On Wartime Housing. Louis Shalako.

730 square feet.

Louis Shalako

The new federal government of Canada is promoting home-building, and one aspect of the plan is pre-approved home designs.

There have been references to ‘war-time’ housing, which was built in large numbers and all across this country after WW II. Large numbers of service men and women were coming home from Europe and other theatres, and they needed two things. They needed housing, and they needed employment.

A large housing program served both needs, bearing in mind circumstances are different in the modern context. We have both a housing shortage, and a labour shortage. Funny thing is, there's no real shortage of money. Just look at the homes people are buying now, more importantly, look at the mega-homes that are being built.

By eliminating the basement, and putting the furnace, hot water tank, laundry tubs on the ground floor, you simply bump out the side of the kitchen and add a few more squares. You also save a big chunk of up-front money.

Young people could, in fact, afford a small starter home. The design, #50-13, seen above, stands at 730 sq. feet. My two-bedroom apartment is roughly equivalent. With pre-fabrication, the components relatively small, (for highway trucking), the longest elevation at 30', you could pump these out like so many hot rolls. You could sell these at $299,000.00, with the feds splitting the 10 % down payment, and a mortgage amortized over 25 years, at some rational rate. I’ll go three and a half percent compounded monthly.

All the interest has to do is to cover the costs of the program. Developers make their money by actually building the homes in a speedy and efficient manner. The faster you can build them, the better, and if you build it, they will come.

We have to start the conversation somewhere, after all.

All prospective owners would be subject to means testing. Essentially, are you poor enough to both need the program, but also, can you pay your own way insofar as you must—a very specific demographic group, largely consisting of what we might call ‘mature renters’, a group who might like to get out from under the stern eye of the landlord and maybe build a little wealth of their own, for, essentially, the exact same money.

The basic idea is that people could buy a house, on their own land, for $1,000.00 a month, of course on top of that would be municipal taxes, electricity, heat, water, and insurance and maintenance costs. The entire kit fits on a flatbed or inside a standard semi-trailer.

The kit might include all structural elements, and basic amenities like the furnace, hot water tank, bathtub, shower, fridge and stove, pipe for plumbing and rolls of wire and boxes of electrical components, bundles of shingles, stacks of drywall board, all of it packed into one or two long trailers. You can use the stock colours or upgrade at your own expense, however these are in no way ‘custom builds’. These buildings do not require marble floors and bronze countertops, and zirconium-encrusted platinum toilets a la the bourgeoisie.

We're building homes, not status symbols, or stroking the egos of the unrepentant hedonist.

Those people already have money, they already have their McMansions, if they have over-leveraged their credit portfolio, that is their problem and they can suffer the consequences of their own greed and ignorance, their lack of foresight. For all I care, let them rot or let them sell the his and hers Harleys to make next month's payment...but I digress.

Assuming services are on site to hook up to, the basic assembly is rather quick, finishing takes longer, and in some narratives, in the old 1 ½ story housing, the upstairs bedrooms might not have been finished, the basement, almost certainly not. Garages, privacy fences, decks and hot tubs can come later.

Actual plan from the era.

At any time, after the first five years, you could buy out the balance and own it free and clear. This allows for people to resell at a profit and pay off their debt to the Crown and the taxpayers. The initial covenant does not extend to the second buyer. They will pay something a little closer to a going rate.

After five years, the first owner has built up some minimal equity, been ‘forgiven’ the federal contribution to the down payment, and with a relatively stable housing market, the ‘going rate’ for a property of this nature probably has increased a nominal ten percent in value. Simply put, your new home value is at least, (and probably more than) $330,000.00. With payments, offset by interest, over five years, you probably have thirty grand, perhaps a little more of your own equity. If you sold right now, you have paid all monthly costs, but at least you get some if not all of your money back in terms of that $60,000.00 difference in home value.

(Thirty grand of your own and the increase in value combined. - ed.)

You ain’t going to get that in the rental market, are you—and now, perhaps, with a little in savings, with your personal circumstances now different, you might even go looking for something a little more up-market.

Okay, so the government and the taxpayers are not too interested in funding large-scale, tract housing with a bunch of ‘tiny homes’, eight by ten and with a hot-plate beside the door and a tiny chemical toilet in a box under the bed.

We are talking real homes, on perhaps a fairly narrow frontage, in order to maximize the impact of municipal services, including water, sewer, utilities like gas and power. I would suggest forty-five feet with no more than eighty or one hundred feet of depth. This allows for a one-car garage to be built at a later date, and a substantial yard with garden, play areas, etc. It’s a green space.

(The secondary or pass-on covenant, which is passed on to the next buyer, deals with issues like second dwellings, over-sized garages and other obnoxious uses. Human nature being what it is, this will have to be backed up by municipal zoning and ‘covenant’ enforcement bylaws. The financials are free market terms at this point. We would also like to see pure speculators kept out or penalized on subsequent sales. Call it 'capital gains' or something like that. Under the terms of this covenant, the owner must live in the dwelling. Buying one and then renting or leasing it out would be strictly prohibited.)

It is private property after five years. It is yours, free and clear, admittedly with a mortgage on it. In that sense, the right to private property and capitalistic concerns are acknowledged.

I don’t like concrete pads sitting right at grade level. I prefer a two-foot crawl space, this would be well insulated, but it also gives heating ducts and plumbing somewhere to go. It is not a living space and should not be treated as such.

What you want is a proper foundation below the frost line, a wooden deck with floor joists and the like. Construction is ‘stick-built’, but major components are done in a factory. With a floor plan of 30’ x 24’, that floor/deck is essentially three ‘panels’ of rectangular shape, each of which can fit on a semi-trailer. They’re all framed up, all you have to do is to drop them on the foundations and fasten them together. A note here. Some of the original designs were literally sitting on concrete blocks; which may, or may not have been set on footings below the frost line. However, in terms of the front wall or elevation, in terms of the factory-built model, the wall is all framed up, sheathed, insulated, electrical roughed in with coils of sufficient length sort of taped securely. Once the four walls are standing, trusses in place, plywood on the roof, windows and doors in, the wire can be pulled out, routed through the ceiling space to an electrical box in the utility area of the kitchen. Essentially, heat and plumbing are down and under, electrical goes up and over and back down, in my concept. A few bags of insulation for the ceilings, and voila! And it is time to move onto trimming and finishing out, perhaps carpet on plywood for the first few years, but it is a snug and viable home for those who qualify.

There is a new apartment building in town, and there are laundry facilities in each apartment. It’s a compact installation—each unit also has a separate meter for water and electricity, very much a trend in new apartment construction in this country. The rent is one thing, the monthly costs are another. In that sense, it is similar, and yet you own the end result.

To try and improve this design is to make it bigger, which seems fair enough. There would have to be a series of designs, all of them under $500,000.00, including a building lot and all service hookups. When you see the new builds in town here in Sarnia, Ontario, semi-detached and starting at $569,000.00, with a garage, a basement, a second floor, it shows what is possible using some imagination.

Another quick note, virtually none of these buildings are wheelchair or mobility accessible, which would require a single-floor design, with large doorways, ramps for access and much larger bathrooms, specially-designed kitchens for example.

Try putting one of these on its own lot and see what happens.

END

 

A Rational Plan forAffordable Housing.

Wartime Housing Report.

Approved Housing Designs for Ontario Region.

The Floor Plan of an Accessory Dwelling Unit.

What is an Accessible Home.

Here's one on a fair sized lot, $389,000.00

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works onArtPal.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

The Invisible Disability. Louis Shalako.

So, how's your mental health lately...

Louis Shalako

When every report on homelessness and poverty mentions mental health and addictions, one wonders how it is even possible that at least some of these people can’t qualify for federal or provincial disability benefits.

They all qualified for the most minimal welfare, didn’t they. In which case, they must have some rights. They must exist, if we can put it that way.

If nothing else, they are documented citizens.

It’s not like every asshole in town doesn’t somehow know that to be true—

Surely there must be some evidence for all of that, evidence other than the fact that they are homeless, for this is the old ‘coincidence-chasing-the-tail-of-causality’ ploy in all of its logical and rhetorical ugliness.

First, there is the stigma, a stigma that the exact same Canadian journalists are careful to remind us of, with depressing regularity, which as we all know equates with a good poop…it’s pro forma. They can’t help themselves. They must do it. If they were caught in a bear trap, they would gnaw their arm off, in order to continue to slather on the stigma, ladies and gentlemen.

Second, it is an invisible disability.

It’s terribly hard to prove something that is invisible, and yet the Chief of Police is quoted as saying that 88 % of the folks forced to live down at Rainbow Park suffer from a combination of these issues, thereby stigmatizing them and the other twelve percent…that’s because we cannot tell with a quick glance, who is who, and who is what, ladies and gentlemen.

Words have great power. They also have meaning, sometimes very deep meaning which goes beyond that which is in the dictionary.

Words can be used to obscure, as well as to illuminate.

And guilt is one of your weapons.

***

What’s kind of interesting is the sheer number of invisible disabilities. My mother suffers from vertigo. Shirley and Ron were driving the big rig, a brand-new tractor they’d financed themselves. It was a dream for Ron and Shirley was nothing if not game for adventure. She fell getting out of the truck. Hit her head, began experiencing symptoms. Diagnosed by her doctor, and now confirmed by thirty years of experience…the insurance company wouldn’t pay off. It was impossible to prove, and despite her own doctor’s signature, their own doctors were there to dispute it. The government is no better and perhaps no worse than the insurance company.

Ron and Shirley quickly went bankrupt, the costs of trucking being what they are—two drivers can keep that vehicle on the road twice as many hours per day as one single driver.

They did try to get another driver to help Ron, but when diesel went from thirty cents to fifty cents a litre it was time to admit defeat and hang it up.

The financial penalties were tough in such a situation. Bankruptcy is not fun, ladies and gentlemen, and it takes years, many years, to recover from such an event. My mother suffers vertigo to this day.

No one would ever say that my mother was disabled, (Shirley would never say such a thing), and yet, there are people who have been bedridden for years by vertigo. The sheer nausea caused by vertigo, the spinning head, and the loss of balance is purely subjective, in the sense that it cannot be measured by a blood test, an X-ray, or by a urine sample.

No one is going to take your word for it, not when there’s money involved. In that sense, the government and the insurance company are a lot alike…

This one will do.

If you’ve ever been right on the verge of going to sleep, and had that sudden falling sensation, that is very much what vertigo feels like. I’ve suffered from anxiety attacks, way back in the early 2000s. It is different but similar: a kind of rushing feeling, a feeling that the walls are squeezing in, and it is, in fact terrifying. I guess that’s why they politely call it ‘anxiety’.

What it is, is sheer, unremitting terror—all for no apparent reason, it’s all in your head. You’re sitting in a chair, in a room, watching television, and you’re absolutely scared shitless for no reason. By definition, a ‘mental illness’. And thank fucking Darwin that’s over and done with, those particular circumstances, the stress has been gone for a long time now, and I will probably never suffer from that again.

I was afraid to even leave the house for about nine months, funny thing was, I always felt better when I managed to do so.

It was the fear of fear itself, or so I guess.

***

When I was twenty or so, going to Lambton College, I worked part time at the old Woolco Auto Centre, doing oil changes, the old lube, oil and filter Saturday specials, and tires and the like. We had a mechanic. Rolly had to take the three-beer lunch, every single day. His toolbox was a rusted, pathetic wreck. Rolly had the Class A License, the boss hung it up on the wall or we would have hardly been able to stay in business.

Andy was a journeyman mechanic, not Class A, and his toolbox was very professional. I was just young and enthusiastic, in some sense. But poor old Rolly never should have been allowed to repair automobiles after a certain stage of alcoholism. The problem with alcoholism, of course, is that it is self-inflicted. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot—you might get out of work, or even out of a war, but no one is going to give you all that much sympathy. I guess that’s why we call it stigma…Rolly’s hands shook even on a good day, and it was Rolly who stood there and watched as I pulled off brake drums, brake calipers, the rotors, replaced bearings, and put new shoes and pads on the customer vehicle. His hands shook. Was that the booze, or was that Parkinson’s? I suppose I will never know.

Someone had to sign off on that repair…and it better not be an inexperienced twenty year-old kid, or the Ministry of Transportation would have every right to ask a few pointed questions.

And we have absolutely no idea of why any fairly rational person would do that to themselves.

We also have no idea of what the trauma in that man’s life might have been.

Alcohol is pretty insidious, and it takes quite a few people down.

They can still walk, they can still talk, theoretically, they should be able to look after themselves.

It’s a disease.

We're all getting older.

***

After thirty years on disability, (ODSP), I retire at age 65. This results in a substantial raise of three or four hundred dollars a month. Which tells us just how much the government values the disabled. There are seniors on similar benefits, one story on the CBC tells of a woman paying 100 % of her income in rent. What might be the only thing that saves me, is thirteen years in a rent controlled building.

In a recent story, also on CBC, they state that if you have been in a rent-controlled unit for five years, ‘you have a target on your back’.

It’s not a very nice feeling. They’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know.

So what happened, is that I fell from a scaffolding when a plank broke. That was May 4, 1989. I broke my back in three places, so there were compression fractures at T-6, L-3 and L-4. There was also a hell of a lot of pain, and a lot of depression to go along with that, and yet, I can walk. I can talk, I can look after myself pretty well, once I sort of adapted to the realities. Nowadays, I simply don’t work more than three or four hours a day, in winter, when sales are slow, that’s like maybe 12-15 hours a week, in summer, more like 24-26 hours a week. Oddly enough, the job is fairly physical. I just can’t do it full-time, and probably couldn’t live on that income alone…

That almost doubles the base ODSP benefits, and the fact that the government finally raised allowable earnings from $200.00 per month up to $1,000.00 was a big help and a big forward step—dare I call it a victory, for the disabled no matter how we choose to classify them.

Some people fought long and hard for that change, as well as regular raises from the Conservative provincial government, and in fact I was one of them…trust me, they know my name over there.

This is how I know that victory is bittersweet. I mean, we really shouldn’t have to fight that hard, just to get a little justice around here.

I do not know if I get a full payment for August. I do know that the OAS (Old Age Security), presumably CPP and GIS as well, first payments will be September 30.

Only an idiot wouldn’t take steps to prepare for certain eventualities. You might be surprised that I have been saving money, (rather than spending it all on cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines…etc. – ed).

(What I am saying, – ed., is that I will cover the Sept. 1 rent.)

I haven’t even bothered to call the social workers, neither did I appeal a whopping $4,000.00 in so-called overpayments. It took them five years, partly due to COVID-19, (they also tore down their own building), to rule on income dating back to 2019. Some things in life just aren’t fair, what in the hell are you going to do about it. Truth is, I should have fought them, even if I lost—I do reserve the right to tell them exactly what I think of them, although it might be pointless.

It can also wait.

I also know that a lot of folks simply can’t fight for themselves, and maybe I was cast in a somewhat more heroic mold…I am not without my own vanity. You can always fight for someone else, right.

All that juicy stigma.

You might even win a round once in a blue moon, and I have to admit, it feels like a kind of power, which is exactly what the disabled, visible or otherwise, lack.

***

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The price of my freedom, is four grand.

They will cheerfully claw that back one way or another, with little regard to the impact on a senior citizen’s situation, which may be precarious for any number of reasons. What if I can’t work, what if the job goes away, what if I muff the income tax return and don’t get all the proper benefits?

My vehicle is paid off, and yet it is also 14 years old with 308,000 k on the clock. My job depends on a vehicle and having a place to live.

I haven’t had a winter coat in eight or nine years, basically I just dress in layers…and layers and layers.

I’ve cut my own hair for thirty years. I have used dish soap for shampoo, and brushed my teeth with baking soda.

One way or another, I will survive—

Assuming the landlord doesn’t get some kind of a brainstorm.

MillDon Enterprises has a thousand units across southwestern Ontario, and one wonders just how many relatives they have, in order to produce the N-12 eviction form, and to claim that they need the unit for a family member. The problem there, is that there is no follow-up, no verification, and no enforcement, and the onus is on the client to do all of that investigative work. Then take it back to the tribunal, hopefully with competent legal representation. Very few people get back into their old unit, and certainly not in any sort of time-frame.

I live in a three-floor walk-up in the central city. It’s probably the best unit in the building, top floor, (even the Mayor doesn’t have that), on the end away from the driveway, and facing the south so we at least get a bit of sunshine in winter…if you moved into an exact same unit, you will be paying at least double what I am paying. If this seems unfair to the landlord, or the other tenants, well, that’s too bad. I have some rights too, and perhaps the foresight simply to hang onto the place, even when there was a horrible noise problem, one that was never solved until three or four problem children simply moved on, as they almost inevitably will. The rest of us suffered through it, and that’s really all we can say about that.

Here’s the other thing: the company has been systematically renovating units, and raising the rents, as people ended their occupancy and moved out. You could call it a kind of natural attrition, and at this point in time, there are only six or seven units that have been occupied for ten years or longer. Some of us are getting older (we’re all getting older), and all the landlord has to do is to be patient. It’s not hard to estimate the income from this building, which has gone from about $28,000.00 per month to well over $40,000.00 gross income.

(That’s a half a million a year almost, from one fairly small building.)

It would be extremely unlikely that the company would evict the entire building (the N-13 ‘renoviction’), in order to renovate, although that is exactly the case in the building across the street. That building has been vacant since roughly June 1 of 2023, and there is virtually no activity on the part of contractors, although the grass is cut regularly.

The biggest issue with housing right now, even here in Sarnia, is that there is simply no place to go—

No place to go.

In which case, the only thing to do is to stand up and fight.

 

END

 

Landlord has brainstorm...

Woman Pays 100 % of Income in Rent. (CBC)

Apartment Tenants Renovicted. (Sarnia Journal)

Why do we Have to Prove Our Disability Constantly? (The Walrus)

The Invisible Disability. (Wiki)

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

On Immigration and Related Matters. Louis Shalako.

 

The Blind Leading the Blind, Peter Brueghel the Elder.

Louis Shalako

Everything is politics, and all politics is local politics.

Immigration is one of those issues which fall under the aegis of the federal government.

Yet its effects, are seen and felt at the local level—I can only live in one town, one little neighbourhood at a time. What’s happening at the other end of the country doesn’t affect me, mostly because I don’t see it. Canada is a very large country, but it’s a very small town, in the sense that we all know each other. We have wonderful communications in this country, telephone, internet, television. Radio, newspapers and magazines, websites, and all that goes on in our new, electronic, public square. With the Weather Network, I can sit here and watch thunderstorms on radar, rolling on in from wherever.

We have vast resources of information, compared to a few short years ago.

This is one storm no one saw coming, except that they did—they did. We all did. We knew all about the inverted pyramid of demographics back in the early eighties. This is the graph that looks like a pyramid, upside-down, based on statistical analysis of age groups and one would suppose mortality tables of the time. It is the opposite of Malthusian economics, as limited as that is, and as open to question, even at the time it was written.

And people will talk.

***

The housing crisis has come to Sarnia, just has it has come to all Canadian cities and towns.

Past and present federal governments have seen increased levels of immigration as a desirable thing. An aging population and a falling birthrate would seem to make this an inevitable process: when half the population is over 65 years of age, the burden of taxation, including all those state or taxpayer funded pensions falls on fewer and fewer shoulders. People hate taxes of any kind. Older folks hate being rendered homeless and starving to death on the street, a fairly natural inclination. What is interesting, certainly in the case of the Province of Ontario, is that no one seems to have seen this coming. If they did, they sure as hell didn’t think to do anything about it.

In Sarnia, in a recent news story, it was revealed that there are at least 2,000 foreign students at Lambton College. Foreign students pay the going rate, tuition and rent, with no help from federal and provincial student assistance programs.

Foreign students aren’t taking high-end homes and condos. They’re not taking high-end apartments. They are taking the cheapest apartments they can find, what with being here only temporarily.

We can’t blame foreign students for housing inflation in detached homes or high-end condos and apartments. We can’t even really blame immigrants for such inflation, as few immigrants arrive on these shores with big stacks of cash. We all know immigrants can be hard workers, we know their children tend to get good educations, we know that for various reasons related to language and culture, it is often easier for an immigrant to work in low-skilled occupations, right up until the day they quit and start their own business. At which point the rest of us nod thoughtfully and talk about them taking all of our welfare, and all of our jobs…

We sort of know that folks whose French or English language skills are not good will often seek out their fellow countrymen. They will labour in the kitchen rather than at the front counter. One of our local realtors has radio commercials in an Indian language. He’s from India, presumably, there are enough Indians in the local marketplace that this confers some kind of competitive advantage.

Not all foreign students get their education and leave town. Far from it, also, the children of immigrants, Canadian citizens, can go to a college or university as easily as anyone else’s kids.

You see them all over town. Young people, working the gas bar, the beer store, working the vape shop, (as sole proprietor), working the phone sales. Answering the phones at federal and provincial agencies. There are five of those mobile phone shops in our local mall, virtually all of them appear to be ‘foreigners’ or people of colour to be exactly clear.

Some people in the comments section of any major news source just seem to hate immigration, as if it were the cause of all our woes. I won’t lie to you—it probably isn’t the solution to all of our woes either. There may be some valid arguments regarding the level of immigration, but for the most part it is bigotry suffused with ignorance of any economic and social realities. Hatred is blind, and unreasoning, and it poisons every mind that it touches. It also gets to vote—through the ballots of those who hate.

These are the folks that profess to love Canada—only real problem, of course, is that they seem to hate every little thing and every other person in it.

The housing crisis was caused by a perfect storm of events. Immigration, foreign students, these are only factors, but not the whole story.

Even if there was no immigration at all, zero, nil, nada, ladies and gentlemen, we still haven’t been building what is called the ‘missing middle’ in terms of housing, and we sure as hell haven’t been building the lower and bottom tiers of housing. No responsible developer is going to propose a brand-new, state of the art flophouse, ladies and gentlemen. Not when you can go high-end on the same site, rather than listing one-roomers for $700.00 per month when you can put a few of them together as one unit and get $2500.00 per month for the same square footage. It is, after all, new construction, not some clapped-out old church or factory or a sweatshop in an alley somewhere. Simply put, a one-roomer still needs one toilet, one sink. One fridge, one stove. One bathtub, one patio door. An apartment with five rooms still only gets one toilet—capiche?

It is more efficient in terms of cost to the builder.

(Where in the hell would you put it? Sure as hell not Bright’s Grove. – ed.)

The people that are against immigration tend to forget that half the doctors in this town are from Africa, India, Asia. They tend to ignore the fact that here in the Province of Ontario, we simply do not graduate enough doctors to serve the needs of our population of 14 million.

That is just one more failure of Ontario social policy, which I have mentioned before.

When the federal government decided on an increased level of immigration, it was a gamble. The gamble will pay off in the long run, in the shorter term, it has brought increased pressure on available housing stock. What they did not gamble on was Covid-19, supply chain disruptions, and inflation increased by pent-up demand. They did not gamble on a major European war, which has in fact cost this country billions that might have been better spent elsewhere, and driven up the costs of basic food-stuffs like flour and cooking oil. In Japan, with an aging population and virtually zero immigration, they have rural and small-town housing, vacant and falling into disrepair. In China, with a population of over a billion, they can’t fill the housing they have. There are huge developments, full of half-empty and even half-built high-rise apartments. These are mistakes of demography. When the provincial government decided that free market capitalism would be the solution to all problems, it seems to have overlooked the most vulnerable members of the population in terms of available housing. They had to overlook them. Otherwise, they would have had to have given them a raise…was it wrong to put a moratorium on evictions during the pandemic? Ah, but when they took that off again, there was all that pent-up demand, mostly from the landlords, and yes, some folks did abuse the privilege. Most of us did not—

Just sitting here, watching the storms roll in.

All of those evictions. All of those rent-controlled units, suddenly becoming vacant…that wasn’t very smart now, was it. Don’t forget, half the workforce was sent home for six months to a year or more. How in the hell was the average person supposed to pay the rent?

There are villages in Italy, where they will sell you a house for a dollar. It sure sounds like a real bargain. All you have to do is fix it up and live there, and pray for a bit of luck as it’s Mafia territory—and you look like an easy mark in what is someone else’s country. They like to call it free market capitalism, don’t you know—otherwise, it’s just simple extortion.

Right?

Free market capitalism simply can’t do anything for us—what with being responsible to the shareholders and all. The one thing they ain’t, is responsible to the taxpayers, and I guess that just leaves the poor old government holding the bag.

When the provincial government fails to adequately fund colleges and universities, that was a conscious decision. When the provincial government fails to adequately fund disability pensions, or social assistance payments, to the extent that people can’t pay the rent on the units they already occupy, well, this was more than a conscious decision. It was a moral failure, based on ideology and mistaken notions of how things actually work. At some point, you are asking people living on the street, to save first and last month’s rent, on an apartment they couldn’t afford in the first place and that goes about triple several years later; and by this time, you don’t stand a chance in hell of passing the credit check anyways.

The exact same unit that once cost $700.00 per month now costs $2,100.00. It’s like the blind leading the blind sometimes around here…or maybe they’re just stupid, but I think not, and they would hotly deny it themselves. In that sense, we are in agreement…so, you’re not so stupid after all.

Blind, maybe, but not stupid.

When the provincial government fails to provide rent controls on vacant units, this only makes a bad situation worse. It also fuels inflation in the housing market, what with all that turnover.

The only thing that is going to bring down the cost of housing is to build more housing, as quickly as possible and that is going to require skilled labour—and our construction industry is facing a demographic crunch that cannot be denied.

Where exactly do you plan to get all those people? The Province of Ontario is already receiving the benefit of 50 % of all immigration. They have literally fought over immigrants, ladies and gentlemen, although Quebec insists on French language skills in all new arrivals. They still wanted their fair share.

They are here to be exploited, in other words, at least for the first few years, or until they become real Canadians, or something.

It is also true that immigrants do not move to the wide-open prairies and bust some sod these days. They don’t take a freehold title in northern Ontario and begin, with axe and plow, clearing 140 acres of timber to wrest a subsistence from the land in what turns out to be a very short growing season. The land is all taken. They move to the cities, where the opportunities abound and they can be absorbed in a more cosmopolitan environment.

It takes time, decades, before they filter down to the smaller cities and towns. It will happen. It happened here, after all. At some point the immigrants arrive in Tuktoyaktuk, and one wonders what the Innu will think of that one, ladies and gentlemen…more bloody foreigners, eh.

Malthus was a mathematician studying social effects. His thinking was limited in that his model was of an agrarian society, where nothing ever changed except the level of population. He did not take into account changing technologies, and he seems to have completely missed the industrial revolution, with its explosion of productivity, which was happening all around him.

Malthus recognized goods, but failed to recognize services. Immigration, classic or internal, (province to province, for example), played no role in his calculations.

Canada is the second largest country in the world, geographically, with a relatively tiny population. How in the hell are you going to develop all that potential, without people to build the things, to consume the services, to invent new technologies, to find greater efficiencies and to become a nation greater than the sum of its parts.

That, my dears, is a series of very good questions flying in some kind of a fur-ball of aerial combat.

 

END

 

Louis, under oath before a Congressional Committee...

Government to Cap Student Visas.

Same Story from CBC. A two-year cap, due to ‘housing crunch’.

Government to Decrease Temporary Resident Population.

What Is Canada’s Immigration Policy?

Why Canada Wants to Bring 1.5 Million Immigrants by 2025. (BBC)

Ontario Receives Benefit of 50 % of International Immigration.

Malthusian Principles.

The Systematic Failure of Ontario Social Policy.

Canada, the Second Largest Country in the World. (Britannica)

The Innu.

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromAmazon.

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Thank you for reading.

In Depth. The New Landlord. Louis Shalako.

Readers will forgive us if we don't use an image of our own building.

Louis Shalako

It was Friday, May 31 when the letter was shoved through the door frame. It had my name on it, the letter inside has my name, address and the date.

It’s from the landlord. Please remove your window air conditioning unit.

Okay.

It’s not like I didn’t see you coming—

I reckon at least three or four households in this building received such letters. This is different from the annual and pretty generic folded pamphlets shoved through the door frames of every unit in the building, regular reminders when springtime rolls around.

People basically ignored it, took their chances, and the landlord took no action. Things have changed.

It’s different, in other words. Steeves & Rozema used to operate the building, but a new company, MillDon Enterprises Limited has been spun off. Essentially, S & R continues management of senior living and long term care homes, MillDon handles residential apartment buildings. It’s all the same staff and employees, they said so themselves. It might also be an attempt to deflect bad publicity from the parent company, when the renovictions begin in earnest.

I removed the a/c within ten minutes of finding that letter. Yet I suspect this is just the beginning. It’s more than just a change of style, even though their first letter, also inserted through the door frame on or about May 26, announced the change of management and also assured tenants that ‘your tenancies are secure’.

No one’s tenancies are secure, not when it’s a rent-controlled building and seven households out of thirty-one have not turned over in the thirteen or so years that I have been in this building. In a local news story, it was stated that ‘rents have doubled in six or eight years’. Well, they’ve more than doubled in thirteen.

Okay, walking down the street, we can see that some units have the snorkel visible in the window, this is from a portable air conditioning unit, often on wheels, with a flexible hose. They are more expensive and less effective than the typical window mounted units.

It is also true that the upper floor on this building has the metal sleeve, a box set into the masonry, with a grille on the exterior. In my unit, there is a cover screwed on and while it is a repository for spiders and a source of some damned cold air in winter, the even more expensive ‘sleeve-type air conditioner’ can fit in this space. My own problem, is not insoluble—or unsolvable.

(He’s just cheap. – ed.)

However one wants to say it. It’s just a question of time and money, or perhaps speed, time and distance when you figure out the machine has to come from somewhere, in some sort of a time-frame, bearing in mind we must get some kind of heat-wave, certainly at some point in the summer of 2024. Someone has to lug that fucking thing up three flights of stairs, unbox it, find the tools, and do some kind of credible job of installation. Interestingly, assuming more than one window, and the little portables seem to be good for 150 square feet, I doubt if the landlord will be saving much on the electricity. This is not about the price of electricity. This is about control.

Either we do without, or we get the portable units. Or suffer. Or try our luck elsewhere.

It’s better than lying in a puddle of sweat all night long, going days (or nights), without sleep, or dragging a mattress out onto the balcony, like the couple in Rear Window, which I suspect would also deeply aggrieve the landlord. It tends to bring down the tone of the neighbourhood, don’t you know.

***

(Updated Jun 5/24) $322.00 with tax. Kicking cold air.

In such an environment, temptation reigns supreme. If the landlord even got half of us old-timers out of the building the revenues would go up by three or four thousand dollars per month; maybe even more. This building, by my calculations, is already generating well over fifty thousand dollars a month, but another few grand wouldn’t hurt their feelings. What is that, six hundred grand a year…??? From a building that was paid off decades ago, and has been remortgaged multiple times since then, and has been, in general, a cash cow for the last fifty years…

The game will be to get complaints on the tenant. A request, one that is complied with, isn’t exactly a complaint, but that is the way that it will be presented, when the company goes to make their big play. There will be preliminary steps. They will send around a form, this one will be shoved in through all door frames. Tenants will be asked to provide current phone numbers, email addresses, license plate numbers, the names and number of family members. (Next of kin. – ed.) Your insurance policy number, they will advise you to have comprehensive insurance on your auto just in case one of their branches falls on your vehicle. Your dependents, any pets, waterbeds, aquariums, all that sort of thing.

They will determine which tenants have barbecues on their balconies and ‘request’ that they be removed. When it is time for their annual entry, which is when they change the batteries in the smoke detectors, this sort of compulsory notice is shoved in through the door frame of all units. This is when they walk through the unit and take pictures, and send them back to head office for assessment…they do have the right of inspection, ladies and gentlemen.

And I have the right to write a blog-post. I plead self-defense.

At some point they will re-issue the electronic key fobs and ask to see identification when you go to do so. They’ve already got the place wired for sound with an estimated ten to twelve cameras watching you come and go. This ties in with the tracking feature of the key fob, where they know exactly what time you leave for work in the morning and exactly what time you come home, when you take out the garbage, and also, what with a plastic card to operate what used to be coin-operated machines, now they know all about your laundry as well. They will ask if you’re growing pot on the balcony, visible to children on the street three hundred metres away…

The rentier class has all the power and all of the advantages and one must govern oneself accordingly. To lose housing is to become homeless, possibly for the rest of one’s life the way the provincial government is responding to this issue.

As for the county, they’re having another summit, even as we speak.

I have been thinking of painting my unit…but why in the hell would anyone invest any money at all, in something that would take weeks or months of effort, and a considerable amount of cold hard cash, when the odds are the landlord is looking for excuses…??? If you ask permission, it’s just one more black mark on your record. And if you just go ahead and do it, it’s just one more black mark on your record. If they say no, in writing, they can hardly complain about the paintwork, not after nine years of occupancy. If they say yes, in writing, then you’d better do a damned neat job of it and stick to approved colours. I have no doubt a little communication works better with the average landlord in such a case.

You can also see why I am conflicted. To talk to them at all, is to draw attention.

The building across the street has been vacated for one year. There is virtually no activity from contractors. The thing is basically just deserted. The thing here, is that Steeves & Rozema were at least systematically renovating and upgrading units as they were vacated, singly, one at a time, and as things went along. I would think that just leaves six or seven remaining to be done—a real provocation to the obsessive-compulsive, the sort of person who just wants to get something done, in which case I sincerely hope they are not a psychopath...

I’ve also seen the company truck in here this morning: he came around Friday morning, and later that day, the letters arrived.

Presumably, he’s just checking up on compliance.

It still has the S & R logo on the side, incidentally.

It would be difficult to justify, even to themselves, in renovicting the entire building: after all, my next door neighbours are already paying twice as much for essentially the same unit. Mine’s just a little grubby after nine years on the third floor—and four on the second floor when I first moved in. I am a smoker, I do cook, which includes frying bacon and eggs, French fries, I take showers and baths and other such things. The steam will condense on the walls, taking other airborne pollutants with it. The ventilation has never been exactly good in this old building, a bit of a problem when the heat in the building is set rather low over the winter and to open a window a crack is to essentially freeze in your bed. The same holds true in the heat of summer, up here on the third floor. That whole puddle of sweat thing. With baseboard heaters, simple convection sucks all of that up the face of the walls and some of it is going to stick, ladies and gentlemen.

Here’s my point. The fact that I have been in a rent-controlled unit or building for thirteen years is not my problem, it is the landlord’s…which makes it a problem for me after all.

The fact that there is nowhere else to go, (except Rainbow Park), and that I retire off of disability and go onto rather minimal federal pension benefits and other minor supplements in two months, is definitely my problem. The fact that depression has reared its ugly head again and every little thing feels like a punch in the guts isn’t exactly helpful. Depression is an anxiety-based condition. I would appear to have plenty to worry about, in that sense it is an environmental response to some perceived threat or trauma. 

This is our operating environment.

Click to enlarge.

I also noted this morning, that the rent payment had gone from the bank account. It had also gone up by $1.01. Okay, it’s a new company and a few glitches may be expected due to the sheer number of units, 1,000 all over southern Ontario. This is their first time, in other words. Yet nobody wants to confront the landlord over a measly dollar, and if they have decided to charge a dollar for every e-transfer, that’s another thousand dollars a month coming into company coffers, for essentially nothing. It’s not like they notified anyone about anything, they’d have to put it in writing—and guys like me are known to hang onto such things. I was just downtown this morning, and company headquarters for MillDon Enterprises Ltd. are still plastered with S & R logos. I suppose it all takes time. I’m not sure if they have a website up yet, either.

Other than that—

I plead self-defense…

I believe it was Max Webster who sang about getting used to walking the tightrope. Well, neither federal, nor especially provincial pensions, for example ODSP, have kept up with inflation, even when inflation was low. Disability has always been thirty or forty percent below the poverty line in this province. This is why seventy percent of your cheque goes to rent. The poverty line is currently over $25,000.00 per year and ODSP ain’t nowhere near that. Welfare is so much worse—that one is just a disgrace on the part of the provincial government.

I’ve been walking some kind of tightrope for thirty fucking years, ladies and gentlemen.

Also.

The inflation in the housing sector is something else—it’s just plain crazy and no wonder Rainbow Park has a line of tents several hundred metres long, all along the back fence. I have been told, but have not verified independently, that there are encampments along the Howard Watson Trail as well. The building across the street, where all tenants were evicted as of June 1/23, has been sitting empty for a full year. I haven’t seen contractors in there in months, although someone does cut the grass periodically.

Fuck.

The ability to see the future is highly-overrated. The simple truth is that it hasn’t happened yet, and it may never happen. It is also true that knowledge is power—and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Getting old ain’t exactly for wussies, what the hell I’m supposed to do about is a very good question. To sit here and live in dread isn’t exactly my idea of the so-called Golden Years.

 

END

Notes. 

Air Conditioning for Tenants. 

Can I Paint My Unit?

If the landlord really wants to push,  there is quite the backlog at the Tribunal.

Steeves & Rozema to Become Separate Operations.

Homelessness Summit Draws Front-Page Coverage, but no Conclusions, All the Usual Excuses.

(Sarnia Observer, Sarnia News Today.)

***

Community Legal Assistance Sarnia. 

Let go the line. Max Webster.

Rear Window. James Stewart and Grace Kelly. One of my top three Hitchcock films.

Backlog at Tenant and Landlord Tribunal. (CBC)

Rainbow Park. (Sarnia Journal) If the police can't evict a homeless encampment, how secure is my tenancy...???

The Cheapest Portable Air Conditioner at Home Depot.

Poor old Louis has books and stories available from Google Play in ebook and audiobook format. Click on an individual title and then click to select either ebook or audio version.

See his works on ArtPal.

The image is of Mary Nolan. 

Thank you for reading, and listening, ladies and gentlemen.