Celebrating small victories

There's a story on view at CBC today; " Na-Me-Res opens its doors to a new complex for unhoused men." I guess that's a good-news bad-news story. The good news is they're getting twenty dudes off the street and into proper housing. The bad news is this program is run by an Indigenous charity and is understandably focused on getting their people off the street. What we need to do is replicate this program x1000 and extend it across the country. The one thing I noticed is the program demands 100% abstinence from its former-addict residents. I'm surprised there hasn't been a civil-rights challenge on that. The way things have evolved over recent years makes public inebreation a basic human right. And if your public intoxication, regardless of cause, causes you to defecate in the flowerbeds in front of City Hall, well, everybody gotta shit, so fuck off with your judgementalism! Anyway, while the story headlines a small victory, it mentions in passing that Toronto is decades behind in its affordable housing goals. Now that we've gotta spend gazillions on fighter jets and warships and submarines, we'll be centuries behind!

Todt Hill and all that Mafia jazz

Check out CNN or Fox or MSNBC and you'll see a good old story about a Mafia Don (not the one in the White House) who got... ventilated?... on Staten Island yesterday.

That's some crazy shit!... a scene right outta the Godfather, or so Fox and CNN and MSNBC would have us think.

Apparently the prestigious Todt Hill hood, with the best views on the Eastern Seaboard south of Maine,  is just a-flush with big-time mafioso...

So, being a naive Canadian lefty whack-job, I thought I'd take a look at real estate in the Todt Hill neighbourhood.

Here's what a million and a half (US$) gets you on Staten Island, home of Mafia Central Command.

That's a pretty sweet spot, is it not? Five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a quarter acre lot twenty minutes drive from midtown Manhattan?

Here's what a million and a half (US$) gets you in Toronto. A raised bungalow on a fifty foot lot, twenty minutes drive from Bay and Front.


Looks to me like the City of Toronto should be trying to recruit Mafia bosses instead of Amazon, if affordable housing is the goal.

Pot-addled hillbilly beats elite opinion makers to the story, again...

By a year!

More than a year ago I made the observation that the creatives, the innovators, the "disrupters" won't be moving to Toronto if they can't afford to live here. Jeff Gray tells you the same thing on page A17 of today's Globe and Mail.

The so-called "solutions" discussed in Gray's story don't fully address the problem, in part because any solution that relies on "developers" is asking the very people who have largely created the problem to remedy it. Incentivising for-profit developers to build affordable housing is another way of saying you're going to subsidize their profits. That's the wrong approach.

Putting up apartment blocks is not rocket science. It doesn't require "developers." The Romans were putting up multi-storey buildings well before the time of Jesus. Toronto should be cutting the for-profit developers out of the picture, not subsidizing them. What makes property development both risky and lucrative is the cost of land and the convoluted approval process. Since the city of Toronto already owns plenty of land and controls the approval process, what's holding them back from getting shovels in the ground?

You don't need "developers." You need young keeners with fresh Construction Technology diplomas in hand to work as project co-ordinators. The construction unions will be happy for the work whether the finished product is nonprofit or designed to further enrich Toronto's billionaire developers.

Elsewhere in the Globe, John Rapley offers a meditation on Canada's love affair with home ownership. He reports the imaginary conversation of a couple of his imaginary friends which segues into a philosophical treatise on the meaning of money.

That's just more BS that skirts around the fundamental problem causing our runaway real estate inflation and the crisis of affordability; supply and demand. When the federal government is fixated on continuously ramping up immigration while simultaneously washing their hands of any responsibility to provide housing, it's no wonder we are facing a crisis in housing affordability.

That's not the fault of the developers. They're folks who play by the rules we've made for them, and they wouldn't exist if they weren't profitable. We can't relegate housing to the private sector and then complain when market forces make the resulting product unaffordable to the majority of Canadians.


A robust policy of affordable public housing co-sponsored by all levels of government is long overdue.

Affordable housing

I've told this story before.

When my dear father (who just celebrated his 85th, and may God bless him with many more!..) got off the boat back in '56 his first job was shovelling coal. With a hand shovel.

By the time I was in my teens he'd remade himself as a real estate broker. I remember all us kids emptied our piggy banks to be part of the investment syndicate when he bought his first investment property.

I think it was on Barton Street, if I'm not mistaken.

Then we were all corralled into doing whatever we were capable of, from scraping old paint to applying new paint, so he could turn that place around.

The term "flip" had yet to be coined.

Dad was well on his way to joining the pantheon of post-war immigrants who done good in real estate.

And there was a ton of them. Germans, Italians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and Jews from all over. I got to know lots of immigrants who did very well in the real estate business.

Some of them got seriously rich.

Most of them, and my father would be in this group, never got "rich," but they got seriously comfortable.

As a result of my father's success in that business, I was somewhat drawn to it myself, so I'd pick Dad's brain to get a handle on things.

So how do you know what a property is really worth?

It's worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.

What is "affordable housing?"

If somebody bought it, it was obviously affordable... and so on.

OK.

By that metric, when somebody pays five million for a penthouse condo in Toronto, it's obviously "affordable housing."

But that's not the definition of "affordable" that obtains when we discuss affordable housing today.

And that's where the private sector affordable housing model falls flat on its face. A $14/hr minimum wage means you'll never afford decent housing in places like Toronto.

Which is why governments need to get serious about public housing.


That's why we need a robust public housing strategy.

Suitable for first-time buyers or investors

Why is it that you can't scroll through real estate listings for more than two minutes without running across that line?

It's everywhere! That's bare-knuckle capitalism at its finest, isn't it? OK, immigrant family just starting out with your piddly savings from your minimum wage jobs... here's a cosy little starter for you! All you have to do is beat out all those savvy "investors" and the place is yours!

May the highest bidder win!

I'd say that's a competition highly skewed in the favour of the investors, wouldn't you think?

Time to roll out your affordable housing policy, Mr. Trudeau.

And make sure it's about affordable housing, not affordable investment vehicles.