july 22, 07

In previous articles, it was explained how squats and shanty towns are not going to solve the housing problem in Toronto. And, how an assisted ownership self-housing society might work.

Self appointed 'housing advocates' with connections to the city housing bureaucracy have been calling for more 'housing' for years. This means, more of the kind of social housing that has been such wonderful places in which to live and raise families. Alternatively, they call for 'rent subsidies', meaning subsidies to low end landlords.

We will take a quick and fresh look at the history of housing in Canada, what the real needs are, a little of what other countries are doing, and then draw some conclusions about what a useful housing strategy might be.

People who have money to pay get good housing because there is money in building it for them. The ways in which the other half of the population have been housed in Canada has varied with time.

In frontier times, you built your own shack; here is your axe, there are the trees. With industrial urbanisation, the new labour force was crammed into the old buildings the well off no longer wanted.

As with all things social in Canada, government had finally to be forced to govern. First, subsidising low cost apartment construction was tried. This got a lot of low cost rental housing built in the early post war years, but it tended not to stay low cost.

Then the idea of 'social housing' was copied from Europe, along with some very bad architectural ideas. We were subjected to the Le Corbusier "machines for living" idea. These are machines for driving people crazy and making healthy communities impossible. Worse, we got a horrible social housing bureaucracy.

At various times, subsidisation of private low cost landlords has been tried. This never succeeds. The money goes into the slum lords pockets and is gone. No new housing gets built.

Private rental subsidies also drive up the costs of low income housing, because these landlords will always find ways to wring every dollar above bare survival out of their tenants. If they can get more out of a subsidised tenant, they would not take less from a non subsidised one.

co-operating

When the drawbacks of badly thought out social housing and social programs became clear, the next thing government tried was to encourage co-operatives. The advantages are that there was usually a mix of middle and low income/subsidised units, so 'ghettoisation' did not occur. They were run by the people who lived in them, rather than by bureaucrats.

Co-operative housing originated with idealists with some money with which to pool and build 'equity' coops with minimal government help. As they proved to be an effective way of providing low income housing, coops gradually came to be controlled by governmental housing bureaucracies.

The coop federations grew some unpleasant bureaucracies of their own. There has been nasty infighting within members of coops. Sometimes co-operatives have acted as badly as the nastiest slumlords toward their rent-subsidized members.

But coops were better than anything else in Toronto until the fiasco of the Harris/Lastman era. The non equity coops have now been rolled into the city social housing empire. No new coops have been built in Toronto for ten years.

Also in the 'post war' era, home ownership was encouraged. Initially, most 'working people' could get a house in the suburbs. But as developers ran amok, the cost of suitable land for building soared.

During the suburban boom, many people created co-housing associations and bypassed the developers. That is less feasible as large developers now control most open land in metropolitan areas not owned by government.

Condominiums are the new thing for developers to capture the people with some money but not enough to buy a free standing house. Developers are not going to build new rental apartments when they can get tenants who are responsible for their own mortgages and who pay their own maintenance costs.

The lowest level of 'owning' is trailer parks. The residents, like condominium dwellers, are a subset of tenants who buy their units but cannot own the land under it.

Ask most residents of social housing what kind of housing they really want, and they will tell you they want some way to own their own homes.

The ideal would be for everyone who wants to, to be able to own their homes. The obvious problem with this is in the ownership of the land.

The biggest single cost of housing is the land to build it on. Housing is unaffordable for most people because the land is unaffordable. Land becomes unaffordable because everyone who acquires it wants to make a capital gain on it.

The only way to keep land prices down is to keep public land in public hands and to use tax policies to discourage speculation in privately owned land. Any assisted ownership plan that includes the land would give the assisted party an unfair gift from the public wealth.

Not everybody wants to own their own home. Some people want to pay their rent and be left alone. Some people are unable for various reasons to manage their own lives and need some form of assisted or even supervised housing. There is no way to entirely do away with social housing, special needs housing, and rent subsidies.

One way to halt the abuse of tenants by social housing bureaucrats is to adopt 'right to manage' legislation based on that in the United Kingdom. There, organised residents can really manage their own housing, not like the shams co-operatives have become in Toronto.

People in special needs housing will be at risk of 'institutional abuse' from care givers or supervisors. The risk is lessened if this housing us run by local government with ample funding.

The way to have low cost private rental housing, besides keeping land speculation down, is to maintain a high vacancy rate. This means, build a lot of low income housing of various kinds.

A sensible national housing policy would be a combination of assisted ownership of buildings on leased public land, private rent subsidies, and special needs. Most present social housing should become true co-operatives, assisted ownership, true special needs with the funds to run it right, or it should be torn down and rebuilt.

But it takes money to build housing and the money can only come from the federal government. The only way to keep the provincial government from grabbing it, and insure it is directed to where the need is, it is to attach it to individuals as a housing allowance.

The province has no real interests in housing. We need some legislation from the province, and otherwise it should get out of the way.

From the city we need land, and a sensible property and other tax systems geared to ability to pay. We need the city to provide the support needed by low income people to be able to set up and run their own housing systems. The city is the only level of government with the potential to run social and needs housing, and assisted ownership, properly.

None of this is novel. In some developed countries the people pay, on average, 15% of their income on housing. Others have people living in the streets. It depends on how they apply the kind of ideas given above.

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