A programming note before we start: I’ll be doing a livestream with the one and only Kojo Damptey this coming Friday, April 28th at 5:00 PM. We’ll talk about The Sewer Socialists, the big issues facing the Hamilton area, and a whole host of other fun topics. Check it out on Kojo’s YouTube channel at this link.

Finding a house is like steaming a ham

A really great article from Spectator columnist Margaret Shkimba appeared in the paper this past Monday. Opening with a recognition of the good work done by Councillors Nrinder Nann and Maureen Wilson in getting close to 500 CityHousing units back online (an effort that was carried over from the last term of council), Shkimba goes on to make some good points about government inaction.

The city has dithered on maintaining public housing, the feds are missing in action (including Hamilton’s three Liberal MPs, among whom is 1 cabinet minister, 1 former chair of CityHousing, and 1 MP who not only lives in Oakville, but has shown no interest in moving to the city, let alone her riding), and the province is actively making the housing crisis worse.

Shkimba concludes the article with some important observations:

So, in that spirit, let’s take a quick look at a few issues and stories focusing on different aspects of Canada’s housing crisis. And while the title comes from a Simpsons episode, there are only eight “stories” here. Because I sure as hell don’t have time to write 22 stories on housing (as much as I want to).

Build it ourselves

Back on April 14th (ahh, simpler times), a piece from Toronto Star columnist Edward Keenan entitled “If we want affordable housing, why don’t we build it ourselves?” was published. The article is paywalled, but it follows the same line of thinking we got locally in the aforementioned Shkimba piece: Governments at all levels have completely beefed the housing file.

Here’s some background.

Between 1964 and 1975, Ontario built 84,145 units of public housing. The feds jumped in and built 52,189 units between ‘78 and ‘85. And another 37,844 units between ‘86 and ‘95 came from the province. But in 1993, Jean Chrétien’s government stopped all funding for public builds. Harris’s Tories cancelled the provincial housing program in 1995 and slowly began downloading responsibility to the cities.2 

In the 90’s, our governments decided to throw up their hands, yell “screw it”, and let the corporate market do all the lifting on housing.

Simply put: we gave up. Tory governments, Liberal governments, hell, let’s even blame Bob Rae for good measure. We stopped putting money into public housing and helping both non-profits and co-ops get off the ground.

So this happened.

While the “cost of living” since October 1990 (happy 3 month birthday to me!) to October 2022 was 92%, average rents have increased 156%. From 1990 to 1995, when both federal and provincial governments had given up on public housing, the cost of living increase was 12.5% and the increase in average rents was 16.7%.3

The Keenan article uses this context to frame Toronto mayoral candidate Josh Matlow’s Public Build Toronto plan. This plan creates a new city agency which would use city-owned land, including inefficient parking lots, to build new housing, drawing inspiration from the Red Vienna model, which includes Limited-Profit Housing Associations or “LPHA’s” (okay, side note: these are really cool. LPHA’s have a long history in Austrian and, as per a report on them notes, are “neither profit driven nor state-owned”. They are organized as co-ops or LLC's and 17% of Austrians rent from one. Governments provide many with low-interest loans, which are paid back over a few decades by the LPHA through rents. This is a model we have to consider moving forward4). Matlow's plan is similar, calling for a "revolving fund" for housing, which sees the city participate in the building of housing and then working with groups similar to LHPA's to reduce the burden on the city.

This is in contrast to Olivia Chow’s initial housing proposals, which were released on Tuesday. Chow’s plans will use the city’s vacant unit tax to create a fund which will secure existing housing and transfer it to “not-for-profit, community, and Indigenous housing providers (i.e. land trusts) so they can be preserved as affordable rental homes,” providing more safety to renters, and creating a Toronto Renters Action Committee, which will help guide city policy on housing.5

Chow secured the coveted “outdoor cat” endorsement for this bold stance.

Both plans have merit. Matlow is trying to get units built to take people out of the private market. Chow is trying to leverage existing sources of funding to secure units and create safer rental accommodation.

Among the other front runners, Ana Bailão doesn’t yet have a policy on housing and it seems like Mark Saunders would only create more housing if that housing was prisons and those prisons were built overtop bike lanes and supervised consumption sites. Oh, and Brad Bradford’s plan is just to let the market keep doing its thing, just with some fun walk-ups in between.

Keenan’s article is worth noting because concludes with these thoughts:

That a major mayoral candidate in Canada’s largest city is talking about the municipality actually building housing is a huge step in the right direction. Chow’s plan falls slightly behind this, but is still impressive when compared with the other front runners.

Hopefully, we start to hear more about this in the future. I would love to see a provincial election where a party comes out and says it will start an ambitious project of building more non-profit and co-op housing and not stop until everyone who wants a good quality home in the community of their choice gets one. I would love to hear a federal party say they’ll start taxing real estate investors and sending that money to the same plan. I would love to hear mayoral candidates talk about how they’ll stop taking money from sprawl developers and involve the municipality in the business of building houses again (little hint for an upcoming newsletter).

Trust in the land

Still on the Toronto front, a really cool story appeared in The Local a few weeks back that speaks to the proposals brought forward by some Toronto mayoral candidates.

It takes a look at the Community Land Trusts (CLT’s) that are operating in Toronto. In the first profile, they look at a house that was once owned by Toronto’s social housing provider that was transferred to a CLT instead of sold off.

CLT’s are another housing alternative. Rooted in the Israeli kibbutz movement and popularized in North America by the civil rights movement in the south and in the north Bernie Sanders during his time as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, CLT’s are a way of providing housing without an emphasis on profit.

Definitely recommend checking out the article from The Local (link is here again).

A house for no one

For a while there, it looked like things were levelling off in the old house price department. But then the Canadian Real Estate Association announced that the average sale price of a home in Canada had ticked up again in March. Granted, the March 2022 to March 2023 difference in Hamilton was down almost 20%, but that brought us to the relatively reasonable average sale price of… checks notes … $820,081.

So let’s play with some math here. You, a completely normal, run-of-the-mill, median Hamiltonian household, buy a house for $820,000. Let’s say it’s this 3 bedroom townhouse near Garth and Rymal. You like the dark wood on the floor, the curved staircase, and the Ronaldo scarf on the bedroom wall (which you want thrown in for the purchase price). You and your partner snag the place for the asking price. Okay, so your mortgage will run you about $5,110 a month or $61,320 a year. Throw on an extra $370 a month for property taxes ($4,441 a year) and all the other assorted costs of owning a home. Utilities, internet, fixing broken stuff. About $4,000 a year. We’re almost up at $70,000 now.

StatsCan reports that Hamilton’s median after-tax household income is $75,500. That leaves you with around $460 to live on a month. For food, transportation, and other assorted items you might want or need. Kinda hard when you’ve spent 93% of your household income on…the house itself.

We once again find ourselves in a situation where Hamiltonians can’t afford homes in Hamilton. This is, once again, a symptom of our deciding housing can only be provided by the corporate market.

But it also speaks to the Canadian obsession with home ownership. Again, turning to StatsCan, while home ownership rates were declining as of September 2022, over 2/3 of Canadians still owned their own homes.7 We can compare Canada's home ownership rates with the rates in countries where there are real housing alternatives: 61% in Denmark, 55% in Austria, 49% in Germany, and 41% in Switzerland.

If we provided real housing alternatives - social housing, non-profit housing, co-ops, co-living spaces, like…almost anything else - Hamiltonians wouldn’t be coerced into buying property just to have somewhere to live.

Buy, buy, buy

But how can you blame people about being house hungry when they see headlines like these:

These breathless articles appear constantly on my Google News feed because I searched “housing” once and now my algorithm is entirely messed up. They’re all variations of:

OMG THERE ARE HOUSES OUT THERE AND EVEN THE CRAPPY ONES ARE GOING FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OVER ASKING AND YOU SHOULD EXPECT TO PAY AT LEAST $200,000 OVER FOR A SHACK WITHOUT RUNNING WATER BECAUSE YOU NEED TO BUY A HOUSE BID BID BID IT DOESN’T MATTER YOU’LL GET A MORTGAGE YOU NEED TO BUY A HOUSE YOU NEED TO BUY A HOUSE EVERYONE IS DOING IT YOU NEED TO BUY A HOUSE YOU NEED TO BUY A HOUSE BUY A HOUSE YOU WORM YOU UTTER WORM GIVE US MILLIONS FOR A HOUSE WORMBOY YOU KNOW YOU HAVE TO MISTER AND OR MISSES WORM!

These kinds of articles whip up housing hysteria while claiming to just be “reporting on the facts of the housing market”.

But here’s the thing: those last two Globe articles are listed as “specials”. They’re written by a freelancer and they appear to be mostly reposted by folks in the real estate business.

They seem to be part of the Globe’s “Done Deal” section, which focuses on the ups and higher ups of the housing market. The articles give an MLS-style rundown of what the house has, a brief HGTV-style description of the house, and an infomercial-style interview with the real estate agent.

0 critical analysis of the market at all. No deep reporting, no consideration of alternatives, no perspectives from people who can’t afford these pointlessly inflated homes. These aren’t articles. They’re advertisements. And they are advertisements that whip the public into a lusty panic over housing.

Real estate folks are telling people they need to buy. Newspaper articles are fixated on how much “over asking” homes sold for. Banks and brokers encourage people to take out massive mortgages they’ll never be able to pay back.

Sure, the system may be broken, but at least a few folks are getting rich!

Let us live here

Here’s a story that hit…close to home. Both in a literal and figurative sense.

A family in Kirkendall has resorted to sending desperate flyers out to neighbours, asking if anyone in the area is looking to sell a home. The family of five wants a larger home but, because of both the prices in and appeal of Kirkendall, there haven’t been many folks moving out. The family would like a larger home on a quiet street (they have three streets in particular they would prefer) and still within the southern portion of the neighbourhood (between Aberdeen and the Escarpment).

There are a couple of differences between this family and many others looking for a good place to live in the city. They already have a home, have a specific area that they can and are looking to remain in, and they have the luxury of having a real estate agent on their side. Soooooooo many others in Hamilton don’t have that, but the issue is similar: we want to stay in this community, but the nature of the housing market is making it such that we might have to relocate just to find housing.

But what if you’re coming to Hamilton for a purpose? Say, to work here or maybe to study at one of Canada’s most prestigious post-secondary institutions, which just so happens to be located in Hamilton?

Like taking a paycheque from a grad student

On the southwest corner of Bay and King, on the site of one of Hamilton’s most beloved landmarks - a dead parking lot - a new addition to the city’s skyline is rising.

30 storeys of LEED® Silver Certified glittering glass and schnazz, McMaster’s new graduate student residence building is nearly complete.

27 floors of accommodation and, according to Mac, “a fitness centre, yoga and musical instrument jamming spaces, green roofs with an outdoor running track, BBQ area and lounge spaces, beautiful event spaces with communal kitchens and study or meeting spaces.”8

Swanky.

One tiny little itty bitty problem, though. Grad students might not be able to super duper afford to live there. Shared accommodation starts at $1,375. A one bedroom suite will go for $2,065. Given Mac’s poor funding for grad students, renting a one bedroom apartment in Mac’s own building will eat up 75% of a student’s annual income. And, let’s remember, the CMHC defines “affordable” accommodation as taking less than 30% of your annual income.9

This building is a public-private partnership (PPP) with Knightstone Capital, a Toronto-based developer and property management company that “specializes” in what they call “academic assets”. Just as with everything else, even universities are letting the corporate market do all the work providing essential services. And now the costs are being downloaded to grad students.

Sure, it is easy to slag grad students. Having been one for 10 years, I’ll be the first to admit that grad students can be exhausting. But they also do most of the grunt work of making post-secondary institutions function. They work in labs, collect data for research groups, lead seminars and tutorials, take contract teaching gigs, mark papers, supervise exams, work in admin positions, and diligently work to keep on- and near-campus bars in business. For all this, they are underpaid and undervalued. And now, because the university put off building quality housing for grad students for decades, they’ve decided to partner with a corporation which wants nothing more than to extract from grad students.

On this, I agree with my friend, Ward 2 councillor Cameron Kroetsch, who told the Spec: “Institutions have a public duty to ensure the projects they’re a part of are as affordable as possible.”10 On this, Mac has failed. Both Hamilton, and Mac's grad students, will suffer for it.

Those we forget

A warning for those reading: This story deals with the death of a houseless person near McMaster.

On the topic of McMaster and Knightstone: a second PPP for a student residence is underway in Hamilton, this one closer to Mac’s main campus.

A block of houses between Main and Traymore, Forsyth and Dalewood, sat vacant for years.

Way back in the 1960’s when they were planning McMaster’s hospital, the plan was to demolish those homes and have the hospital stretch all the way to Dalewood. Funding cutbacks and a recession saw that plan scrapped, but Mac still knew they wanted to do something on that block.

In the early 2010s, McMaster scooped up all the homes along the south side of Traymore and worked out a deal with Knightstone to develop the homes into a glittering new student residence.

While the university/corporate partnership battled the twin forces of resident opposition and municipal regulation, all those houses sat empty. A whole block of empty homes in a city facing a housing crisis.

Someone living on the margins saw those homes and tried to use them for their intended purpose. By all accounts, that person was someone who struggled with mental health challenges. Living on the streets in Hamilton, they also struggled with addictions issues and had become well acquainted with the police.

McMaster and the Hamilton Police knew that person kept entering the homes. They knew they had challenges. They knew there was a fire in the home they were occupying on September 10, 2022. The Hamilton Fire Department and HPS attended that fire and found the person crying and confused. While McMaster security had concerns about their mental health, little was done to help.

There was another fire two weeks later. First responders didn’t find the person, but the ever-ineffectual private security that would occasionally visit the spot (a statement from Mac to the CBC noted that there were “daily patrols from our security services and ongoing measures like fencing and fence repairs to keep people out.”11) said they saw the person around the buildings that day.

Four days after that, on September 28, 2022, came the final fire. This one was too intense, moved too quickly, spread through the derelict building with ease. The first responders who attended were unable to save the person they had interacted with just days earlier.

Despite knowing the circumstances and recognizing that someone was breaking into the homes McMaster left abandoned and crumbling, nothing was done. This is, in part, because there is little that could be done. Funding for mental health and addictions supports is minimal, shelter space is limited and dangerous, and a confluence of actors in the area meant that responsibility could be shrugged off to the next agency.

In September, 2022, when all this happened, there were an estimated 1,531 unhoused people in Hamilton and only 337 shelter beds. While the number of unhoused people has skyrocketed since 2020, the number of beds has remained roughly the same.

And that’s just the data we have.

CBC Hamilton reporter Bobby Hristova had to launch Freedom of Information requests against McMaster just to learn more about the person who died on McMaster’s watch. The HFD and HPS don’t track how many fires in the city are caused by people seeking shelter in unsafe buildings, even though, according to a burn surgeon at Hamilton General Hospital, that’s entirely possible.

We don’t collect or share data. We don’t have the resources to help the most vulnerable. We don’t even consider how leaving homes abandoned during a housing crisis looks or what message that sends about our priorities.

As Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas MPP Sandy Shaw told the CBC, what happened to the person who died on Traymore was because of a “perfect storm” of structural and institutional failures.12 Why does it take someone in our community dying before we see the storm that's been raging in front of us for so long? And how many more deaths will it take for us to do something about the storm?

Ye olde village

One last housing story to consider. TVO profiled a new project happening in Ontario’s north: a “medieval” village where the cost of housing will be much cheaper than anywhere else in the province.

Way up in Ontario’s “unorganized” communities (places in the province without a municipal government - usually northern and rural), someone named Anthony Barrett is selling shares in “medieval” villages, where people will live a sustainable, off-grid lifestyle in a common space while not necessarily holding title to their own land. Tiny homes, little generators, a simple existence. And, apparently, you don’t need to dress the part or put on a terrible British accent… “medieval” just means “simple” in this context. No crusades or castles or plague. At least, I don’t think…

But the interesting thing is that communities around these “villages” (which, when you think about them, seem more like intentional communities than anything), have gone full NIMBY at the prospect of people moving in. Well, I guess it isn’t so much “not in my backyard” and more “not in the surrounding unorganized territory that is likely many kilometres away from me”.

The president of the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities embodies this "NITSUTTILMKAFM” spirit when they say “The burden of these developments is going to be borne by neighbouring municipalities…The fact is they’ll still draw on all the services that our residents are paying for, whether that’s landfill, schools, hospitals, what have you.”13 And while it may be NITSUTTILMKAFMesque to critique those seeking a different place to live, they are right in observing that, without addressing the influx of new people, the already fragile services in these communities may be strained beyond their breaking point.

People are trying to find more sustainable and affordable ways to live. For many, that means leaving larger cities and finding rural areas in which they can live for less and have a less intense impact on the environment. But the issue is that the same problems will still follow all these folks trying to escape. Unless we work on big, structural changes to the issues we face - housing, transportation, social services, etc. - then moving to a medieval village is just running away from the problems.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll keep my codpiece and chainmail stored away at the present moment, and focus on fixing what’s broken about the housing market in the here and now.

A good tweet

This section is inspired by a similar one on Garbage Day newsletter, since it fits here. Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama called out the rather short-sighted (and very culture war-esque) Tory plan to cut all educational requirements for new police officers. The Tory “Press Office” then attempted to clap back with “She's content with the crime wave sweeping across the province.” Ah, yes, because rational voters think “well this candidate says their opponent is pro-crime and that makes me nervous.” It is great to think Ontario’s governing party thinks so little of Ontarians. Anyway, Sarah, true-to-form, called them out for spewing talking points while actively harming the province. Kinda reminds me of the “good old days” of Twitter when we all thought the platform…you know…mattered.

Cool facts for cool people

• Anyone want to buy the old RokBar in Hess Village? Advertised as a “very successful nightclub pre-COVID”, one of the ugliest remaining buildings in the city is up for sale for a cool 3 mils. This building is…an abomination. Windowless, austere, and endlessly sticky. I was convinced to go there once in undergrad. I did not have fun. Sure, I’m less a “club guy” and more a “let’s yell about politics at a bar for 5 hours guy”, but still. The building it a stain on Hess Village and should be done away with. But that’s just my opinion. I don’t have the $3,000,000 to make it happen. Unless someone wants to launch a Kickstarter…

• Twitter continues to melt down, but, in between poorly planned ideas rolling out, there are still a few gems that float to the surface. One of the best came from the Hamilton LRT Twitter account this week. They tweeted about a strange structure that remains after a building was demolished to make way for LRT at King Street East and Holton Avenue. It looks like a cut away of a walk-up with scaffolding around it. Turns out, it is all supporting a chimney that just so happens to be the home of a Chimney Swift, which is a bird that’s at risk. After noticing that, the Hamilton LRT team adapted their plans and made sure the little Chimney Swift could keep its home! Birds and LRT, living in harmony! 🐦🚊💖

• A little bit down the road, between Brantford and London, lies tiny Norwich, Ontario. Around 11,000 residents, a local centre for farming communities, and a township council of 5 (1 mayor and 4 councillors…pretty standard in Ontario). And, as of Tuesday, April 25th, Norwich as a municipality has come out swinging against queer folks. Last year, when the city raised the Pride flag, it was routinely vandalized. In one instance, farm equipment store operator Jake Dey vandalized a local Pride flag, was arrested, attended Norwich council, gave a rambling 30 minute speech equating queer folks with Nazis, and promptly had all of the charges against him withdrawn. Instead of addressing the culture of hate emanating from their township, they folded and gave the bigots what they wanted. At first, the by-law specifically targeted queer-identified symbols. Recognizing that this might get them in trouble with the ol’ Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Councillor John Scholten worked out a deal with a fellow councillor to make it a blanket ban on “special interest flags”, allowing only the Canadian, provincial, and municipal flags on township property. Outside the meeting, People’s Party supporters and people waving flags supporting former US President Donald Trump appeared to support the ban. Overall, this is a regressive move that signals the US culture wars are headed our way with intensity. If things keep on the same trajectory, expect more culture warriors running for local office (mayor, councillor, AND school trustee) to advance anti-queer, anti-trans, and anti-everything policies as a cover for their hardcore pro-corporate agenda.

• Speaking of school trustee fun, our friends up in York have been enduring a months-long assault by far-right activists who are targeting the York Catholic District School Board (YCDSB). In a fun coincidence, also on Tuesday night, YCDSB trustees debated raising the Pride flag in June. A shouting match erupted as opponents attacked the board and supporters. Listen, folks, this is exhausting. Like, entirely draining. The pandemic completely ruined some people’s sense of community and the personhood of others. They got online, got weird, and then brought that weirdness out into the world. And people are going to get hurt.

• A huge success story comes from the Hamilton YWCA. Located beside City Hall, the YWCA opened a safer use drug space a year ago. On April 22, it was announced that not a single person had died while accessing the space and that staff at the site had treated 54 drug poisonings. The YWCA is providing a safe and supportive environment for people who would otherwise be forced to consume drugs in private and/or in unsafe settings. This should be a huge wake-up call to all those opponents in the community who doubt the efficacy of these services.

• Jumping over the Atlantic, our friends in the UK are having some municipal elections on May 4th (Northern Ireland follows with municipal elections on the 18th). And there is incredible controversy over these elections. Not just because the governing Tories are expected to be decimated (yeah, the UK, like any normal country, has parties in local elections), but because these are the first elections there to be held under their new Elections Act of 2022. For the very first time, people will have to show photo ID to vote. People in the UK are mighty angry about this. Some have called it an attempt at voter suppression. Long time elections workers are quitting over it. The police are actually on stand-by in case people start rioting at polling stations. It is a mess. But, to most Canadians, the whole kerfuffle seems pretty weird. We have needed to show photo ID for a while, which isn’t a problem, since over 85% of Canadians have at least a driver’s licence and the number of options available if you don’t have ID that matches your current address make it so that there are very few cases where someone is denied a ballot outright. It is just interesting to see how things work in other places, eh?

Housingmania! Thanks for reading all the way through this week. Didn’t have much time to proofread this one, so think of any spelling and grammar errors as fun little quirks. Until next week!