Writing about housing, growth and urbanism has been challenging lately.
It’s so depressing. The federal Liberal government announced important housing measures in its last budget but these measures will take a long time to trickle down to my level and I’m already old. I am starting to realize that I will never own a home again, and that my rent will never come down. At best, the rate of increase might slow down. We hear big ideas about making housing affordable “someday” but no one is talking about what we need to do right now to help people struggling with the cost of living, precarious housing and unemployment. I hear conservatives like Pierre Poilievre decry government programs such as dental care, pharmacare, childcare, and social housing as “inflationary”, like pouring oil over inflationary fires. Well I’m sorry Pierre if keeping my children out of poverty with a mouthful of teeth is making it harder to buy a cottage.
Here are six stumps of reflections on housing policy and politics, and whether any of this even matters.
ONE Co-opting the language of affordability to oppose housing
The language of affordability — or lack thereof — has been co-opted by those who oppose building new housing near existing one. It’s the new “righteous” way to oppose increasing the housing stock when you don’t want to build more homes but don’t want to sound like a jerk. As if these new units would be acceptable if only they were affordable. Will anyone think about The People?
I lived in Orleans in 2011 when Habitat for Humanity built 8 affordable homes in my neighbourhood. I can tell you that being affordable was exactly the problem: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.1060310
I love this little gem of NIMBY nesting dolls from then-Councillor Stephen Blais:
"If challenges continue to mount on this particular proposal — a private developer may choose to purchase the land - and put up higher density housing in the form of stacks or walk up apartments," Blais said.
Opposing affordable housing by threatening people with density. And we wonder how we got here?
(In a chef’s kiss of irony, someone built a 4-storey rental building right behind the Habitat homes 10 years later.)
Now that 431 rental apartments are coming to a neighbourhood near mine, market rents are held up as exhibit A of why we shouldn’t approve this new development. Renting, even at today’s eye-popping rates, is still more affordable than buying a house. My (much) better half Glen Gower crunched the numbers in his newsletter and explained why in this excellent piece:
The podcast « 10-minute take » by RBC Economics also has a short, sweet, and very informative episode on why it’s so hard for renters to save a downpayment:
In a nutshell, it’s more expensive to buy a house than to rent an apartment. Who would have thought?
TWO My parents have a bigger house than mine and that’s a problem
Home-ownership confers long term economic benefits and nowhere is it as obvious as by looking at Canadian seniors — such as my parents and my partner’s parents — staying in the large houses they bought to raise their families long after their families have left the nest. Their wealth and stability are tied to their real estate, and that’s a problem for everyone. This article from the Globe & Mail sums it up:
Meanwhile, I live in a rental 3-bedroom townhouse with my partner (on which I depend to afford the rent) and five of my nine offspring aged 22, 15, 12, 12 and 10.
My 10 year-old doesn’t have a room or a bed of his own: he has a mattress in my room that we pull out at night. At $2300/month plus utilities, that’s what I can afford.
Last year, my kids spent a night at an airport hotel before an early flight. My youngest son walked into the room and went: “My own bed?? I never had my own bed!!”
In these circumstances, it’s hard not to notice that our aging parents live in increasingly valuable 4-bedroom single family homes in desirable family neighbourhoods. Two people in houses big enough for a family of 6, with backyards, near parks and schools, some of those schools closing due to poor enrolment. We drive children from new subdivisions to schools in neighbourhoods where no one has children. I’m not suggesting that our parents should give us their house, but the irony is hard to miss.
Baby boomers live in houses where they will soon be unable to use the stairs, in car-dependent neighbourhoods where they will soon be unable to use their car. Nurses and PSWs will soon make house calls to help them “age in place” because the austerity and the fiscal “common sense” they demanded in their prime earning years failed to fund an elder care system worth aging for.
Like us, they are living the consequences of the restrictive housing policies at the root of the housing crisis. Unlike us, they voted for that. They limited new housing in their neighbourhoods to protect their property values, prevented tax increases above the rate of inflation, underfunded transit, and incentivized house ownership at the expense of rental and non-market housing. They hollowed out the post-war social policies established by their parents after the depression, but only after ensuring their own prosperity. As an electoral force, they protect the guaranteed basic income they receive through the GIS and OAS while making sure that no such proven anti-poverty measures are available to their children and grandchildren on account of their high cost.
Meanwhile, my kid is sleeping on the floor in a rental townhome I can only afford because my partner pays for half of it.
I can’t finish a bedroom or add a bathroom in the basement to accommodate my family size. I can’t replace the appliances for larger, more efficient ones. I can’t build a deck to enjoy the backyard. I can’t improve a house I don’t own. And no amount of saving will get me a down payment in my lifetime. Every night when I pull out the mattress from the closet, I wonder how much longer this can work and what I will do when it no longer does.
The true human cost of the housing crisis will unfold over years, as lost opportunities come to bear their rotten fruits.
THREE On being a Millennial at 50
When I speak about the housing crisis and how it is affecting my family, I sound like a Millennial. I was born in 1973, I’m the child of early baby boomers. That makes me Gen X, the parent of Millennials. I went through a divorce at 45 after staying home for 25 years to raise my 9 children. As a result, I find myself in the same situation as my oldest children born between 1996 and 2002: I am in an entry-level job with less than 10 years of work experience, my retirement is not funded, my ability to save for retirement is hamstrung by the rising cost of living and I am looking at 30 years of saving before I can afford a down payment. I am very much at my children’s end of the housing crisis but with 6 dependents, a bad back, and closer to the end of my productive years than their beginning.
At the population-level, my peers – other Gen Xers – are generally well-employed property-owners with a suite of entitlements unlikely to be available to their children, like employer-funded pensions and single-payer healthcare. They are part of the bottleneck keeping Millennials from accessing stable housing.
The problem with my fellow Millennials is that, having witnessed their governments’ unwillingness to intervene to stop the transfer of wealth from their generation to their parents and grandparents’ generations, are about to fall for the belief that government interventions are the problem and elect Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre with one of the largest majorities seen since the 1980’s.
To quote Taylor Swift ft. Bon Iver: “I think I've seen this film before. And I didn't like the ending”
Where I part ways from my fellow Millennials is in knowing that the housing crisis is a market failure caused by inadequate and insufficient government intervention. Our current crisis is the direct result of conservative policies enacted in the 90s such as Mike Harris’ Common Sense Revolution in Ontario and Paul Martin’s deficit-fighting measures at the federal level.
We cannot solve a collective problem such as health care funding, climate change, or housing, with the type of fend-for-yourself individualism proposed by the conservative movement. It’s a contradiction in terms. The housing crisis is the direct result of market-oriented government policies. We cannot solve market failures with market solutions.
FOUR Home builder benefit from housing scarcity.
In my suburbs, residents are generally opposed to new housing and home builders are accused of building too much too fast in a mad grab for maximum profit. None of these residents realize that the limits on home construction they demanded are the reason homebuilders are making so much profit.
Builders also sell homes and benefit from keeping the housing stock low enough to drive up prices. We don’t think of developers benefiting from scarcity when we see the cranes and dump trucks take over a neighbourhood. That’s only because they have a long way to catch up with demand. When home builders wrap themselves in the flag of increasing the housing supply and build a home for everyone, remember that they will stop short of building enough homes to make them affordable. They can work a spreadsheet.
My point is: we need government involvement in housing because private builders have an interest in housing scarcity, just as much as your NIMBY neighbour but on a different scale. They may take us some of the way to affordability but it is not in their interest to take us all the way there. So why are we delaying? Let’s get the right policies in place now instead of waiting 20 years.
FIVE Becoming a political voice politicians care about
Every time you hear a politician promise to make housing affordable without decreasing the value of real estate, you hear a politician afraid of an important political constituency.
As the partner of a politician, I am not one to paint them with too broad a brush. But there is something essential about democracy and it is the following: if you want to be elected, you have to offer voters something they can support. In order to represent people in an elected assembly, politicians need to earn more votes than their opponents. That’s the long and short of it.
When I say that those who are affected by the housing crisis need to become a voice that politicians care about, I mean that there has to be political consequences to ignoring us. And until now, there hasn’t been. There is no take for those who run an unsuccessful campaign: the cost of a campaign in time and money does not make up for “the experience” or for the political theory of “putting your hat in the ring”. Any serious candidate should be in it to win it. Underdog parties in Canada, like the Greens or the NDP in some places, have caused serious damage to their own cause by putting names on ballots without running a credible campaign with a view to get votes.
Baby boomers and Gen Xers have been able to implement policies limiting housing construction and hollowing social programs because they are a political constituency politicians can’t ignore. But the housing crisis is like water on a paper towel, gradually spreading to a larger and larger area. When solving the housing crisis pitted affluent and numerous baby boomers against the poorest and least empowered members of society, when non-market housing was targeting the poorest 1% of the population, it paid to ignore the voiceless. Now that the housing crisis is afflicting the comfortable, now that middle-class single-parent families like mine need to access affordable housing programs, income support, and food banks, we can do what our parents did before us and become a political constituency they can’t ignore.
SIX “Still Renovating”
I am currently reading “Still Renovating: A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy” and realizing that this is not the first time Canada grapples with rapid growth and a housing shortage.
Describing the housing pressures caused by rapid growth and urbanization during the Second World War, the author writes:
Housing distress was already much higher at the end of the Depression than a decade earlier. Wartime growth brought extreme shortages of housing, overcrowding, sharp rent increases until controls were introduced in 1941, evictions and homelessness. With (housing) production virtually ceased, middle-class families were not moving out to new homes and not freeing up dwellings for new arrivals or those with lower incomes. The pressures were only modestly reduced by federal incentives to subdivide dwellings into duplexes, exhortation to rent out rooms, and production for war workers (...).
(...) many shared with several beds to a room; others lived in basements (next to a huge coal furnace in those days) or other low-quality spaces. In these circumstances, the imbalance of market power was huge, and renters with little money were at the mercy of property-owners. Municipalities or local bodies set up housing registries, but they were overburdened. Local social agencies could provide housing help only to the literally homeless. These conditions were a large concern to many city governments.
We have been here before. Not only have we been through a housing crisis before, we had to grapple with questions of separation of powers, whether market solutions can solve market failures, federal-municipal partnerships bypassing provincial governments, and competing social agendas.
It is frustrating to see to what extent we have not only forgotten the lessons of the past, but – having forgotten how long it took to put certain policies and programs in place and why – dismantled them systematically when the housing crisis lost its acuteness. In other words: when they started working. This reminded me why social justice advocacy is so exhausting: you can never take your eyes off the ball.