I'm in the middle of another "deep dig" about housing, but I thought I'd toss out an idea that my significant other has mentioned several times and which I think has a great deal of merit. My wife (Misha) is a veteran who served in the First Gulf War as a member of an activated National Guard unit from Missouri. Like me, she is a firm supporter of the idea of a Guaranteed Annual Income. But she takes the idea one step further and suggests that we should also have "Guaranteed Personal Housing" (GPH).
As she describes it, it would be like the barracks she lived in after getting out of Basic Training. This is an important distinction, because most people's vision of barracks life comes from old WWII movies---which was something like what she experienced in basic training.
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| Public Domain image of Australian Air Force barracks in Edmonton Alberta during WWII. (Think British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, BCATP.) |
Once you move beyond that into the modern day, things start looking an awful lot like the dorm room I had in my second semester at the U. of Guelph. Here's a picture of a modern US Air Force/Navy dorm\.
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| From a page by the Wiley|Wilson architectural firm. |
The salient features are that the housing is basic, some has shared bedrooms and some doesn't (again like a university dorm). The expectation is that most eating happens in a mess hall/cafeteria. Beyond that, there are shared facilities---eg a tv lounge and a computer pool. Probably most importantly, there is a regular inspection to ensure that a minimum standard of cleanliness is maintained and there no damage done to the structure. This happened at the U. of Guelph too, only it consisted of house-keeping coming in to vacuum once a week. (There were some residences where this didn't happen. But from my days working in the campus carpentry shop I can attest that sometimes the messes we found after move-out were colossal---truck loads of beer bottles, holes cut through walls---which just shows how important regular inspections can be.)
Misha's idea is that something like this should be available from the government whenever the wheels fall off your life and you find yourself with no place to live. Please note, this isn't supposed to replace things like group homes, rent-geared to income housing, etc. That's because there are a lot of people who simply wouldn't fit into this sort of thing. Sad to say, some folks need "minders" to keep them from destroying any housing they find themselves. This can be because they have psychological issues, substance abuse problems, etc. Also, it shouldn't be seen as appropriate for people with families or many types of disabilities.
What it would be good for would be young people who are having a problem "launching" after leaving school and simply cannot live with their parents. It could also be useful for singles or couples without children who've hit "rock bottom" after after a bankruptcy, job loss, divorce, etc. It would also be valuable for people who simply need some time to 'find themselves' when they want to move into another part of their life---entrepreneurs, artists, people going through minor life crises, etc.
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My major concern about the need for something like this is because if the government were to extend our current Guaranteed Annual Income systems to the people older than eighteen and younger than 65, I'm afraid that it wouldn't help anyone because all the increased income would be siphoned off by landlords who would just ratchet-up rents in lockstep.
I suppose it shouldn't be necessary to point this out, but the current cost of housing in Guelph is loopy and seems to be totally disconnected from people's ability to pay. I get regular real estate reports sent to me from Bullpen Consulting and the latest one, Nov 2021, had the following information:
Guelph finished ninth on the list of 35 cities for average monthly rent in October for a one-bedroom home at $1,766 and for average monthly rent for a two-bedroom at $2,115.
Year over year, average rent in Guelph in October was up 11.3 per cent for a one-bedroom and 10.2 per cent for a two-bedroom. Month over month, average rent in Guelph in October was up 3.5 per cent and up 5.3 per cent for a two-bedroom.
With rents this high and rising so fast, it's obvious that a key part of what is impoverishing people is the outrageous cost of housing. And the only way to get the cost of housing down and still ensure an adequate supply is to build new housing. As I see it, one relatively cheap way of doing this is to create barracks or dorm-style housing for that fraction of the population which is single or couples without children who would find this sort of low-cost housing an improvement over their present situation.
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I suppose some readers might take issue with this suggestion, but if so, I'd like you to think about it this way. A great many people are already living in rooming houses or shared accommodation. The problem is that with the average two-bedroom apartment going for $2,115 this means that each person has to pony up over $1000/month. And if someone is working at a minimum wage job of $15/hour, for forty hours a week, with four weeks in a month, that gives them only $2400 before taxes. That means that whatever else someone has to pay for---car, cell phone, food, dental, utilities, etc---leaves precious little for someone to build up the savings needed to get out of the "poverty trap".
The benefit of the citizen barracks idea is that they are a type of housing that the government could build for a lot less than the sorts of social housing it is already creating---and which is pretty much not available to most singles and childless couples anyway because the demand has so wildly out-stripped the supply.
There's also a multiplier effect. One of the advantages of a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) is that it eliminates the "reserve army of labour" that keeps wages low and allows employers to abuse employees. The idea is that if companies can always find someone who is so desperate for money that they will work for them, they can pay as little as possible and treat employees like dirt because there will always be someone to replace them. This is why wages stagnate or fall when their is a labour surplus. And in a situation where automation is replacing human labour and unions aren't all that strong (ie: like the last few decades) people make less and less money.
If we had a good GAI system in Canada every time someone tried to hire someone with crappy pay and/or awful working conditions the potential employee could say "No. I don't think so. I'd rather live on the GAI until something better comes along." This would force the economy to stop being reliant on exploiting labour and instead invest more in improving productivity through smart management and intelligent use of automation. It probably will be the case that automation will force more people out of work, but those days are coming anyway. And a GAI would give people the time to educate themselves and develop new "side hustles" that would keep them occupied doing the sorts of things (like writing this blog) that are useful for human flourishing, but don't seem to be sustained by the market place.
The same problem faces housing. If there is so little housing available that people have no other option than going onto the streets, landlords can charge as much as people can bear---which leaves them almost nothing else. Indeed, that's why food banks are so popular now. People have to choose between rent and food.
If the government could provide a cheap dorm or barracks room---for people who have a modicum of self-discipline---it would keep those folks off the streets. It would also lower pressure on social housing and shelters because they would be reserved for people who couldn't live in a barracks. It would also push down the cost of housing for lower income people because it would strengthen their bargaining power with landlords because the "last resort" wouldn't be freezing on the street, but rather living in a barracks until something better comes along. And building barracks for a subsection of the population who would find it suitable would be a lot cheaper than building apartments for every single member of the population who's having a hard time finding a place to live.
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I want to make a couple things clear.
First of all, this isn't a universal panacea. It's something that I think could be of value for a specific fraction of the population. There are lots of people who have "issues" who would very quickly destroy a barracks through things like vandalism or just plain unwillingness to clean up their messes. There would have to be some sort of regular inspections for people. If they fail to meet a minimum standard, they will have to be evicted.
That's why there will still need to be specific housing geared towards people who---for one reason or another---simply cannot be trusted to live in a citizen's barracks. These already exist, and they would still be needed.
Secondly, this could be a very good idea---or it could be an absolutely dreadful one, depending on how it is executed. If people manage them under the impression that the people living in these places are "failures" who need to be "punished" in order to force them to get back to being productive members of our great capitalist utopia, they will fail miserably. Similarly, if people try to make them into schools for building a new model citizenry, they will also fail. People are people, and they should be allowed to get about their lives as best they can if they find themselves living in these new barracks.
Some folks will only see them as a temporary way station on their way to being a middle or upper class "respectable person". But I could see other people living in them for long periods of time. We already have lots of elderly, working poor, disabled, students, and, at-loose-ends folks living in rooming houses already. The difference between them and the barracks is that what I'm proposing could be a lot cheaper and more comfortable. And if society provided this type of housing, a lot more of the disability, pension, student grant, and, welfare money the government gives out would stay in people's hands---instead of going to landlords.
So what do you think? Should we add Guaranteed Minimum Housing---in the form of citizen's barracks---to the idea of a Guaranteed Annual Income?
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
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