowing a salamander the right to veto all potential housing in the city or province is that not building enough housing has a significant opportunity cost---namely that housing sky-rockets in price and lower-income people get hammered into poverty as a higher and higher percentage of their income goes into providing housing. 

Another complexity comes from the fact that some things are just going to happen in our society, whether people like it or not. One example that comes to mind is the Hanlon Creek Business Park. It was a very nice piece of unused land that had a trout stream and an old farmer's woodlot. Since the property was next to the Hanlon expressway and close to the 401 highway, it was also a very nice piece of premium property for the city to zone industrial and advertise to bring new businesses into the city.

The city went to a great deal of effort to minimize the environmental impact of this development. Take a look at the following map that suggests how much thought went into this effort.

To see more detail, click on the image. Graphic c/o City of Guelph.

 

Compared to what would have happened in the past, this was an amazing amount of careful work aimed at fulfilling the environmental demands of the triple bottom line. It should be remembered that all of this was done even though the property wasn't especially important from an ecological point of view. If memory serves from both past research and direct observation of the land, the small woods wasn't "old growth" because it had been selectively logged by the previous owner---which would have changed the composition of the trees populating the site. The trout stream was already under stress from things like illegal off-roading. The preparation for the business park actually aimed to not only protect the stream but to also remediate damage that had already been done. The rest of the property were over-grown farmer's fields with things like feral apple trees along old fence lines that had been "land banked" by speculators for several decades .  

But even that wasn't enough to satisfy everyone and a significant opposition movement mobilized against the project. While the city was eventually successful and businesses are now working in the area, the protests cost the city a lot of money and politicians ended up eating a lot of grief. 

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This raises a fourth way to protect housing development from red tape. Currently there are complaints about a huge backlog in appeals that have been sent to the Ontario Land Tribunal (the successor to the Ontario Municipal Board). The argument in the Task Force recommendations is that it needs to be harder to lodge complaints and there need to be significant penalties if the Tribunal decides that the complaints are frivolous or designed to cause delay. 

This raises an important point for a democratic society. If people don't like the policies of their government they have the option of voting for someone else. But what if the majority of people want things that are objectively unfair to a minority? That's why we separate the legal system from politics. That way a judge can look at the objective facts of a situation and decided whether or not the government of the day is following the law or just making stuff up as they go along. In addition, if they can also look at the law itself and decided whether or not it conforms with the constitutional values (ie: the Bill of Rights) that society has set above the law. 

All well and good, but people need to realize that there is a big difference between voting in an election and taking the government to court (or the Ontario Land Tribunal). That's because there are two significant opportunity costs involved in going before the legal system: it is hideously expensive, and, takes a long time. As I've pointed out above, delays and added expenses add significant amounts of money to the rent or cost of buying a home. To that end, it's important that society assign a real cost to accessing the legal system---or else people will just clog the courts.

As a matter of fact, just hiring a lawyer and going before a judge is generally sufficiently onerous to keep most sane individuals out of the court house. But a group of individuals sometimes get so incensed by a state of affairs that they band together, hire a lawyer, and, take on the "powers and principalities". The point is to balance the cost involved to participate so that it is high enough to discourage frivolous suits while not keeping out people with legitimate complaints. 

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I have myself been the plaintiff in one of these lawsuits. As part of a group of Guelph's religious leaders, I sued Walmart as an action aimed at protecting the Saint Ignatius Retreat Centre. We did this because the St. Ignatius property serves an important function for a great many religious organizations in the city---including Protestants, Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, First Nations, etc. I won't go too far into the details except to say that this wasn't done lightly because the law we were using cannot be used by incorporated groups, which means that I could be held liable for court costs. And at a preliminary hearing I was ruled against and told to pay (if memory serves) something like $6,000 for a 15 minute session in front of a Divisional Court Judge. 

After that event our group set out to raise money for a legal defense fund. This was successful and we raised over $60,000 in a week. As the case developed, Walmart agreed to mediation with a judge from the Ontario Municipal Board acting as the "go between". I well remember him warning me that if the case went against me I would lose my house, all my savings, and, have my income garnished if I lost. (Eventually, we settled out of court and Walmart ended-up paying all the court costs plus a significant settlement to St. Ignatius.)        

I'd like to point out what I consider the salient points in the above story. First, the risks that were undertaken were significant, so it was obvious to all and sundry that the people involved were dead serious about the issue. Secondly, the people behind this action were important leaders of Guelph's spiritual community. Third, we had obvious community support because we were able to build a significant legal defense "war chest" in short order. 

In retrospect I wonder if I would have done this sort of thing again. Possibly not. I'm married now and wouldn't want to risk my wife's financial security. But having said that, I think that I got the calculus right about balancing the value to the community versus the personal risk I was running. St. Ignatius is still there, and the settlement it received probably has a great deal to do with that fact. 

Enough blowing my own horn---. 

It's important to allow people to have access to appeals, but there has to be such a high bar to doing so to prevent most projects getting drowned in appeals to the Land Use Tribunal. This could be done in a variety of ways, but I'm not going to get into them because this is a technical subject that will be settled by lawyers, not the citizenry. 

 

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I think though, that there is yet another issue that bleeds out of the above. One thing I've been really concerned about with both the COVID pandemic and the Ukrainian war is what seems to be a permanent "contrarian" constituency. By this, I mean people who seem to be opposed to stuff just for the sake of being opposed. This isn't to say that they don't have their reasons---it's just that when they state them they generally don't have anything approaching a logical reason or real evidence for being so inclined. And yet, they are very emotionally invested in ideas like the vaccines are dangerous and Putin has a right to invade Ukraine. 

 

My working hypothesis is that there is a significant fraction of the population that is very angry and upset about society and the economy. They want something different---maybe something better than capitalism, perhaps something more like the Olde Tyme religion of their youth. I've written about the danger of nostalgia, but I also think that there is a danger to contrarianism just for the sake of being contrary. Sometimes the business people and government are right---or at least less than totally wrong. I think the housing crisis is one of these---perhaps very rare---situations. The Task Force thinks that the biggest problem is supply, and ordinary citizens who don't want their neighbourhoods to change are preventing the new construction we desperately need. 

 

Of course, there are ways that new housing could be built either better or worse. Indeed, several of the suggestions from the Task Force were especially of interest to me: 

• finding land in the yellow belt 
• building the missing middle 
• getting rid of the two stair rule in small apartment buildings
• rethinking mandatory parking
• allowing larger mass timber buildings

These are not recommendations that I think will find favour with with the existing development industry. After all, these people have made their fortunes building suburban sprawl based on single-family homes. If discussion of housing continues to be dominated by NIMBYs fighting tooth and nail against all change, I fear that the conversation will be settled without significant public input, and these extremely positive suggestions will get left in the dust---leaving nothing but a heavy-handed provincial regime that allows the existing development community to build more suburban sprawl with the odd sacrifice zone choked with apartment towers. 

 

My suggestion to the community is to make the effort to research and try to understand the housing crisis from the point of view of people who don't already own their own homes and honestly face up to the complex, difficult choices that have to be made. Don't dismiss other people's problems with cheap shots about greedy landlords, money laundering, or, the need for federal subsidies. Democracy isn't about always getting your own way, or, being able vent your emotions. It requires citizens to educate themselves about the issues and to try to put themselves in the shoes of everyone else. There are a lot worse things to suffer through than having to see an apartment tower rise up in your neighbourhood.    

 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Cults Smashers: Part Sixteen

Stephen decided that he wanted to ensure his status as a “saint” by being the first to pull off something spectacular that hadn’t been done before. He thought that the path to this sort of fame would be by successfully using a technology that no one else had. The road to this would be by leveraging what he’d learned in chemistry classes, what he’d found in old books, and, what he’d learned playing around with Arduino controllers at the local “hacker space”.

The Anarchist Cookbook had a recipe for making cyanide gas. It was dangerous to make, but it gave instructions about how to minimize the risk. Basically, you did it outside and wore a gas mask (surprisingly easy to find on-line at military surplus businesses). If you were careful, you ended up with a clear liquid that the book suggested you could put in sealed, glass bottles and which burst into flames when you smashed the bottle---and gave off poisonous smoke.

Jeffries did some tests and decided that he would “upgrade” the delivery system. He’d put the liquid in opaque, re-usable plastic water bottles and put wifi-controlled chemical detonators in the lids. That way, he’d be able to send a coded message over the internet from anywhere in the world. Once he’d filled the bottles, he glued the bottle tops with “miracle glue” so no one could unscrew a bottle and set the gas off prematurely.

He had a target in mind. At the local university one of the student groups---the local chapter of Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups---was putting on a weekend symposium to do with “Women’s Issues”. Steven thought that he would declare his status as an Incel saint by striking a blow against the femnoids. This way, he would be remembered as a “supreme gentlemen”.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Housing Revisited: Report of the Ontario Housing Affordability Task Force, Part One

A couple weeks ago the Ontario government released The Report of the Housing Affordability Task Force. As the chair of the task force, Jake Lawrence, described in the cover letter; the mandate it followed was to come up with practical solutions to the housing crisis:

Jake Lawrence

When striking the Housing Affordability Task Force, you and Premier Ford were clear: you wanted actionable, concrete solutions to help Ontarians and there was no time to waste. You asked us to be bold and gave us the freedom and independence to develop our recommendations.

This bears emphasis because when I talk about housing issues with my friends and neighbours---all of whom already own their own homes---I hear a lot of airy-fairy suggestions that I think wouldn't go anywhere. These include:

• ending money-laundering (that's the federal government's jurisdiction and something of a game of whack-a-mole anyway)
• stopping the rise in population (that's a great idea---except that both these people and myself are usually also in favour of allowing more immigration---like the Ukrainian refugees already on their way here)
• having the federal and provincial government drive dump truck loads of money into Guelph to build more social housing (good luck with that!)
• Make the rich pay!!!!! (except the rich usually seem to be very good---for one reason or another---at not paying)
• stop allowing people to change apartments into Air BNBs (that wouldn't have much effect except in tourist zones---and enforcement would be a huge pain)
• raising interest rates (that would cause problems for the entire economy)
• financial subsidies for first-time home buyers, like writing-off mortgage payments on your income tax (the US does this, and it doesn't help anyone because the savings just go into pushing up housing prices even higher)
• reform the bureaucracy to speed up the approval process for new housing
  

Here's a video clip from a TVO show where a past governor of the Bank of Canada---and member of the Housing Affordability Task Force---Stephen Poloz, explains what he thinks is really behind the high cost of housing in Ontario. 

It appears that he puts most of the blame on local government. This is the same thing that I've heard time and time again from other experts---municipal councils give far too much power to small groups of local citizens to block developers from building new housing.

If something happens in one community, it might make sense to blame the municipal government. But if it happens all over North America and much of the world beyond, I'd say that there is a bigger issue at play. So if I'm going to blame Guelph's Council for anything, it's a timidity that has kept it from thinking "outside of the box". But as someone who always thinks this way---and was profoundly unsuccessful as a politician---I suspect that the real problem comes down to a few things that are common almost everywhere:

• most people don't vote in municipal elections
• the few who do overwhelmingly already own their own homes
• conversely, people who don't own a place----even if they would like to some day, usually don't vote
• similarly, people who live in a neighbourhood and want to keep it the same will show up at Council meetings---and those who might eventually buy some new housing in that area won't
• retirees (like me) generally have more time to be involved in these sorts of things---and they also tend to the most adverse to change
  

What this means is that there is a conflict of interest in our democratic system that discriminates against potential new home owners plus a system that results in almost no one advocating on their behalf.

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This particular article has been an especial slog for me. Probably because I feel that advocating for people who are suffering from the high price of real estate is such a thankless task, I've found wading through these complex issues really hard to do, even though none of this is new to me. That's just to say that even though I am interested in the subject, a lot of writing these articles is plain hard work. If you think that it's worthwhile and you can afford it, why not support it with a subscription? Patreon and PayPal make it easy to do.
 

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The best way to understand the report's recommendations is to break them down into several different operational categories:

• accurately assess the needs and options for creating housing
  
• re-order the priorities of city council
• take away some key powers from municipalities and give them to the province
• change rules that have gotten in the way of building affordable housing 
• create regulations and penalties that will force municipalities to "get with the program"
• cut the "red tape" that strangles new development
  

&&&&

 

First off, the report points out that in the past both the province and municipalities have badly under-estimated the rising demand for housing. The shortfall has been identified as coming mostly from increased permanent and temporary immigration from both outside of the country and from other provinces. (I discussed this in a previous article.)  

Secondly, most discussions about development have been around the preservation of farmland and water recharge areas. (Doug Ford famously promised the development community that if elected, he'd unravel the Green Belt legislation brought in by previous Liberal governments.) The Task Force side-steps this issue by suggesting that there is already plenty of room to build new housing in low-density suburbs.
 

The recommendations of the task force aimed at these specific parts of the problem are:

• commit to building 1.5 million new homes in ten years
• "Amend the Planning Act, Provincial Policy
  Statement, and Growth Plans to set “growth in the
  full spectrum of housing supply” and “intensification
  within existing built-up areas” of municipalities as
  the most important residential housing priorities in
  the mandate and purpose."
  

I've quoted number "2" in full because it raises an important point. If you look at the current official plan of Guelph, you will see the following statement of goals for the document:

The Official Plan:
a) Establishes a vision, guiding principles, strategic goals, objectives and policies to manage future land use patterns that have a positive effect on the social, economic, cultural and natural environment of the city.
b) Promotes long-term community sustainability and embodies policies and actions that aim to simultaneously achieve social well-being, economic vitality, cultural conservation and enhancement, environmental integrity and energy sustainability.
c) Promotes the public interest in the future development of the city and provides a comprehensive land use policy basis which will be implemented through the Zoning By-law and other land use controls.
d) Guides decision making and community building to the year 2031

As you can see, nowhere in the above statement is there a direct statement that it is a goal of the city to provide adequate housing for all the citizens. 

There's a saying in science to the effect that you can't understand something until you measure it. Well, a somewhat similar thing could be said about governance: if you don't mention it directly, it won't be a priority. Guelph has never made growth in the housing supply or increasing the density of housing into priorities, which means that it has always been "traded off" for other considerations that are specifically mentioned in planning documents. Actually putting these two considerations into our planning documents and also defining them as the top priorities of planning---even ahead of things like creating enough parks, protecting heritage architecture, or, preserving a neighbourhood's "traditional character"---would go a long way to really dealing with the current housing crisis.

The report also makes the case that there already is lots of land to build housing on in Ontario municipalities---it's just been locked-up through exclusionary zoning that restricts it to only single, fully-detached housing. As a result, the population density in our cities is far, far less than that seen in other major cities of the world. Take a look at the following graphic that I've copied from the document.

I've mentioned this issue in previous posts on this subject. But it really does need to be hammered home because almost all of the people I meet simply refuse to admit that this is a real problem. So here's a short explanation of the "yellow belt" in Toronto and where all the land the Task Force says could be used to build the housing needed to end the current crisis.

 

The Task Force is focusing on the issue of building housing stock to lower the cost of living. But there is another side to this issue that also should be mentioned. Low density housing is tremendously expensive for cities to service. In fact, most experts would suggest that in most cases it can only exist because older, higher-density neighbourhoods subsidize them. Here's an excellent video from the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes that explains this issue while talking about a variety of cities---including Guelph.

 

Please note that while the creator of this video is lauding Guelph for building enough higher density housing to keep the city from bankrupting itself, this doesn't mean that it is building enough to keep all it's citizens housed. These are two different issues. Guelph may have enough higher density housing to successfully subsidize its huge swathes of low-density housing, but if we had much more, we might also be able to supply affordable housing to most of the people who want to live here. People have a bias towards thinking in either/or dichotomies---but the universe usually works with percentages. 

&&&&

 

OK, then. How does the Affordability Task Force think that cities like Guelph can increase the density of its housing? 

 

One phrase that they use a fair amount is "as of right". That's a fancy, legal way of saying that they are resetting the "default" of planning. What is now a special case that you have to argue in front of Council or appeal to the Planning Appeal Tribunal (what used to be called the OMB), would be assumed OK "from the get go". The Ontario Housing Affordability Task Force Report identifies a series of different planning decisions that should be considered standard operating procedures across the province from now on:

• building a fourplex of up to four stories on any given single lot
• converting commercial properties to housing
• allowing things like "granny flats" 
• allowing multi-tenant housing (ie: no laws against renting rooms)
• allowing 6 to 11 story buildings with no minimum parking requirement on any existing transit corridor 
• support municipalities to ensure that any greenfield development---both within and outside of existing municipal boundaries---to ensure that it adheres to the same density requirements identified in this report
  

In effect, the Task Force realizes that municipal politics has made increasing a city's density into a "kiss of death". Since it is political suicide to advocate for it, no one on Council wants to support it anywhere. The solution proposed simply takes away the power to veto development that would raise density from the hands of local government. With the power diffused over the entire province, the hope is that no provincial government will be afraid of a local backlash against building more housing in any particular neighbourhood.
 
&&&&

 

Another issue that stands in the way of building more housing are a variety of building code and other rules that have refused to "keep up" with the latest technology and social trends. What they do is artificially inflate the cost of building housing without actually improving the safety or value of the home. 

 

To understand this point, consider the following housing requirements that the Task Force suggests should be changed to allow:

• a single set of stairs in an apartment building
• wooden multi-story apartment buildings
• housing without dedicated parking spaces

The first recommendation deals with a section of the building code that mandates that apartments must have a two separate, closed-off sets of stairs on opposite sides of the building. The reasoning has been that by doing so, the individual units are protected from air intake that would feed a fire, and, give occupants a second option if one of the stairwells is impassable because of the fire.

The problem with this law is that the second set of stairs are an added expense. 

 

Enclosing and separating the stairs from the aisles also removes the potential to use natural ventilation and lighting for the corridors outside of apartments. Take a look at a European apartment stairwell. (Single stairwells are the standard in Europe.) If you add a skylight and cupola on the top of the central stairwell, then light will stream down, and, hot air can exit the top. If tenants open the doors of their apartments (or a vent at the top of their doors) then hot air will get drawn out of their unit and cooler air will come in through open windows (because of the "chimney effect")---increasing ventilation and reducing air conditioning costs.

A Paris apartment building stairwell. Image c/o The Urbanist.

While it's true that the two stairs code was designed to save lives, modern construction techniques (no more hollow plaster and lathe walls, fire resistant solid flooring, etc) plus requirements for mandatory smoke detectors and sprinklers have pretty much removed any reason for this old rule---at least for mid-sized and smaller apartment buildings.

   

A second recommendation is to allow builders across the province the option of building small apartment buildings with modern wooden construction methods instead of forcing them to exclusively use reinforced concrete. I did a quick non-scientific survey of statements wood versus concrete construction, and noticed what seemed to be a great deal of motivated reasoning that seemed to based on which side of the industry was paying the bills. (Could this be why it's taken so long to reform the building code?)

 

After winnowing through the chaff, it seems to me that the key issues to understand are that a new technology has emerged using something called "mass timber" construction for small apartment buildings. This uses "cross-laminated timber" to replace slabs and beams of reinforced concrete or steel.

Cross-laminated timber floor slab being lowered onto beams made from the same material. Image c/o Think Wood.

As you can see from the above picture, the slabs of wood are much bigger and thicker than the two-by-fours most people see in single family homes. This makes them much more resistant to fire.
 

As near as I can tell, the wood itself is not cheaper than either steel or reinforced concrete. What it is, however, is lighter---which helps cut construction costs. It also seems to be easier to work with, which means that labour costs and speed of build are better. This is where wood cuts costs. Moreover, as a renewable resource, mass timber construction is less carbon intensive than traditional methods.

 

There are already quite a few examples of successful mass timber constructed buildings, such as the 2016 T3 (Timber, Technology, Transit) building in Minneapolis below. It's a seven story office building and was constructed over just 2.5 months and used half the construction labour of a comparable reinforced steel building.  

 

The T3 building in Minneapolis. Image c/o Think Wood.

Finally, as I pointed out in a past article, using the numbers provided by an expert in the field---Donald Shoup---plus Guelph's then current parking regulations, underground parking in apartments and condominiums adds something like $75,000 to the cost of each housing unit. If developers were able to stop automatically adding expensive parking to a building---whether it is needed by tenants or not---it could result in real savings for both home buyers and renters. 

 

&&&&   

 

Finally, in any attempt to deal with an existing problem it's important to not only change the rules, but to also provide for enforcement. There are lots of examples where governments brought in really good rules to deal with a substantive issue but they were simply ignored and this dramatically reduced their effectiveness. (If you want to check out one example, take a look at this depressing story I wrote about solid waste.) The housing emergency is too important to the well-being of this nation to come up with a good-sounding strategy that just gets sabotaged in implementation.  

 

To that end, there are a series of recommendations from the Task Force aimed at ensuring minimal sabotage to government programs based on it's recommendations:

• if a municipality hasn't raised density levels to provincial minimums within 2 years, the province will allow unlimited height and density next to major transit stations (think about the proposed tower on Wyndham St. across from  the Guelph police station)

If Guelph didn't have it's act together vis-a-vis density, it would be forced to accept this building by the province. Image c/o Skyscraper Page.

• force municipalities to change their zoning and plans to ensure the following:

• preserving the character of a neighbourhood would no longer be a priority
• remove site plan approval and public consultation from any development proposal that conforms to the official plan and has 10 or less units
• create province-wide standards with regard to things like lot size, building depth, landscaping, etc---including reducing or eliminating minimum parking requirements
• remove all floor plate restrictions on towers to allow for the creation of more efficient high-density housing
  

• stop municipalities from having more public meetings on a project beyond those required under the provincial Planning Act 
• force municipalities to allow digital participation in public consultation
• force municipalities to delegate decision-making vis-a-vis site plan approvals and minor variances to staff
• prohibit municipalities from making bulk listing on city heritage homes listings and retroactively declaring a home as being "heritage" after a development listing has been filed. In addition, any home owner who has had their property designated as being preserved for historical reasons should be compensated at the fair market rate for loss of revenue.
• restore the right of developers to appeal municipal plans and Municipal Comprehensive Reviews 

&&&&

This pig of an article is already longer than most of my readers will probably like, so I'm going to take a pause here. In part two I'll deal with more Task Force recommendations---the ones aimed at stream-lining the bureaucracy to let housing get proposed and build without years of studies and consultation. I'll also add my own thoughts about what this all means and what I'm going to be looking for this year in both municipal and provincial elections. 

Until then, cross your fingers and hope that the pandemic is finally winding down. If you can, help support the Ukraine war effort any way you think best. Be nice to each other, we've been going through "interesting times"---and they are never fun. 

&&&&

Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

 

Cult Smashers: Part Fifteen

The head of the operation led both Sally and Nate into the booth. He pointed at a woman who was sitting at a terminal watching, and directed her to the mixing board. She walked over, put on some headphones, and, starting flicking switches.

Nate was placed in front of a microphone. He, Sally, and, the technician put on headphones too. The woman spoke to them. “My co-worker is going to give you a sheet of things to say. Just read them into the microphone using your normal voice.”

Nate read the script. “This is a vial of the Estra-Zappica vaccine that was smuggled out of a mass clinic so it could be tested. Here is it under 200 power magnification. As you can see, there seem to be metallic structures. What are they doing in a vaccine? And look at this video footage I took over a long period of time and sped up, the structures seem to be replicating and assembling into larger structures. Is that a tentacle? Or is it an antenna? It looks like nano-tech. But that can’t be, humanity doesn’t have anything like this sort of science-fiction stuff. So where does it come from? Could it be from an alien civilization? Why is the government so adamant that everyone get injected with this stuff for a disease that doesn’t seem to be much more dangerous than the flu?”

The woman at the mixing board spoke again. “That’s good. I have your sound levels set up. Could you repeat it?” Nate did as he was told. At that point, the bearded man asked indicated it was OK to remove the headphones.

“If you’ve ever wondered why so much popular music sounds exactly the same nowadays, there’s a good technical reason. Modern musicians are often terrible performers so they rely on technology to correct the fact that they don’t know how to sing in tune and can’t project their voices. Everyone knows that amplifiers overcome poor projection, but they were also used to hide the fact that many professionals can’t even play a tune. Blast the sound loud enough and all the subtleties get lost. Now we have something called an “auto-tuner” that will actually change the pitch of a singer and fix the problems in a singers voice. There are also other technologies that can change timing, and other subtle features of pop music. Unfortunately, the result is a decline in musicianship and everything ending sounding much the same.”

“What we’ve been working on here is to analyze the speech patterns of charismatic influencers on the loony fringe to find out what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. We’ve come up with a machine and a program that we think is able to mimic their abilities. We call it ‘audio ketchup’, because we slather it over ‘bad tasting’ ideas so gullible people will eat them up.”

“It consists of a mixing system plus a couple software programs. The first one is an auto-tuner that maximizes the sort of tones that the best influencers use. Here’s what your brief statement sounds like auto-tuned.”

Nate could clearly recognize himself, but there was a deeper resonance---and a distinct sound of ‘confidence’ in the recording.

The woman typed some more on her keyboard. “Now I’m going to run a special program that we developed here. It uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence to recreate the same rhythm as the best influencers. It speeds up voice, adds dramatic pauses, etc.”

Again, it was still Nate speaking---but even more authoritatively than in the previous play back.

She spoke again while her fingers clattered on the keyboard. “Now we are adding in modulations in the volume. This creates different emphasis for different ideas. Again, done with an AI using software created here.”

This was the strongest version of all. Nate was amazed! He sounded like a Biblical prophet!

At this point Sally looked at her watch and announced. “OK. That’s enough for today. We have an appointment somewhere else. Thanks and keep up with the good work.”

She led Nate who followed back out the front of the old bakery and into the Jaguar.

&&&&

Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Cult Smashers: Part Fourteen

Sally turned onto a back street, went down it a couple blocks, and, ended up parking in totally average industrial mall. She came to a place with dirty windows and a “For Lease” sign on the window. She had a key that let her open the front door.

Inside, the place was grubby. It looked like the last occupant had been an ethnic bakery. The floor was filthy, but there was still the faint whiff of bread. She locked the door behind them, then went to a mirror behind the counter. She pulled out a hankie and used it to push on the mirror without leaving finger marks---it popped out an inch. She pulled it open all the way on a hinge, which revealed a steel door with a keypad. She tapped out a code into it, turned the knob, and, the two went in. She pulled the mirror behind her closed, then shut the steel fire door.

“The Old Ones own a couple places like this in Toronto. It suits their purposes to have real estate that can be used as ‘pop ups’ whenever they start a special project and need to create a workspace.” The room was clean and had workbenches with stools around most of the periphery. There were various computers plus what seemed to be a small, but well-supported video studio with a large green wall sitting at one side.

A couple people were working at terminals. One of them came over. He was tall and thin, had a short, full-face black beard, dark heavy-framed glasses, a thick head of curly dark hair. He was wearing birkenstocks with socks, khaki slacks, a denim shirt, and, a grey, unbuttoned cardigan. “Hey, good to see you. Is this your protege?”

Sally pre-empted Nate’s response with a brief statement directed at him, “We don’t use names here for security reasons.”

She turned back to the tall, thin man. “Yeah. I brought him here so he could learn a bit about what you are doing. Fill him in on the project---no picky details, just the broad over-view.”

The thin man turned to Nate and gave him a spiel that had obviously been given enough times before to come naturally. “OK. One of the big intermediate-level problems our society is facing is the decline in civic cohesion. We have increasing numbers of people who don’t believe in science, journalism, anything the government says, etc. That in itself would be a problem, but they do believe in some pretty nonsensical things instead---and that leads to behaviour that is a big problem for everyone else.”

“They don’t get vaccinated because they think that it’s conspiracy by Bill Gates or lizards from space or something else to inject them with chips that track their every movement or make you sterile or cause autism or whatever. As a result, diseases that should be relatively easy to control have become more and more difficult to deal with.”

“Even worse, small, but significant numbers of people are becoming radicalized to the point where they are willing to commit violence. We have people shooting up synagogues, driving trucks into crowds, planting bombs in public areas, etc. We have been studying what sort of people are most susceptible to this sort of radicalization, how it’s done, and, trying to come up with a way we can inoculate them to prevent this from happening.”

“We think that the problem is what are called ‘charismatic influencers’. That is, there are a small number of people who have the ability to inspire significant numbers of very committed individuals to do what they say. Mostly they do this just to raise money. But among the people with these abilities is another smaller set who---for one reason or another---are trying to get their followers to do acts of terrorism.”

“We believe that what makes someone an influencer is a specific type of behaviour that works on a specifically susceptible subset of the human population. The people we’ve been studying do this sort of thing subconsciously, but we think we can train individuals and use technology to do it pretty much on command.”

Sally joined in at this point. “We want you to learn how to use this technique to make you an influencer too. The hope is that if you are good enough at it, you might be able to ‘counter attack’ those specific influencers that seem to be most interested in programming lone wolf terrorist attacks.”

“Why don’t you take us into the studio booth to show us where you are at with your technology?”

&&&&

Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!