Social Housing and Guelph

Synopsis

Social housing is controlled by the county, yet the lion's share of the county's units are in the city. In addition, most of the money that gets spent on it comes from the federal and provincial governments. And those two levels of government have a long history of using that money as a "political football" that comes and goes in response to the back-and-forth battles between left and right. Put into the context of the entire economy and the private development sector, however, the average financial commitment has tended to be woefully inadequate. Indeed, it is hard to believe that any government would be willing to put the amount required to actually deal with the enormous housing problems that we currently face. To this end, it is pretty clear that any municipal government that really wants to address the housing backlog in Guelph is going to have to undertake actions that will be profoundly unpopular with a large part of the electorate. 

What is "Social Housing"?

It's important to realize that there are two components to the idea of "social housing". First, there is the actual building being constructed, which generally has some sort of subsidy towards its creation. An equally important element is a monthly subsidy by the government to the landlords of individual tenants, which is called "rent-geared-to-income".

Rent-geared-to-income is a provincial program governed by the Housing Services Act of 2011 (this link provides updates to 2018.) It is really, really, really hard to understand this act and obviously requires a social worker to navigate through the dense legal language to understand who is and is not able to get this help. (Just to give you one example, the people who are helped out under this program aren't identified as "people", "families", "households", "clients", or, "recipients" but rather as "benefit units".) But as a general rule, people who qualify for rent-geared-to-income find that the cost of their housing is restricted to about 30% of their income. You cannot get rent-geared-to-income in just any apartment, however, as this would encourage private landlords to gouge the province. Instead, the money is tied to specific units that are generally built with money provided by the federal government or the province through specific funding programs. These housing units come in a wide variety of forms---depending on who lives there, and, how they are owned and administered.

One way to think about the different types of housing is to consider how they are owned and managed. In the city of Guelph there are 52 different complexes that provide a total of 2,473 units of social housing. You can break these down into five categories of ownership:  

• non-profit corporations (952) (these can include both Non-Government Agencies (NGOs) and the city of Guelph)
• housing co-ops (253)
• county-owned (882)
• Affordable Housing (27) (defined as being 20% below the average market rent)
• "Rent Supplement Housing" (183) (housing that is privately owned but which has units that the County assigns to people where rent-geared-to-income money is paid directly to the landlord)  

Non-Profits

A non-profit corporation is an incorporated, limited liability company. "Limited liability" means that under the law the individuals involved do not have any personal financial responsibility for the company (unlike a partnership.) A "non-profit" corporation has no obligation to shareholders to make a profit (this is the "fiduciary duty" that I mentioned towards the end of one of my articles about solid waste issues.) Instead, the  duty of the organization is towards the ends that the incorporation articles set out in their charter---in this case, providing low cost housing for people in need. A non-profit need not be a "charitable" company, as that specifically refers to the ability of a group to issue legal tax receipts to donours, which is tightly regulated. (Even though as a matter of fact, some housing non-profits are charities.) Some of Guelph's non-profit housing corporations do have a relationship with larger charities---such as the Abbeyfield Houses Society of Guelph, which is part of a national charity that began in Great Britain.

As a general rule, however, non-profits tend to act as "subcontractors" for the federal and provincial governments who take on the task of applying for money from government programs that fund social housing. They also apply for grants from "hands off" government-supported charitable agencies---like the Trillium Foundation---to build and administer these social programs.

In addition to the Non Government Agencies (NGOs---like Abbeyfield), we also have the Guelph Nonprofit Housing Corporation. According to it's website it has 512 rent units", of which 80% are rent-geared-to-income and the rest are "market priced" (that's something like 410 units.) It has a contract with the county that means that all of the Guelph properties are managed by the same staff that deal with county-owned ones.

Co-ops

In contrast, a housing co-op consists of people who band together to create and manage a housing complex that they "own" co-operatively. It's important to realize that is a system that is different from standard "freehold". There are two ways that a co-op can be organized: "equity" and "non-equity". An equity co-op allows each individual owner the right to sell their property (the individual apartment or townhouse unit they live in) to another person in order to recoup the money that they personally put into it. These sorts of co-ops are very common in other countries, but exceedingly rare in Ontario. (A condo is different in that it is organized and built by a private developer for a profit. A co-op is organized by the owners at-cost.)

Instead, what we generally have are non-equity co-ops that were built under a federal program that operated in the 1970s and 1980s. Under that system, governments supplied start up capital that citizens used to build the housing complex under the understanding that a certain percentage of the units would be set aside for low-income individuals under a rent-geared-to-income scheme. In exchange for this help, the co-op members forgo building any equity in the complex---all capital accrued instead is deemed as belonging to the co-op as a whole. Theoretically, once the money loaned by the government is paid back, rents might be lowered. But in actual fact by the time this happens most of the money raised by rents end up being ploughed back into maintenance. Rents tend to be lower in general, however, because their is no owner taking a profit.

The program to create co-ops were primarily introduced on the assumption that they would prevent a city from shunting all lower-income people into one area. This had been attempted in many social housing programs in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was believed that they failed because a certain fraction of the poor tend to make "bad life choices" (think crime) which tended to drag under other people who were struggling to "get ahead" but who were poor through no fault of their own. Co-ops were designed to have a mix of people from all classes, which would prevent this problem. For a variety of reasons (beyond the scope of this article) the program that supported them was cancelled in the 1980s and they are no longer being built as part of social housing.

(Having said that, there is no reason at all why individuals cannot use their own private capital to build equity co-ops---and I know of at least one current Guelph project "in the works". But these would not be independent from the current market forces---so they would not necessarily be any more affordable than any other type of housing. As such, they have nothing at all to do with social housing.)

County Owned

Wellington county also owns outright a large number of properties that it provides to people of limited income. The lion's share are in Guelph---because that's where most of the need exists. But having said that, it also owns properties in other parts of the county:  Fergus, Elora, Erin, Rockwood, Eramosa, Mapleton, Minto, Arthur, and, Mount Forest. Since this blog tries to deal exclusively with Guelph matters, I won't be dealing with any of these properties. Suffice it to say that there is a need for social housing just about everywhere.

Affordable Housing

As part of the on-going attempts by Council to help the housing crisis, the city of Guelph has been attempting to negotiate with developers to bring in new affordable units whenever a new proposal comes before them. (I talked about this in a previous post.) Some of this has been done through the use of subsidies---either directly or through deferred taxes. The result has been a stock of so-called "affordable housing" units, which is defined as being "20% below the market average".

According to the numbers I found in my first article on housing, here are the average rent costs for various sized apartments, followed by their "affordable cost" (ie: 80%), then the yearly income that a household would have to make to make this equal to at most 30% of their gross income. The way to understand the math is that if you are paying 30% of your monthly income in rent, you can get your monthly income by multiplying your monthly rent by 3.33. And that translates to your yearly income by multiplying by 12. But you can simplify the calculation by multiplying the 3.33 by 12, which gives you 40. So to find out the yearly income of people who are only paying 30% of it in rent, you just multiply the numbers by 40. Unless a rent really is 30% or less than your income, it is hard to say that it is really "affordable". The last number is this hypothetical income where what the city calls "affordable rent" is only 30%.

• bachelor apartment: $750 (average), $600 ("affordable"), and income of $24000.
• one bedroom: $980 and $784, and income of $31,360
• two bedroom: $1,124 and $899, and income of $35,960
• three bedroom: $1200 and $960, and income of $38,400
• average cost of an apartment: $1,066 and $853, and income of $34,120

And again, as I mentioned in my other articles on this subject, the problem is that household income is too low for this definition of "affordable" to be of any service to the poor. That is, if you break down Guelph household income into six groups, you see the following:

• less than $20,000/year, 5,770 or 10.5%
• $20,000 to $40,000, 8,320 or 15%
• $40,000 to $60,000, 8,920 or 16%
• $60,000 to $80,000, 7,635 or 14%
• $80,000 to $100,000, 6,690 or 12%
• $100,000 and over, 17,530 or 32%

The numbers aren't precise, but at the very least 10.5% plus some other figure---let's assume 4.5%---of the households in Guelph (ie: 15%) make less than $24,000/year in gross income. This means that what Guelph defines as affordable really isn't "affordable". For this reason, it's hard to believe that "this affordable housing" category really has an significant impact on housing issues---especially since there are only 27 units in the city.

Rent Supplement Housing

These are privately-owned apartments that the county has entered into an arrangement with to provide rent-geared-to-income. The supplement is paid directly to the landlord. Obviously in a hot rental market like Guelph most landlords would rather rent to the general public. But there are some buildings that for one reason or another the landlord is happy to rent out this way and the county considers "value for the money".  I suspect that there could be issues to pursue here---but this article is already ballooning in size, so I'll leave it at that.

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Federal and Provincial Social Housing Initiatives:  History 101

I had mentioned early on that the federal and provincial governments had been involved in building social housing. I also mentioned that housing co-ops were primarily built under a program that was cancelled in the 1980s. There have been a great many different programs and it would take a lot of time to explain the timeline. Luckily, the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association (ONPHA) has created this nifty graphic that shows the various programs that the federal and provincial governments have set up, starved for funds, and, eliminated over the years between 1945 and 2011. I'd suggest that anyone who is interested in this subject take the time to linger over it, and make the effort to think about what was going on in the larger Canadian society. Consider, for example, that Jean Chretien was prime minister at the time (1993) that the federal government decided to stop funding any social housing---I assume as part of the general attempt to balance the budget. You can also see that Mike Harris was premier of Ontario when the provincial social housing program was also cancelled (1995.) (I suspect that this was when I remember seeing beggars show up in downtown Guelph for the first time. Politics has consequences in people's lives.)  (Sorry, but this is the best resolution of the graphic that I could get.) 

The Context

I don't have the time to write a complete history or synopsis of federal and provincial social housing policy---and I'm pretty sure that most of you wouldn't read it if I did. But I think it's important to realize a few points.

First of all, ask yourself "What fraction of society is this housing program supposed to be helping?" Canada has several different housing problems going on all at the same time. These include housing on First Nations' reserves. It also includes providing housing for people who are in crisis because of mental illness, drug addiction, physical disability, or, spousal abuse. As well, there are huge geographic areas---like the Greater Toronto Area (eg:  Guelph)---where the commercial real estate market has decoupled from the incomes of most people and no longer provides affordable housing for many middle and lower-income people. All these needs are something that different levels of government need to deal with, but require a huge amount of money. Equally important, each constituency has dramatically different levels of influence over public policy. In a democracy there always is a tendency for politicians to deal with the problems of people who carry lots of votes over those who objectively may have more real need---simply because of electoral concerns. So, when a proposal comes forward for social housing, it's important to ask "social housing, for who?" As I pointed out above, the fraction of housing called "affordable housing"---as defined as being 20% less than the average market rent---appears to only be aimed at lower middle-class people instead of the genuinely poor.

Secondly, it's really important that any program that a government puts forward be placed in a context. When a government minister announces that so much money has been set aside to provide housing for so many households, it is tremendously important to always find out what percentage of the budget the money provides and what percentage of units this will provide to the entire housing market. For example, according to the 2016 federal census, there were 55,900 places to live in Guelph. Of those 5,470 were social housing of one sort or another---or 9.8%. As I showed above, the actual need---as defined as rents for 30% of gross income or less---is really something like 15% of the population, or, 8,390 households. This suggests that if the only way that Guelph can provide affordable housing for the poor is through social housing, it has a backlog of almost 3,000 units.

I don't have a figure for how much it costs to create an average unit of social housing---and I would be dubious about any such number if it was presented to me simply because there are so many different types of housing that fall under that umbrella, and, the cost would fluctuate wildly from community to community based on the cost of land. But to get a feel for the amount of money involved, let's look at something that the city staff have developed a figure to describe. As I mentioned in my last article, city staff have suggested that a subsidy of $60,000/unit is necessary to get private developers to create new "affordable" housing. What this means is that if the County, Province, Federal Government, etc, were to use this subsidy mechanism it would cost something like 174.9 million dollars in Guelph alone to deal with the shortfall in social housing. And let's not forget that this isn't the real cost for creating social housing. Instead, it's the price of creating apartments that are 20% less than the market average for a limited amount of time. And at this price they are unaffordable by that bottom 15% of the market that are most in need of housing. Social housing units that really do help the desperately poor would cost a lot more per unit. Just to put this figure of $174.9 million into context, the entire operating budget for Guelph in 2018 is $233 million.   

I think that the magnitude of the housing problem really needs to be understood. The federal government recently created a "National Housing Strategy" that commits to spending $40 billion over ten years. This sounds like an astronomical amount of money, but the casual reader needs to remember a couple things. First, this only comes down to $4 billion per year. Secondly, this is for the entire country. Think of it this way, Guelph only has a population of 131,900 people. Canada has 36.29 million. This means that Guelph has only .3635% of the population of the entire country. That means that proportionally the federal government has committed to providing $14.54 million to Guelph. This is nowhere near enough money to effectively deal with the crisis we are currently facing. And don't forget that Guelph's population is growing rapidly and it's stock of existing, low-cost housing is shrinking because of gentrification. 

We also have to admit to ourselves that social programs---like creating and maintaining social housing---is always going to be treated like a political football. That means that programs will be "spun" to look bigger than they actually are, and, cancelled for totally capricious reasons. To cite a couple specific examples, consider the fact that the federal Liberal party announced that their funding was "$40 billion over ten years" and that $500 million dollars was set aside in the provincial Climate Action Plan to maintain and upgrade social housing in Ontario. Trudeau's government has no way of knowing what will happen to their government after the next election---let alone in ten years. And our dear, beloved new Premier just ripped up the cap-and-trade agreement that was funding the Climate Action Plan---which means no money for social housing buildings to replace worn-out heating systems.  

I've discussed social housing in some detail because I've had local politicians tell me that the real solution to the housing crisis is to get the federal and provincial governments to build more social housing. But when I began to understand the scale of the problem, it seemed to me to be total moonshine to think that the electorate will let politicians of any stripe make that size of social investment. It might actually be true that this would be the best way to do things (see the example of Vienna I raised in my last article), but it just doesn't seem politically feasible in Canada. Moreover, social housing has historically seemed to be easy to cut when voters are more concerned about taxes than they are about homelessness. Once you accept this unpleasant truth, the interested citizen is left with the question "well, what exactly are we supposed to do?"

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I'm not about to suggest that the federal government shouldn't be building new social housing. But we need to see social housing as a last resort instead of the be all and end all. Government simply lacks the financial resources that would be needed for the task at hand. The only answer that I can think of to solve the mess we are in is to bring in private developers. Whether individual readers agree with capitalism or not, the fact of the matter is that Canada is a social democracy. And that, fundamentally, is based on the idea that we allow private business people to run huge swaths of the economy. But it isn't a libertarian utopia---we believe that democratically-elected governments should step in and nudge businesses in directions that serve the public good. That's why we have inspectors to ensure that butchers don't sell people contaminated meat. It's also why we have public planners who force developers to build housing that doesn't immediately degenerate into slums. But somewhere in the planning process the idea that zoning should ensure that there is an adequate supply of housing for everyone has been forgotten.

As I have pointed out in various articles, there are a variety of ways in which our zoning seems designed to make housing not affordable. We pass zoning bylaws that mandate far too much required parking---which mean that it is illegal to build walkable "down towns" with apartments over the top of stores. It also means that the driveways for houses cannot be widened to provide parking for basement apartments---and that owners who lack the extra parking can't even rent to people without cars. For years the OMB ruled that any type of increased density was illegal in any area where people lived in individual houses---so as to "protect the neighbourhood character".  We have rules against building towers any higher than an arbitrary limit "to preserve the sight line". We mandate what seems to be a very large amount of parkland (one hectare---the size of a football field) per 1,000 residents (about 300 apartments.) We have regulations to prevent sprawl in order to prevent encroachment on farmland and water recharge areas.  The last of these regulations is important and should be preserved, but the others should be relaxed in order to let developers increase the housing stock at least to the point where everyone has a place to live that they can afford.

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There is an important real estate concept that I came across while reading a Parliamentary Research Paper on the history of social housing in Canada: "filtering".  This is the idea that when a building gets to a certain age the rents it charges tend to decline. I'd never come across this term before, and further research told me that housing policy rarely considers it's impact on affordability. But once I understood the concept, I immediately understood its importance. When I was a student and afterwards when I was working at crappy janitorial jobs I lived in nothing else than old, cheap apartment buildings or run-down shared houses. Guelph used to be filled with them. But when I think about where I lived then, every single one of those buildings has been renovated and "gentrified". Indeed, my current home is an old, middle-class home that had gone through a "filtering" process over 100 years. First it was duplexed in the 1950s, then it ended up a run-down boarding house for students before I bought it. Over twenty years I fixed it up and is now worth a great deal of money. This is "gentrification" and that's a concept that everyone understands. What they don't is that filtering and gentrification are the opposite ends of a housing continuum. When there is an adequate, optimal, or, surplus supply, housing for the poor is created by filtering. When there is an inadequate supply of housing, what little does exist gets removed by gentrification. Filtering has ceased in Guelph and gentrification has dramatically cut the supply of housing for the poor. The solution to this change is not to chastise people for fixing up old houses and apartment buildings, but to instead increase the supply of new houses to the point where there isn't so much competition that filtering gets totally eliminated.

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According to an article by Christopher Chung in The Tyee, Vancouver politicians are beginning to seriously consider tackling that city's housing crisis by changing the zoning policies across the entire city---including the hitherto sacrosanct areas that consist exclusively of single family houses. As he reports

Independent mayoral candidate Shauna Sylvester is also for zoning reform. Yesterday, she tweeted points from her housing platform: “Instead of just stacking people along big, busy streets and arterials or building condo towers at busy centres, I want to create opportunities for human-scaled homes in real neighbourhoods.”

Doesn't the line "stacking people along big, busy streets and arterials or building condo towers at busy centres" sound familiar? If it does, it's because that is exactly what is being done in Guelph. The downtown and the Gordon Street bus line seems to be the only place in the city where developers are allowed to really pull out all the stops and build a lot of intensive housing.

According to Chung this idea isn't just something being put forward by fringe candidates, either:

Outgoing Mayor Gregor Robertson wants staff to go farther and look into the possibility of allowing “triplexes, quadplexes and other multi-unit forms to significantly bring down the purchase cost per unit of housing in low-density neighbourhoods.”

Indeed, I listened to a Vox "The Weeds" podcast on this subject this summer and it seems that the core problem with housing just about everywhere is not that there isn't enough housing being built in the poor parts of town, but rather that most of the land belongs to the more well-off and they don't want any new housing built in their neighbourhoods. (Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to add a link to the episode due to a compatibility problem between Linux and the Apple universe. If you want to see if you can get it to work, the episode is titled "We're Not Going to Pay Rent" and was originally aired on August 17th, 2018.) And when you look at the rules that Guelph has governing zoning, it is very hard not to believe that ultimately this is what underlies a lot of it---the people who already own houses simply do not want to be even slightly discomforted in order to provide housing for other people. Indeed, at a recent municipal breakfast meeting I had this attitude starkly presented to me. A fellow baby-boomer told me that he wants the value of his house to go up and up forever because that's money in his bank. When I suggested that we need to think about other people, he said "I own my own home, and so do my children. I don't care about my grandchildren, and I certainly don't care about anyone else's. I did OK and they can find their own way." 

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I will let that statement speak for itself. Thus ends my series on housing in Guelph. My next article will be on a very different subject. 

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And now a word from a poorly paid, yet hard-working writer---.

For many years I was quite bitter about the quality of journalism I was reading. For example, I would get angry when a reporter just repeated a figure from a politician instead of attempting to describe it as a percentage so the reader could put it into a context. I'd say to myself "why couldn't that guy to a little bit of research to figure out whether or not this is a substantial issue or just more empty spin?" Writing this blog has given me some insight into this. Research takes a LOT more time than simply showing up, asking a few questions, and, editing the response into a story. 

I have also learned to respect those reporters. By hammering out those little stories they were recording the history of the community. Now that they are gone we aren't creating a record of the city for future generations. Some future version of myself will not be able to go to the public library and wade through volume after volume of copies of the old "Guelph Mercury" to learn in detail what was happening in the city back in the early 21st century. That really is a tragedy. We do have a group of people trying to fill the gap---guys like Adam Donaldson and myself. But we need community support if we are going to make this business model work. Nothing that requires this level of effort can be sustained unless people get paid to do it. (And certainly, unless some more money comes down the pipeline, everything we do is just one computer crash away from disappearing forever.) 

I get new supporters as I publish new articles. (Thanks to Stephanie, Ralph, and, Nina for being so awesome!)  But I need to keep reminding folks to support the Back-Grounder. As little as a dollar a month helps---if lots of people do it. You can use the Patreon button at the upper right side to set up a regular subscription and there is also a "tip jar" for one-time contributions.  Even if you can't afford to help financially, it really helps if you spread the word through your favourite social media. My last article went viral, and that works wonders for subscriptions. 

How Can We Make Housing Affordable?

I've been on a tear about housing since the beginning of May---three posts so far. The last one offered some basic ideas about why it is that housing is getting so darn expensive. In this one I'm going to talk about proposed actions that the city working on to get some cheaper housing in Guelph. At the end, I'll take a stab at offering some suggestions that I've gleaned from general reading on the subject. 

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The place that I decided to start is the official Guelph Affordable Housing Strategy Report that was presented to City Council on July 24th of 2017. It outlines a wide range of suggested ways in which the staff thought that the city could push down the cost of housing. Of course, the most important thing to understand first is exactly what people mean by "affordable".

The first point to understand is that the bottom part of the housing market is below the definition of "affordability". As you can see in the graphic below, there are five different categories of social housing that range from shelters for the homeless, through emergency housing for people in distress (eg: homes for battered spouses), etc. (This graphic calls only one of these parts "social housing", but generally the term applies to all of these different situations. "Social" housing is one of those pesky "plastic words" that can mean very different things to different people---so don't worry about technical definitions here.) What I'm dealing with in this particular post is the last two parts of the continuum:  "private market rental" and "home ownership". Hopefully I'll still have enough enthusiasm left after this four-post marathon to research and write something about social housing.

From the Ontario government publication Municipal Tools for Affordable Housing. 
(As usual, click on the graphic to get a version that is easier to read.) 

What I'm calling "social housing" is the responsibility of the county, not the city. As such, the city affordability strategy is specifically not dealing with things like that. This isn't to say that the city isn't interested, (or that I'm not either), just that that is another part of the housing problem that will be dealt with through different mechanisms.

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The second point that the city had to decide upon was what exact numbers it was going to use as being the threshold for affordability. It did this by first deciding upon a formula, so they copied the provincial definition:

“a) in the case of ownership housing, the least expensive of:

1. housing for which the purchase price results in annual accommodation
costs which do not exceed 30 percent of gross annual household income
for low and moderate income households; or

2. housing for which the purchase price is at least 10% below the average
purchase price of a resale unit in the regional market area;

b) in the case of rental housing, the least expensive of:

1. a unit for which the rent does not exceed 30 percent of gross annual household income for low and moderate income households; or 

2. a unit for which the rent is at or below the average market rent of a unit in the regional market area.”

Defining affordability based on the figure of 30% of gross income is fairly straightforward. The ticklish bit is how one defines "low or moderate income households". This is especially important when you understand that a significant part of the problem Guelph faces is wealth stratification. There are a lot of people who's income has increased substantially in the past few years---and even more who's wages have stagnated. It gets even more tricky when you admit that there is a significant chunk of the population who make so little that you aren't even going to try to use the free market to provide housing for them. (That's where "social housing" is supposed to kick in.)

The city staff have defined "low and moderate incomes" as being between the 30th and 60th percentile of household income. Anything below the 30th is to be dealt with through social housing, and, above 60---who cares, those folks are doing OK already. (To understand what a "percentile" is, 30% of the people make less than the 30th percentile, and 60% make less than the 60th percentile.) Working with these assumptions, the city has calculated actual numbers. (I'm going to round off for scientific accuracy.)  

Using the 30% of gross income formula, the city calculates that a household making $47,000 to $92,000/year should be able to buy a house for $339,000. Using the "10% below average market cost", then they should be able to afford a house that costs $327,000. Since the formula is based on the lower of the two numbers, that means that "affordable to buy" is anything less than $327,000. 

Let's do some "back of the envelope" calculations to see how feasible this is. The Royal Bank website says that they offer a 5 year fixed mortgage at 3.74%. And the Bank of Montreal has a nifty mortgage calculator that let's me plug in numbers and develop a number for how much a person has to pay. Let's say that the family has a down payment of 15%. So that means that a person buying a $327,000 row house would have a down payment of $49,000. This would leave them with a $278,000 mortgage. BMO says that over a 25 year term at this rate, a household would have to pay $1,400 monthly.

If the people who buy the house are at the lower income level---$47,000/year---that would mean that they would have a monthly income of $3900. That means that the mortgage payment alone of $1,400/month comes to about 36% of their income. Subtract that from their monthly income, and we have $2500. Now let's take off federal and provincial tax---that's about 20% or $780/month (remember this is based on people's gross income.) Now we have $1720/month. Add in property taxes, insurance, some maintenance (better be good with your hands so you can do the work yourself), electricity, water, natural gas, etc. Let's say that this takes away another $1,000/month for that (for that price you're only going to get a "fixer upper" that is probably badly insulated.) Now we are at $720/month. That's supposed to pay for food, clothing, transportation---cars are expensive, but houses near transit or downtown sell at a premium.  In addition, how about children to play in the backyard? Oh----they're really expensive. You could rent a room to a student---but that increases your income so that doesn't count. It would help immensely if your family was willing to step in and help during a crisis---which gets back to that "inter-generational wealth" thing that I mentioned in a previous post. Frankly, I don't think that I would want to take on that sort of burden---not many people would.

Here we have my first quibble. If we define "affordable" in terms of "10% below the market average", we are throwing aside that notion that we are talking about the people between the 30th and 60th percentile of income. Instead, we are really talking about a group that is somewhat higher---perhaps the 40th to 60th? 

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Now let's look at rents. The city suggests that "affordable" means that a household making between $24,000 and $48,000 should be able to rent a home for $1,000/month based on the market definition, and, $1200/month based on the percentage of income. Since the formula is based on "whatever is lower", we work with $1000/month. Frankly, I simply don't understand how a monthly rent of $1000 makes any sense when you are making $24,000/year. Simple math would suggest that at that rate you are paying 50% of your gross income into rent. At $48,000 it does make sense though, as then the cost is 25%. 

In a previous post I cited some Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) figures for Guelph household income that I put in point form:

• less than $20,000/year, 5,770 or 10.5%
• $20,000 to $40,000, 8,320 or 15%
• $40,000 to $60,000, 8,920 or 16%
• $60,000 to $80,000, 7,635 or 14%
• $80,000 to $100,000, 6,690 or 12%
• $100,000 and over, 17,530 or 32%

As you can see, the CMHC shows what percentage of Guelph households earn how much, in $20,000 increments. If you add 10.5% to 15% you get 25.5%---which is below the 30th percentile of income. Yet at this point people are making $40,000/year. And to get to 30th percentile, you would have to get up to as much as perhaps $45,000/year. (I haven't been able to find numbers to develop a more fine-grained analysis.) $45,000/year comes to $3750/month, and a monthly rent of $1000 is a very reasonable 27% of a household's income. Indeed, if you really want to work with the 30th percentile to the 60th as the range of "low to moderate income", then the top end needs to be set at over $80,000/year for household income. At $40,000 the ratio is 30%. So honestly, I don't know where the staff were getting the number of range of "$24,000 to $48,000" for low to moderate household income---instead, I'd suggest that"low to moderate income" for rent affordability should really be defined as "$45,000 to $80,000 household income".  (I can only speculate that the city collectively balked at the idea that between one in four and one in three of Guelph's households need social housing. This would make sense as the federal and provincial governments have effectively "bailed" on social housing for the last few decades---and the city and county simply can't afford to do much about it. Here we are at the fundamental problem I identified in a previous post: wealth stratification. More about this in a future promised post about social housing.)

&&&&

Time for the cod liver oil. 

I put a lot of work into these investigative reports. And it's real work and I know what real work is---I spent my childhood shoveling manure, hoeing potatoes, bailing hay, etc. Since then, amongst other things, I've worked as a janitor, ran a jack hammer, and, moved a lot of heavy, nasty furniture. And I have the scars to prove it: flat feet, tendonitis, sciatica, arthritis, etc. Researching and writing these stories is just as hard a job as anything else I've done. It eats up a lot of time, sometimes I get headaches, and, it is often exhausting. A lot of it is tedious as the Dickens. But I also get lots of positive feedback from people who say that they really find the blog informative and important to learning about Guelph.

We are at a crossroads as a society. The old news model based on advertising and large corporations is dying before our eyes. But we still need news and there are people out there (like me) who are busting their butts trying to get a new system off the ground. But we can't do it ourselves. We need subscribers who are willing to use Patreon to support us. We aren't asking for large donations---as little as a dollar a month or a dollar a story is all we really need. I can read the statistics and get feedback, so I know a lot of people are reading the blog. Instead, I think people have just gotten into the habit of expecting stuff on the Web to be free. 

Well, let me tell you a non-secret: there ain't no such thing as "free". Every story you see on the Internet has been paid for in one way or the other. It's either paid for by secret donors who are pushing an agenda during an election or to accomplish something else. Or, it is paid for by companies who "mine your data" and then sell it to groups that range from legitimate advertisers to the Russian mob. These folks have zero interest in keeping you informed, and every time you refuse to support the legitimate guys like myself, you are strengthening the hands of these other players.

Another reason people hold back on supporting indie media is fear of using their credit card on the web. I can understand that. I've had problems with web-based businesses myself that made it very, very hard to cancel a subscription. That's why you should use PayPal (this is not an ad, it's literally what I think.) PayPal makes it really easy to cancel a subscription any time you want. You don't have to put a "stop payment" on through the bank, and, you don't have to change your credit card number. You just go on line and cancel. Similarly, Patreon is also set up to protect your finances. I know, there is a bit of a learning curve. But if you can do on-line banking, you can do this.

One last thing about technology in general. If it seems too complicated and you just want to walk away from it, just remember that that isn't going to make it disappear from your life. All you are doing is making yourself more vulnerable to something that you haven't made the effort to understand. At one time browsing the Web might have been something that daunted you, but you learned and now can see the value of it or you wouldn't be reading this advert. You can do the same thing with regard to Patreon and PayPal. 

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Once the city decided what is or is not "affordable", the next task was to set targets for how much new affordable housing the city wants to see built every year. What staff suggested was

• 30% affordable units, or, 352 in total
• 25% affordable ownership units, 293 houses
• 1% affordable primary rental, 12 apartments in large complexes
• 4% affordable secondary rental, 47 secondary apartments

As you can see, the city has made a much bigger commitment to creating affordable houses than apartments:  83% of the annual target are owned houses, whereas only 3% are primary rental, and, 13% secondary rental. It could be argued that this makes sense because 70.2% of Guelph citizens own their own home. But there is also the question of which part of the population needs the most help. As I pointed out in a previous discussion above, when staff suggest that they need to create housing for the 30th to 60th percentile, the numbers they presented for the lower range of renters was significantly below that 30th percentile target. Might it be a better allocation of scarce resources to put the entire emphasis on affordability on the people who are between the 30th to 45th percentile of household income and ignore the people who are between the 45th and 60th percentile? After all, people in the upper part of the group will be able to afford relatively higher rents even if they cannot afford by buy a home. 

There are several reasons why the staff might not suggest this.

First, it might seem crass, but Guelph is a democracy. And democracies can't put scarce resources towards the people who need them the most. Instead, they have put them into the hands of the majority of voters. Since slightly more than 70% of voters own their own homes, these are people who have a lot more in common with---and more sympathy for---people who want own their own home than others who live in apartments. Council simply has to be seen as being concerned about the plight of people who want to own houses but cannot afford to do so, in order to develop support from the 70% of already existing home owners. To do anything else would be political suicide. And no matter how much you care about genuinely poor people, first you have to deal with the people who are going to elect you. If the overwhelming majority of voters are middle-class home owners, it will be pretty much impossible to get elected if you craft policy that emphasizes help for lower income renters.

Second, if your toolbox contains just a hammer and not much else, the only thing you can do is go look for nails to pound. And historically the city has only had a very small number of mechanisms at its disposal to encourage the creation of affordable primary apartments (ie:  apartments in purpose-built apartment buildings.) Traditionally, the city has had a lot more influence over individually-owned houses than it has over apartment complexes.

Guelph isn't a Stalinist state that can expropriate land and then levy large taxes to build housing towers---even if the voters would let them. When it comes to building primary apartments all it used to be able to do was offer subsidies to developers.

A quantity surveyor was hired to produce proformas [ie: a standard document, form or financial statement] based on typical apartment, townhouse and stacked townhouse projects in Guelph covering a range of locations, site conditions and tenures (rented or owned). Based on the analysis, the “tipping point” for rental housing ranged from approximately $60,000 per unit for an apartment in the downtown with commercial space (0-2 bedroom units) to approximately $80,000 per unit for a townhouse (3 bedroom) located within the greenfield area. This level of subsidy is generally in line with the City’s experience in historically funding affordable housing units and financial incentives provided by other municipalities.

Affordable Housing Strategy, July 24, 2017, p-12.

As you might imagine, if the only thing that the city can do to get affordable housing is to kick in that amount of money per unit, there isn't going to be a lot of affordability in the future. This isn't to say that the city isn't going to do some of this, though. If you look through a report on the city website titled 2015 – 2017 Reserve, Reserve Fund Report and Continuity Schedule , you will see on page 2 a line item that says the city has an "uncommitted balance" of $173,000 for "Affordable Housing". If this is used to directly subsidize apartments it wouldn't even result in 3 units. I could only imagine the uproar that would happen if the city decided to raise property taxes high enough to be able to subsidize a significant number of units. None of the Council members who supported such a plan would survive the next election.

&&&&

Having said the above, the staff have suggested new tools that the city can bring to bear. The ones that are of more use to create primary rental units are as follows.

One of the most powerful is something that the Liberal government passed as law before they were swept from power by Doug Ford's Conservatives:  inclusionary zoning. This is a provincial regulation that allows municipalities to encourage developers to build a specific percentage of a large apartment building's units that are priced at what the province defines as "affordable housing". Unfortunately, there is a big problem with this that goes back to the issues I identified above. If we define "low and moderate" income people who need "affordable" housing as anyone that is below the 60th percentile of household income, we can easily avoid providing for those people who are most in need of affordable housing but whom we don't want to put into social housing:  the folks between the 30th and 45th percentile household income. (That is to say, it is a lot easier to build housing for the households who make the 59th percentile of income than for those who are at the 30th.)

A second issue is that for the city to start to use inclusionary zoning, it is required to make some changes to the official plan. Unfortunately, due to appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board of Guelph's official plan by large developers (mentioned in a previous post), there has been a "cloud" over it for several years. Now that those appeals have been refused (the OMB had it's teeth pulled by the Liberals), the city might think about bringing in some changes to allow it to use this new tool. But those changes will take time to put into place.  Another element to consider is that the affordability prices of the units created through this tool need to be set for a limited period of time, after which the building owner can raise the rent to the going price. These are up to the city to decide upon, but readers need to remember that there is no law forcing a developer to build a specific project. If the city asks for too many units, or that they continue to be priced affordably for too long, the builder always has the option of deciding not to build at all. 

Another suggestion from the staff involves changing the definition of a "community benefit" to include the creation of more affordable units in large construction projects. This would allow the city to trade off things like height and density restrictions when developers are negotiating to create large projects. Since size is directly related to profitability, the idea that a project could be a few stories higher or take a greater percentage of the lot footprint in exchange for adding affordable units might be quite appealing. Unfortunately, these two issues are usually extreme "hot buttons" for neighbours---who fight tooth and nail against allowing more height or density to new projects. This means that in many cases this new mechanism might be politically unfeasible to actually use.

A third option that staff suggest is to rejig our regulations governing parking. As I pointed out in a previous post, the requirement that all housing have a certain amount of mandated parking adds a huge amount to the cost of construction---as much as $65,900 per unit in a tower with underground parking. With the rate of car ownership by young people declining, it just stands to reason that a significant fraction of the people who buy condos or rent apartments don't own personal automobiles and would welcome the cost savings that come from not having to buy or rent expensive parking space that comes along with where they live. This would be true especially in the downtown core but also along the Gordon Street transit corridor---where bus service has improved to the point where it is easier to live without a car.

Unfortunately, parking is a very "touchy" issue in Guelph. The downtown merchants go berzerk if you suggest that their customers should pay for their parking spaces instead of being subsidized by the tax payer. In some neighbourhoods people are in an uproar because some folks want to widen their driveways to allow more parking spaces as they jam more people into the house to pay the huge mortgage. Inevitably some people are going to buy or rent units without parking and then decide that for one reason or another they need a car after all. And that is going to cause conflicts as they try to find places to park after the fact. Forcing everyone to pay huge amounts of money for parking---whether they want it or not---at least had the benefit of nipping most of this stuff in the bud. Unfortunately, it really is a grotesque misallocation of scarce resources, and staff are right to suggest a change. It remains to be seen what Council will do when the inevitable wailing, screaming, and, gnashing of teeth comes to their doorstep.

&&&&

In addition to primary rental units there's a class called "secondary rental". These are properties that aren't part of large, purpose-built apartment buildings. They include things like basement apartments, houses that people buy to rent out to others, rooming houses, and, condos that people buy to rent to others. The staff suggest that the city has a lot more room to maneuver to encourage the creation of affordable housing through these sorts of units.

A lot of single detached homes have large lots with either already existing out-buildings (ie: "coach houses") or room to build a new one (a "granny flat".) Currently people can apply to convert these into bachelor apartments, but the building code stipulates their servicing (sewage, water, etc) has to come directly off the main lines (usually called "service to the curb".) In many cases this is a lot more expensive than simply connecting to the house that already exists on the property. Allowing servicing to the house instead of the curb would encourage a lot more people to build rental housing in their back yard and thus add exactly the sort of housing that is in highest demand (bachelor units.) 

Another regulation that gets in the way of creating secondary rental units is the one that forbids building accessory apartments in townhouses. I suspect that part of the problem with both this rule and the one above comes down to parking, so the easing of parking regulations will also affect this. Unfortunately, the same political considerations will also come into play. People will rent units without parking and still have a car, which will cause conflicts with people who don't want strange people parking overnight on the curb in front of their house.

And, of course, another bylaw that causes problems is one that strictly separates types of housing into semi and single-detached housing. This stops the city from building higher-density suburbs and infilling to raise the density of existing low-density areas that consist of nothing but single detached homes on large lots. I suspect that this is something from times past that has been allowed to stand primarily because of the baleful influence of the OMB, which allowed anyone in a low-density suburb an automatic veto over any city attempt to raise the density. Of course, the neighbours can still raise a stink at Council. But at least the city legal staff will no longer be telling the politicians that it is a waste of time and money to even try to change the bylaw.

The staff also suggest that the city encourage the creation of purpose-built condos for rental. This raises an interesting point. A lot of people are buying condominiums as investment vehicles and renting them out to others. If you look at the Statistics Canada figures, you will see that 13% of Canadian households live in condominiums---mostly in large urban areas, like Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and their surrounding "greater metropolitan areas" (ie: like Guelph.) And of these, a little over 25% have renters living in them instead of owners. Unfortunately, the CMHC has no figures to identify any form of secondary rental. The city does have numbers for the number of legally registered secondary apartments in the city, but since so many are not registered and condos don't qualify, the numbers really aren't worth quoting. One of the recommendations by staff is to lobby CMHC to start collecting numbers on secondary rentals---including condominiums.

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The Big Picture Viewpoint: the price of land

I hope that by this point I've given readers a bit of a feel for how complex and difficult it is for the staff and Council to come up with some mechanism for creating more affordable housing. They are obviously trying, but are saddled by two huge issues that are outside the control of the city. First, the federal and provincial governments haven't built significant amounts of new social housing for decades. Secondly, we are in the midst of a dramatic process where most of the money of the economy is moving towards a significant minority of the population and the majority is being left behind. This creates a "bidding war" where developers almost exclusively build housing for the upper middle and higher classes and totally ignore everyone else. These aren't problems that only affect Guelph. Communities all over the world have faced similar things. Some have tried to create solutions and I've been doing a bit of reading on the subject. There seem to be two commonalities that I think bear mentioning.

The first of these is that a community needs some way of controlling land speculation. To understand this point, it is important to realize that the cost of building a house is generally a surprisingly small part of the price. I found a nifty on-line calculator that allows you to cost out the price of building a house once you already have a lot. I plugged in the numbers for my home---a two and a half story top-down duplex of 2,288 square feet. The price that I came up with was $228,800---based on the assumption of an "upscale" house with hardwood floors, two car garage, solid wood cabinets, and so on. We don't have a garage but the house does have a lot of very nifty interior work (mostly done by the owners), so I suspect that it is somewhat comparable.

There aren't a lot of lots for sale in Guelph, but I did find one. It's downtown with the asking price of $300,000.

Image used under "Fair Use Provision",
from "Point 2 Homes" 

I didn't get any dimensions for the lot in the posting, but it is in the downtown area, which is the same as my house. And because the lot looks big but not enormous, I'm assuming it's pretty small---like my lot. (Realtors have the impressive super power---through camera angles---to make even a doghouse look like the Taj Mahal.) So build my house on the same lot in the same part of town and you get $529,000---more than half of which is just the cost of the land. I've been told that this is something like what my building would be worth if we put it up for sale in the current ridiculously over-priced market. (Oh, and just in case you start thinking that I'm filthy rich, I bought it with another person who lives in the other unit. I paid only $59,500 for my half---and it was a horrid slum that we have totally gutted and rebuilt over 20 years with a lot of "sweat equity".)

In my previous post on this subject I suggested that the law of supply and demand was behind the wild increase in housing costs. What the example of the above would suggest is that the real competition is not for housing per se, but rather for the land that the housing is built upon. This is something that comes up over and over again in the literature discussing housing costs: there needs to be a mechanism to control land speculators.

As usual, click on the above to see a bigger image.
"The exact property ownership boundaries may vary and
this map should be used for illustrative purposes only."
Image c/o Marnie Benson

To understand this point, consider the above map of land ownership from the Clair-Maltby area. As you can see, the land in this area is already mostly owned by Guelph's major developers. I don't know when they bought this land, but the odds are that it was a long time ago. Buying up parcels of land for future development is a type of speculation known as "land banking".

To understand what's going on here, please do not forget that I'm specifically talking about land, not houses. Building houses and apartment buildings is a public good. It's also something that is fairly competitive---there are a lot of tradespeople in the world who can build you a house. What is rare are people who have enough money on hand to be able to buy up large parcels of land (or a lot of small lots to amalgamate into a large holding), and hold onto it for long periods of time while scarcity makes the price go way up. This is what economists call "rent-seeking behaviour", and it is usually considered a bad thing because it allows already wealthy people to become even more wealthy without actually adding anything of any value to society.

Economists have come up with mechanisms to control land speculation in order to keep the cost of

19th century economist Henry George
public domain image
c/o The "Devon Henry George Society"

land from becoming so high that it makes housing expensive. Generally, it comes down to taxing land so high that it is prohibitively expensive for someone to buy it up "on spec" and land bank it for long periods of time. Historically, the leading proponent of this idea was Henry George, who was a tremendously popular economist in the 19th century. I suppose you could say that he was the last popular manifestation of the 18th century school of economics called "physiocracy"  that posited that all society's wealth ultimately comes from nature.

There have been societies that actually adopted Georgist principles. One example---although I doubt that they would even know who George was---is the city of Vienna in Europe. The old capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has pretty much always looked like a glittering jewel of city. But the impressive facades hid a nasty problem on the eve of WWI. Most people who lived in the city rented their housing, and rents were so high that people tended to be crammed into over-crowded tenements.

When the war broke out the government brought in rent controls to protect the families that were left trying to pay the rent when their husbands went off to war---many of whom never returned. These rent controls remained in place after the war was lost and the Imperial government was replaced by something to the left of the NDP but not outright Marxist. Generally economists don't encourage rent controls because they tend to discourage developers from building new housing. But in the case of Vienna the municipal government also raised land taxes and then used the money to build social housing. The high taxes and rent control effectively drove private money out of the housing market, except for the high end "carriage trade". Even this tended to be high density because high land taxes encourage people to build vertically instead of sprawling. (This is why environmentalists and "new urbanists" tend to support Georgist policies.)

The great thing about using a land tax to pay for social housing is that the taxes generally are levied against people like land speculators who are parasites on the economy. Since they actually don't do anything useful for society---like carpenters and brick layers do---penalizing their activity is actually beneficial to the economy instead of being a drain on it. Secondly, if you use the money raised to build social housing the purchase price for the land needed goes down because no one is "banking" land anymore. And since the city doesn't pay taxes on the land it owns itself, when it builds social housing it effectively gains a competitive advantage over the private sector. This allows it to remain competitive against private property owners.

None of this means that Vienna has created a huge, Stalinist bureaucracy that creates endless blocks of the brutalist concrete boxes that governments love to build. (I mentioned the government's love of brutalism in the second half of my article about why the city tore down the Carnegie library.) It gets around this unfortunate tendency by using a competitive tender process whereby non-profit corporations and private builders are allowed to bid against each other for new social housing not just on the basis of price, but also on the basis of how the project will benefit the needs of the people living there and the city as-a-whole.

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The Big Blue Sky Perspective: Delusional Thinking

A horse hair fly whisk, image c/0
"Anping JuLong Animal By Product Ltd".  

I have another side to myself that I usually don't show to the people who read this blog. I'm a follower of the ancient Chinese philosophical system known as "Daoism". It's a little bit like Buddhism, but different in subtle ways. But one thing that both have in common is an interest in "delusional thinking".

Delusions are ideas that people use to explain the world around them---but which are so wrong that they are profoundly counter-productive. Indeed, according to Daoism delusional thinking is at the root of most of the problems that afflict us all. And the secret of learning to live in harmony with both nature and our fellow human beings is to root out the delusions and replace them with a true understanding of how the world works and where our best interests lie. Once someone cuts through delusion and embraces the truth they can then "merge with the Dao" and develop their intrinsic abilities to their full. One of the "badges of office" for a Daoist (and a Zen teacher too---Zen is influenced by Daoism) is a horse hair fly whisk. The job of the Daoist is to "whisk away" the delusions that confuse people like flies and mosquitoes that buzz around your head. I would argue that underlying most of the problems that the city faces in providing affordable housing are a set of delusions that people hold about their housing. So let me get out my fly whisk and try to chase away those pesky insects.

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I mentioned that one way the city could deal with rising housing costs would be through raising the taxes on land. The problem with this is that the vast majority of home owners in Guelph tend to view themselves not as consumers of real estate but rather as participants in the real estate business. That is to say that people see their home as an investment instead of just a place to live. So any policy aimed at ending land speculation will be vigorously opposed by people who want their house to continue to accumulate in value.

What makes this idea delusional is the fact that everyone has to have a place to live. If your house has accumulated in value, so have all the others. That means that any increase in equity that you make when you sell your house will get used up when you buy your next home, rent an apartment, or, help your children buy their first home. Land speculation only benefits the big developers---everyone else only gets exploited by this situation. .

&&&&

Melissa Gilbert, the impossibly cute
girl who played Ingalls-Wilder on the
tv version of "Little House on the
Prairie" image c/o Wiki Commons

A second set of delusions centre around some sort of pastoral fantasy. Lots of people have a strong emotional commitment to the ideal of rural life. People want to go "back to the land" and they devour books like Laura Ingalls-Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. What this is all about is a sentimental attachment to the idea that rural life is an ideal way to raise a child and that it is somewhat abusive to have a family in an urban environment. I grew up on a farm and I can personally attest to how idiotic this delusion really is. Farm children are sometimes worked like slaves and are so isolated that they can be totally at the mercy of  abusive parents. (If you want an antidote to this sentimental nonsense, you might read Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese.) This isn't to say that life on a farm in inherently worse than any other, but it has no special "grooviness" that justifies the rank sentimentality that many urban people have about living this way.

James Howard Kunstler,
grew up in an apartment downtown.
He's not a hoodlum!
Image c/o Wiki Commons

Farm children are surrounded by nature and they are totally integrated into the productive life of the family (ie: from a very early age they feed livestock, clean stables, till the fields, etc.) This means that they are given a lot of independence and responsibility at an early age. If this isn't over-done, it helps children develop a strong work ethic, independence, confidence, and, self-reliance. The same sort of thing can happen in an urban environment with a good public transit system. James Howard Kunstler (the famous urbanist advocate) was raised in an apartment in New York and talks about the amazing independence he had from a quite young age. Once he could navigate transit by himself, the entire city was his oyster and he talks about spending days at the library, museums (many of which were free at the time), meeting a wide variety of different types of people, and other things that dramatically enriched his world.

Suburban sprawl has absolutely nothing in common with a farm. There is no nature to speak of and a back yard of cut grass is pretty much useless for anything else than a neighbourhood barbeque. And the low density of the development effectively strangles any attempt to create a good public transit system. As a result, parents effectively have two options:  give in and let the kids spend all their time in front of the computer, or, become their taxi driver and enroll them in some sort of regimented activity like church, hockey, baseball, martial arts, ballet, etc. In the former case, the best you can hope for is that they will become horribly out-of-shape computer programmers---the worst is that they will descend into some sort of Internet "rabbit hole". In the latter, the kids will have some physical activity, but at the expense of any opportunity to develop independence, self-reliance, or, meet people from a wide variety of cultures with different life experiences.

Most people can't afford to buy hobby farms to work out their fantasies about country living, but many of them can afford a single-detached house with a back yard. What they don't understand, however, is one single-detached home is nice---especially if it is at the edge of the city with nature all around you. But if everyone else has one too, the result is soul-less suburban sprawl. And this is probably the absolute worst place to raise children. 

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This brings me to another delusion that I want to point out. I first became aware of this in an intro philosophy course at university. It was a night class, so there were a lot of community members there. Someone had compared family life to birds raising nestlings. I commented that it was probably a lot better to compare us to social insects---like ants or bees. I heard gasps in the room. Later on, I read that the famous biologist E. O. Wilson---who is the leading expert on "eusocial" animals---doesn't even see this as an analogy. For him it's a proven fact that human beings live in large colonies like ants, the only difference is that we call them "cities", "countries", and, "cultures".

Unfortunately, our particular modern culture promotes the strange idea that we should all think of ourselves as heroic individuals who owe nothing to the society they inhabit. We pit students against each other in individual tests and never get them to work together in teams. We teach "democracy" through student council elections where children are encouraged to run against each other---but never teach them how to organize a meeting so a large group can work through a problem and come up with a collective solution. We do encourage team sports---but even then we do so by praising "stars" and humiliating "bench warmers".  Indeed, our entire economic system is based on the idea that we should all become business stars like Steve Jobs who go out and "create" wealth.

The problem with this worldview is that it is utter nonsense. Steve Jobs had his iphones built at Foxconn factories that are so horrible that the company had to install suicide nets to stop workers from killing themselves by jumping off the roof.  He also based his software on packages that were developed by the open source community---but refused pay back the favour by helping it development new products (like most other companies do.) The fact of the matter is that there are no "self-made men" in this world---only people who have worked hard, been somewhat lucky, and, who lack the self-awareness to understand the many ways in which they have benefited from the society that supported their projects. The end result of this constant propaganda is a population of people who think that they bear absolutely no responsibility to other people or future generations. Instead, they have adopted the ridiculous idea that everyone can get ahead if they just work hard and stick to it. As a result, they are not interested in working together with other people to create solutions that work for everyone---because they are only looking for something that works for them individually. This attitude was pithily encapsulated by the author Ronald Wright but is usually attributed to John Steinbeck:

   “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” 

&&&&

When I was young my father put up a rope and a tire in a tree so I would have a swing. He mentioned in passing that his father had planted that tree when he was my age. He then took the time to make a general statement: "you don't plant a tree for yourself---you plant them for your children and grand-children". By way of a contrast, my retired neighbour once mentioned that he had had a tree in the front yard of his house but that someone had run into it with a car and killed it. When I asked why he hadn't planted another one he said "why should I? I won't be around to enjoy it when it gets to a nice size."  The difference between those two points of view illustrates one last delusion that keeps Guelph from having affordable housing.

Far too many people not only are oblivious to the many ways that society has nurtured their own personal lives, but also have this idea that they don't owe anyone else a damn thing. Possibly the most blatant example are the parents who gleefully throw away their money when retired and don't leave an inheritance to their children. Some folks even proudly proclaim this fact on their cars or motor homes.

License Plate-style sign for sale on-line
Image used through the "fair use" provision.

I suspect that for at least some of these folks they believe that because they were able to buy a house and get ahead in the world there's no reason why everyone else couldn't do the same thing. Well, that's nonsense and is an example of the "I did it all myself" delusion that I mentioned above. But for others, I think that it's just that they have become so selfish that they just don't care about anyone else---even their own children. How much hope is there that anyone who has a sign like this on their car is going to be concerned about other people who can't find a place to live?  

This is a profoundly dangerous tendency. And I think that this unwillingness by a large slug of the population to give a damn about anyone else is partly why housing is so expensive. People who have a single-detached home already often simply don't care if there is a lack of affordable apartments. That's why they fight tooth and nail against any attempt to increase the density of housing in their neighbourhoods. It's also why they fight against any attempt to build large apartment towers that might get the price of units down to a more reasonable level. Whenever some developer does want to build a big complex, you can bet that there will be a crowd of outraged neighbours who show up at Council to scream, wail, and, gnash their teeth in opposition. Is it any wonder that any politician who wants to be re-elected usually supports a "compromise" that ends up raising the price of each individual unit? 

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I'm often a meetings where I hear people (usually baby-boomers like myself) complain bitterly about a proposed large apartment building. But once in a while I hear someone else (usually a "Gen-X" or "millennial") pipe up and say something like "I hope they build a giant tower with lots of apartments---so I can rent a place to live!" But only once in a while. Usually the angry "NIMBYs" end up carrying the day. This is because politicians know which side of their bread is buttered. Until the people who have trouble finding a home start showing up at Council arguing for more higher density, and, vote in larger numbers than the people who already own their own house (or home owners develop some empathy towards other who are not so well off) it is going to continue to be hard to find a place to live in Guelph. 

(This also counts when it comes to social housing. As long as the feds and province can avoid paying a political price for refusing to invest in it, it simply will not be built. But more about that in a future post.)