Stittsville has been abuzz with the news of a 25-storey tower proposed on a piece of vacant land. Of course, the land is adjacent to single-family homes because what isn’t in the suburbs? Building anything else was prohibited until amalgamation in 2000 and it took the best part of 20 years to make townhomes acceptable.
For more background about this application, you can read Councillor Glen Gower’s newsletter. For a sense of how the public feels about it, you can join Stittsville Neighbours or Stittsville Moms on Facebook at your own risk.
The tallest building in Stittsville is a 6-storey retirement residence. An application for a 12 storey apartment building was approved but construction is held back until certain conditions are met. 25-storey is incomprehensible to the local taxbase. Not content to take a win on the steady increase of their property value, they are now claiming ownership of the view from their house, the curbs on their street, the exclusive use of the parks in their neighborhoods, and the traffic on their roads. They behave as if $6000/year in property taxes on their million dollar homes bought them anything more than the subsidized share of city services they already enjoy. I’m not faulting anyone for making a good bet, but they are investing time and resources to keep my children out of the community where they live, go to school, and made friends, and I can’t deal with that calmly.
Homeowners in Stittsville want ever-increasing home values with ever-decreasing municipal taxes. The fact that their tax bill is tied to their home value is beside the point. Whenever someone complains that they “have to pay too much taxes” I want to reply “you *get to* pay too much taxes.” Who would you rather be, the person who gets a property tax bill or the person who can’t afford to?
Housing makes me really grumpy. I wrote about it in My Housing Story.
Since I wrote my last post, a few things happened in my life. I started working as an admin for a large public sector union. Stay with me here, I promise I will bring this back to housing.
I have a Master’s in law from McGill University, and an LLB from Ottawa U. I am fully bilingual and I can write in both official languages. But I am also a 50 year-old woman who stayed home to raise her children for the best part of her adult life. I started working for a paycheque in 2018 at 45, divorced in 2020, and found myself unemployed in 2022. I now work making photocopies and ordering highlighters for people fighting the good fight in the labour movement.
I like my job, I get along well with my colleagues, and I believe in the cause, but let’s be honest here: the reason I can’t access jobs beyond the entry-level is systemic sexism and ageism in hiring. Hiring processes do not recognize the value of unpaid caregiving work. Since women make up the lion share of unpaid caregivers, a system that doesn’t recognize unpaid caregiving work inevitably yields sexist results. I wrote about that too: Unpaid caregiving work is everybody's business
The funny thing with all the “isms” – racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, colonialism, classism — is that you don’t have to bear the burdens of intergenerational trauma and intersectionality to get a taste of the downward spiral of adversity that starts with bias and discrimination. I wrote about that in my other newsletter: Underemployment Math.
Last week, I had the pleasure of supporting the work of the National Indigenous Peoples Circle, which is part of the governance structure of the Public Service Alliance of Canada (my employer). Studies on barriers to Indigenous recruitment in the federal government have identified systemic issues that exclude Indigenous candidates from jobs and promotions. Some of the proposed solutions include screening “based on potential skills and competencies, not necessarily work experience.” I may not be Indigenous but I get it.
The consequences of bias and inequality are well documented. Solutions have been explored and identified, but we’re falling short of implementing them. The best ideas and solutions to make hiring more equitable die at the doorstep of regulations, policies, and constitutions that limit or prevent change.
When we exclude people from certain opportunities, we effectively reduce the competition for those opportunities. Jobs, promotions, higher education, housing, and the generational economic advantage that accompanies the above. Advantage builds on itself and so does disadvantage. Ending discrimination in recruitment is not only a matter of changing recruitment practices, it also means taking the privilege that used to be in the hands of a few and giving it to the many. It means keeping people with the right skills on staff while they go through the messy process of gaining the right experience. It means that some things will change and that there will be a cost to those who gained their privilege through exclusion and discrimination. It’s simple: when you open doors that were previously closed, more people can go through them.
Our reluctance to consider solutions that come at a cost to those who benefit from the crisis is why we can’t solve anything, including discrimination in hiring and the housing crisis.
Like discrimination in employment, the housing crisis is entirely man-made. It is the result of years of economic and land use policies that favoured home value over housing. These policies limited where and how we could build rental housing, effectively discriminating against people of modest means, people with precarious or low-paid employment, women-led households and immigrant families. The same policies curtailed the type of housing we could build near higher-value neighbourhoods, not only limiting housing supply but also sending a message to homeowners that they had a right to ever-increasing home values. We nursed two generations of homeowners – my boomer parents and their Gen X children – on the belief that they came by their privilege through merit when in reality the increase in their home values is the result of their success in keeping people out of their neighbourhoods. They made housing a scarce resource and they are now fighting to hold on to a privilege they earned through exclusion and discrimination.
Today, provincial and federal governments are on a housing crisis frenzy but still promising to solve it without cost to those who caused it. They are holding on to hope that they can make housing affordable without making anyone’s house cheaper. The math ain’t mathing.
No one is asking homeowners to cut them a cheque. All we’re asking is to slow down the mad drive to maximum gain so the rest of us can catch up. One apartment building at a time.