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.

Go Deep: The Systematic Failure of Ontario Social Policy. Louis Shalako.

In a kind of social horror, Louis goes deep on social policy, or so it is called...

Louis Shalako

The systematic failure of social policy in the Province of Ontario is no accident. 

That's because things are caused to happen.

It’s more than systemic, a pretty good word all on its own. It’s a little more deliberate than that. Systemic refers to those funny little provisions, built into the system, which sometimes makes some things difficult, and other things impossible. The so-called Catch-22, a wonderful story by Joseph Heller.

Systematic, means it is a bit of a lesson in applied cruelty, and this by a democratically-elected government, of whatever ideological stripe. It isn’t exactly enlightened, but it does stem from a kind of self-interest of the taxpayer kind. To claim it is a big conspiracy is to mistake its organization, for it has none. It is smugness, writ large; and its inevitable results, where the rich complain about the cost of housing, and bitch and whine about the costs of homelessness, all in one and the same breath. This situation did not come about overnight.

Our system of food banks and homeless shelters goes back at least forty years, by some accounts, although such things have always existed, in one form or another, probably since the dawn of time itself. There was a big recession, and remember when interest rates went just plain ludicrous—this would be the early to mid-eighties. When the old man went to re-mortgage the family home, the rate was over eighteen percent—and my father, a divorced parent, was scared shitless, too.

That was all so long ago.

More recently, it was Conservative Premier Mike Harris of Ontario and his ‘common sense revolution’, that struck the first and the worst blow, insofar as the present crisis of homelessness and affordability is concerned. We will talk about the impacts of ‘mental health and addictions’ some other time, although I am sure I will get to it someday.

It was in 1995, when the Province of Ontario, with the conservatives elected by a strong majority, gutted social assistance payments by twenty percent. Where the rate for a single adult had been $663.00 per month, it was reduced to $520.00 per month. Using an online ‘inflation calculator’, inflation has taken what would have cost $100.00 in 1995, up to $183.26 in mid-May of 2024. If we multiply that by 5.2, the figure would be $916.30 per month, and yet the current rate is only $733.00 per month. Welfare payments have not kept up with the rate of inflation, and in fact our current, Progressive Conservative government here in Ontario, did not give any raises to folks on disability, for the first five years of their mandate. They have not given one single raise to folks who are unfortunate enough to find themselves on ‘welfare’, social assistance.

Ah, but if we take a figure of $183.00 and multiply that by 6.63, the figure now becomes $1,215.01 per month. It’s still not a lot of money, what with the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment all across the province being much higher than that, but it would, under some circumstances, have given people a fighting chance, of at least keeping a roof over their heads. It is also true that if more people had simply been able to keep the roof they already had, over their heads, the average price of rent in this province would actually be lower—that is because, while the province does have rent controls, on buildings of a certain age, there is no rent control when a unit becomes vacant. The landlord now has the right to charge what could be called ‘market rate’, which is a fine term, useful enough, but only if we accept that things might have been different—if only the Province of Ontario had any kind of effective, or even just rational, social policy.

You're welcome to check the math.

If they had raised the rates, more people would have kept their homes—and if you, had moved within the last five or six years, into any apartment in this province, your rent would have been lower—

Ah, but you prefer to cut off your noses to spite your faces, because the ideology trumps truth, and logic, and utility, every fucking time with some of you people.

Some years later, in an interview, Mike Harris was asked about the common-sense revolution. He considered it his ‘legacy’, that within a fairly short time, unemployment went down, and had stayed down. Yet he made no mention, that it was the economy, (stupid), and not regressive social policy that had made that happen. I ought to know.

I have lived through every recession of the last fifty or sixty-plus years, although as an infant, I could hardly have been aware of such things. As an adult, it is much more up close and personal. When I was on welfare, however briefly, I was paying $450.00 per month in rent. Knock that welfare check down to $520.00 per month, and I had seventy dollars per month, for food, clothing, personal needs including soap, toothpaste, dish-soap, and quite frankly, hobbies, entertainment, were out the door. So was any hope of ‘bettering myself’ with training or education, anything that was not provided by the system. Training a guy with a broken back to become a mason’s helper, slugging 100-lb. concrete blocks, mixing mortar and wheeling that around in a wheelbarrow is simply not appropriate, and is simply not going to work—yet sending him to college or university, in order to train him, (or her), in something more appropriate, something that might actually be a viable career, was never in the cards.

What is interesting is that disability and welfare are always divided up into ‘shelter’ and ‘personal needs’ portions. The minute you lose your housing, you no longer ‘need’ that shelter portion, although the Province, so I have been told, does provide a meagre $100.00 per month ‘homelessness benefit’. Yes, you heard me right. Now you’re supposed to live on the street, feed yourself, stay off the dope and somehow, over the course of several years, without getting robbed and beaten for your money, to somehow save first and last month’s rent for an apartment you can’t afford in the first place, also bearing in mind after all of this you are sort of unlikely to do well in any sort of credit check—right???

The so-called homeless benefit mostly goes to the rich, in the form of reduced taxes.

Affordable, geared-to-income housing would appear to be a desirable thing, a ‘social good’ in every sense. Yet the County of Lambton appears to be totally incompetent to build any such thing in any appreciable numbers. When confronted by a looming crisis, the council voted unanimously to fund a five-year study. This was a cop-out by any other name, and of course the ultimate results of that study were a study in pure shamelessness.

The rich are your friends...

They’ve been spewing out this pap smear for years, and yet they haven’t succeeded in doing one damned thing about it.

Neither city council, or county council, have ever said one word about the levels of social assistance, federal and provincial disability pensions, levels of Old Age Security, Canada Pension Plan, or any other federal or provincial benefits for low-income Canadians. It’s almost like they’re afraid someone might do something about it—

If you look at the image, you will see that MillDon, recently split off from Steeves & Rozema, is charging three percent if a tenant shows up at head office to pay their rent by debit or credit card. Considering that a one bedroom unit is going for an easy $1,500.00 per month, this equates with $45.00, per month, for the privilege, of paying your rent. That is $540.00 per year, for someone just to pay the rent.

With a lack of affordable housing for working Canadians, we end up with a captive audience of renters. There is nowhere else to go. What are they going to do, especially as there is still a fair percentage of unbanked individuals, and they have to live somewhere. It’s a lot like the family doctor—so many of us simply don’t have one. Why would someone not have a bank account? There are a hundred reasons: garnished wages, child support or alimony in arrears, overdrafts, accounts frozen or sealed, unpaid fines, overdraft maxed out, service charges built up and no funds to pay—the usual sins of poverty, ladies and gentlemen, this is how folks end up taking their cheques to a payday lender, and end up hooked on that peculiar and rather predatory service.

$45.00/month, just for the privilege of paying the rent.

***

The landlord lies awake at night, wondering if they even have the nerve to try that with automatic bank payments; which don’t cost them a single damned cent. The simplest of software will tell you who has paid, and who hasn’t.

In one local development, affordable, geared-to-income development of over fifty units, a very small number of people wanted garden plots, and their wish was granted. Funny thing is, the landlord, in this case the County of Lambton, squawked about water usage, and therefore, imposed a hundred-dollar per month water surcharge, regardless of whether a household was using the vegetable plots or not. One wonders how many tomatoes one would have to grow to make it worth it to the individual user, or whether they had such plots the next year, or what the County actually did with the estimated $5,400.00 per month they gouged out of our most vulnerable citizens, (half of them dying of cancer), with that little stunt…

What I thought was interesting, was when tenants, all of whom are low income, many on disability or other benefits, had to pay for their own hot water tanks, installation and monthly fees. This is of course, over and above the one-third of income that the so-called rent is supposedly set at. One wonders what happens when a ‘client’ is evicted—where do we go from here, right.

This particular development is sort of high-end for subsidized housing, and yet the county has been unable to build anything like it since. We have, over the last ten years or so, ‘approved’ something like 2,400 housing units, many described as ‘affordable’, in Sarnia-Lambton. Some would even say 3,500, but some of those have been acknowledged to be dead in the water—which is at least honest, and one would hope that some other property developer will take that over and maybe do something—anything, with it.

Let’s not hold our breath waiting.

And I have often wondered. When the Doug Ford government imagines affordable housing, just exactly what do they see in the privacy of their own heads.

I’ll bet it’s nice.

Government: building more castles faster.

***

In the fourteenth century, the Black Plague killed anywhere from one-third to one-half of the population. The cost of labour went up. The profits of the lords of the manors fell, due to vacant lands. They had trouble getting people to work for them. The result, in legal terms, was that efforts were made to bind the serf ever closer to the land—and the master.

Naturally, it didn’t really work, and when someone who had gone to work in London, and yet found themselves disabled, they had to return to their home parish just to get poor relief, which did exist in those days. Back then, the Church provided virtually all social services outside of the military and the courts. To see the state still relying on that in modern times pretty much says it all...

The sumptuary laws literally told people what they could and could not wear. In 1 Corinthians 7:20, it says; Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.

The ruling classes, of course, took it literally—or presented it literally, for they themselves, did not feel bound by it. Basically, do not quit your job and go looking for more money somewhere else. This was the original rentier class, and they meant business—even as they plundered France and held their captives for ransom, even as they built new castles with the money they had ‘earned’ by valor in battle. In their own eyes, the very paragons of virtue. But then, that’s what they always say.

***

With the aging of the population, and a falling birthrate, it is a similar situation. The cost of labour will go up, the number of hands will go down—and the upper crust of society will do all they can to continue to exploit the labouring classes. Not the least of which, is to just plain lie to us, and still expect us to like them for it. But this is why the federal government took a gamble on an increased level of immigration. This gamble will probably pay off in the long run, in the short term, it has indeed exacerbated the housing crisis. Or, as I like to call it, the income crisis. And I am not talking about the rich when I say that.

What would happen if we all just stood here and stared at the camera...

One aspect of all this is surveillance: at some point, the landlord put cameras outdoors, and then, they put cameras indoors, and then, some time later, put in more cameras, looking up and down the hallways. They call it security. It may actually provide some, assuming it’s not the landlord and renoviction we’re worried about. This is an effort to exercise their rights—in the future, tenants may be asked to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. If you prefer not to sign such an agreement, they might prefer not to offer you a lease. It’s their right. Not so much yours. It’s that simple. Odds are, you will sign it.

Oh, and when you do leave, and if you do open your mouth and speak about some negative experience, you have violated the NDA and you can be sued for ‘damages’ in a court of law.

It’s one more attempt to control.

 

 

END

 

Go deep: a theory of local journalism.

Okay. So, local radio reports on important local news stories. Whether it’s on the air or on the website, the stories are short and shallow. This is a feature of the medium, where the attention span is assumed to be about three minutes or less—accounting for the sort of music they play as well. In the local daily, stories range from very short, up to the average, roughly five or six hundred words, and a long story is maybe a thousand. In our local monthly, the same holds true, in that ‘genuine’ news coverage, biased as it might be, is no more than five or six hundred words, and the columnists, being mostly unpaid, about the same. It is true that the major news sources, the CBC for example, have the budget and the time to do investigative reporting, analysis, the regular panel of experts commenting on one major issue of the day. It struck me that in a media environment where the tendency is to go shallow, and devote the least portion of time and resources to news coverage, (the local market in other words) a person of some journalistic bent, someone with a few gut instincts, might go deep.

A bit of background. The Sarnia Journal won a Community Journalism Award for doing just that, going deep, in their series on homelessness and addictions in this community.

Yeah, but doesn’t that just prove what I am saying?

Go deep. It’s not like I have anything to lose, or anything better to do, while I await renoviction papers and a verdict of ‘mental-health addictions’, on the front page of those very same publications, when I finally am rammed through the cracks with a fine-toothed hatchet and end up living in a tent in Rainbow park, or maybe, if I’m lucky, in a van down by the river. Since I don’t work for them, I don’t have to play by their rules. I am a private citizen, not responsible to any other person or entity besides the law and the constitution, and I will say what I want, I will write what I want, and let the chips fall where they may. I do not have any advertisers. I do not rely on donations, corporate or otherwise. We're not selling Girl Scout Cookies here, ladies and gentlemen...

Maybe that’s why they want to get me out of my house, ladies and gentlemen—or am I just being paranoid.

(His instincts are killing him. – ed.)

The funny thing is, I have been very stable these past thirty fucking years on disability, and one can only wonder just what in the hell is the matter with you people.

Would you like to know the truth? You’ve probably guessed it already.

They—or maybe even we—in a collective sense, just don’t want to spend the money, unless it’s somebody else’s money—the very socialism they profess to despise, ladies and gentlemen.

#Louis

 

The Bank of Canada’s online inflation calculator.

A Three-Dollar Calculator Cuts Through an Endless Amount of Bullshit.

Catch-22. Joseph Heller.

Catch-22 available from Russian Website. Use at own risk.

Food banks arose to fight hunger:

The Interest Rate Crunch of the ‘80s.

If you can make any sense of this, please let us know.

Lambton’s housing pap smear.

Failure of the County.

Recommended reading.

The Hundred Years War, by Desmond Seward. 

English Society in the Later Middle Ages. Maurice Keen.

Also:

Check out How to Rob a Bank, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery, by Louis Shalako on iTunes.

Thank you for reading.