Tiny Houses for the Homeless: The Big Myth. Louis Shalako.

 

The challenge of 'narrowness'.

Louis Shalako

The Myth of the Tiny Home.

 

The tiny home, certainly as a solution for homelessness, is a sorry myth, just one more lie from the sort of people who really should know better.

Their plan calls for dozens of the things in the middle of a muddy bean field out by the airport…

Yet city council seems to think it’s a good idea. The only question, is where to put them—the fact the new homelessness encampment protocol calls for one hundred metres of setback, yes, you heard that right—one hundred metres of setback, tells you just how seriously they take themselves.

...essentially, they have made any new encampment both illegal and impossible, which is the result of their own rules. So, where you gonna put that...??? If I may inquire, what does that do for the homeless encampment you already have...???

So, I downloaded a PDF of ruled graph paper, and I can print out as many sheets as I need.

Let’s take a look at the structure itself.

Drawing.

Calculated at 410 sq. ft. although interior space would be a little smaller. Based upon an 8.5'W x 20'L x 8.5'T shipping container for the base. The floor of the upper space is framed with 2" x 6" spruce studs, the floor with 3/4" ply. This doesn’t stand up to the building codes you say. Fine, but then neither do tents pitched in a public park. With framing, insulation, vapour barrier and probably 3/8" drywall in the upper floor, and a bay window, lower left, a proper 3' x 7' door, windows with screens, a skylight upper left, and provision for a stove, what's missing is a floor plan and proper hookups for sewer, water, electricity and possibly gas. It is, of course,  uninsurable. (This is where all that very useful stigma comes in.) Where you put the steps in an 8.5' wide space is very important, I reckon they'd be at least 2.5' wide, hopefully with a straight run, although there is a case to be made for a turn part way up. Simple geometry dictates that a stair that climbs 8.5' at forty-five degrees requires the same length, right.

I really ought to check the geometry. With a 12’ rise from the second floor to the peak, the upper story is a bit of a sail in a really big wind, and you need to bolt that down, rather than just throwing a few spikes in there. The presumed occupant needs to be able to climb stairs, so it’s not for the disabled or the truly elderly.

In my view, it’s better to set the shipping container on a pad of reinforced concrete, rather than just letting it sink into a mud-hole. Services like water and sewage, whether it’s a septic tank or otherwise, must be in place. The shipping container would have to be carefully placed, as the holes for services have to line up.

The challenge of the shipping container house is that the width is limited to 8.5' or you're joining two together. Once you start cutting out large sections in order to do that, the question of loading comes into play, and why didn’t you just frame it properly in the first place. Going to the 40' length merely accentuates the problem. This 410 sq. ft. concept has a kitchen, bath and living room on the ground floor, and a loft style bedroom up above. So you walk in, and the landing for the stairs has two angled steps, turn right and up you go. The upper deck is wider in order to get headroom at the top of the stairs, and to make a livable space. Looking at the end view, you see the limitation of 'narrowness'. Also, the land, the services, those are fixed costs, relatively speaking, no matter how small or efficient the structure. A local guy built a tiny home on wheels, with fridge, stove, heat, toilet, shower, electricity, wifi, big-screen TV, water tanks, and what must be very small washer and dryer. He was asking $45,000.00 and didn't seem to get too many offers. The bathroom, under the sleeping platform, can't be five feet tall. It just can't. As for offers, or lack of them, that’s because the stairs go up to within a foot of the ceiling, and once you get a mattress onto the sleeping platform, you have eleven inches of clearance and you have to get out of bed in order to turn over.

Towing that overloaded, top heavy thing down the road must have been a real nightmare.

How in the hell he got that 25 k out to Reese’s Corners is a very good question. I reckon he’ll never do it again—

...terribly narrow, right.

Services like water and sewage, city or septic, must be in place and the shipping container would have to be carefully placed on a reinforced concrete pad. The holes have to line up.

Construction trailers.

The typical construction trailer is more like 12’ wide. You can get them down a road. They are insulated, some have heat and a/c, some have a washroom and holding tanks, presumably, for water and effluents. You can plug them in and run power from a portable generator.

City council is looking into building 80 sq. ft. doghouses for the homeless. With ‘wraparound’ supports, due to all the mental health addictions and stigma. They honestly think they can build them for five grand, and will set them down in a bean field, with one hundred metres of setback from all other roads, trails, parks, schools, retail, industry, ditches, trees, groundhog dens, pretty rocks or any other sidewalk, bus stop, or other amenities such as fire hydrants, ladies and gentlemen.

There are dozens of these in a field south of town...

Shortly after the 2018 municipal elections, county council voted unanimously for a five-year study of housing and homelessness.

It was a cop-out, it bought them five years of idleness, and they did nothing with it except bloviate at various housing summits, all of which were reported on by Canadian journalists, presumably with a straight face and without puking up a little bit into their mouths and having to swallow it all back down again.

The funny thing is, you can get a used camper trailer for five or six grand. Don't worry, that won't happen either.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. A Stranger In Paris is currently free in audio format.

Council Approves Inaction Plan for Microscopic Doghouses for ‘Our Most Vulnerable’ People.

(One year from now, there will not be a single tiny home anywhere in this municipality. - ed.) 

Everybody needs a home.

Added link, (CBC Sept 22/24) Man Designs Tiny Homes. If you read the article and look at the pictures, you may see what might be a bed, very high over the kitchenette area. There appears to be a ladder leading up there. One, that ladder looks extremely dangerous due to structural weakness, and you probably don't want to fall out of bed or have that ladder break while you're climing up there. I am hoping that is a storage area, and the bed is in a more desirable location, but the pictures are limited. This is why I put a proper set of stairs up to a proper bedroom in my own design, and of course there would be a handrail, and the bed is just a bed, not a cubby eight feet off the floor.

So, in order to remove barriers to housing for our most vulnerable citizens, we ask them to climb eight feet up a vertical ladder, 90 degrees, straight up and no fucking slope at all, like Spider Man or something, and somehow clamber into and out of bed via ladder at the foot of a space which cannot be more than about thirty-two inches at its highest. Are we fucking monkey's then. Fuck off.

Nice as the colours are, this thing was clearly drawn by a member of the #bourgeoisie.

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.

Louis has some art on ArtPal.

Thank you for reading.

Opinion. Double Highway 40 Already. Louis Shalako.

The north-south axis is what's missing from this social and economic equation.

Louis Shalako

Highway 40 should have been doubled thirty or forty years ago.

It is a kind of ring road, one which with the growth of the city, would eventually bisex it.

(Bisect. – ed.)

It’s a very schizoid little highway, never quite able to make up its mind as to whether it is a four-lane, divided highway, a two-lane, provincial highway, a county road, a quiet residential street, or maybe just a death-trap and a hazard to human health. If it had indeed been doubled, many years ago, the petrochemical industry in Sarnia would have probably still suffered roughly the same decline. The difference, is that we might have had a better shot at some other kinds of industrial development, which does not depend on pipelines and tanker ships full of asphalt…which is, ironically enough, what roads are made of.

It’s not like we don’t have plenty.

The City of Windsor has a huge battery plant under construction, with a huge foreign investment, as well as billions of public money from the federal and provincial governments.

St. Thomas, just south of London, has something similar. There are auto plants in Ingersoll and Listowel. What these places have in common is the Highway 401, which leads to Detroit to the west, and presumably, all the way to Quebec to the east. It is the busiest highway in Canada. Through Toronto, is the busiest highway in the world if you can believe such statements. Sarnia is connected to London by the Highway 402, with the twin spans of the Bluewater Bridges taking traffic over the St. Clair River to Port Huron Michigan, and then it’s roughly an hour to Detroit on the American side. The bridge was opened in 1938 and was a busy corridor for war trade and production during WW II.

The Highway 40 was built to coincide with the construction of the 402. The 402 was built on acquired land, in a process which took years. Essentially, it followed a concession line, where a property on one concession butted up against the back of a property on the next concession. It was driven through the woodlots, which minimized costs and the loss of farmland. Highway 40 followed the path of Modeland Road at the north end, and then kind of hooked into the existing Churchill Road at the south end. It used existing rights-of-way. You can see the evidence of this just west of the Beehive intersection along Plank Road. The extension of Highway 40 goes south to Wallaceburg. That’s the set of stoplights right at the Ineos/Styrolutions plant, recently in the news for benzene levels. Only short stretches of the road are four lanes, divided by a ditch. The rest, for the most part, is two opposing lanes, with a speed limit of 80 kilometres per hour. That means head-on closing speeds in excess of 160-kph in the event of collision. That’s because everyone speeds a little bit, and some folks by a lot—

Then there are those stoplights, advanced green signals, and uncontrolled intersections such as MacGregor Sideroad and Scott Road. There are some concerns…

At the north end of Modeland Road, the speed limit is 50 kph, but this is well away from the high-traffic, commercial and industrial areas of the city. Chemical Valley traffic can be fast and aggressive, which I am always reminded of when I go to the smoke shack on the rez before dawn on a winter’s morn. Honestly, I should plan things a little better, I mean, it’s dark, with snow or drizzle or fog, and it’s like these people aren’t some little old man out for a Sunday drive and a carton of smokes. Quite frankly, some of you guys should get up a little earlier, leave a little sooner, and slow the fuck down—for crying out loud.

But, essentially, we have two issues. The first is Chemical Valley traffic, and the fact that the highway represents the fastest north-south axis, and then there is traffic between Sarnia, Wallaceburg, Chatham, and then on to Windsor—where all the big auto plants are, and then there is Detroit on the Michigan side. At the time of writing, the two halves of the new Gordie Howe Bridge are about to meet above the Detroit River—they’ve actually snagged the two ends together with some temporary girders while getting set up to drop the last sort of pre-fabbed bridge section into the middle…a few boxes of some really big bolts, and that puppy will be all set for the paving, one would think.

Simply doubling the Highway 40 where it is now two lanes doesn’t really solve the essential problem. The highway south of Wallaceburg is two lanes—and the route goes right through the centre of a small town, with small bridges over the Sydenham River.

It would be best to bypass Wallaceburg, and the same is true at Chatham, with the route sort of going through town and hooking up with the 401 south of the city. A technical point, I would bypass Wally-World on the east, and Chatham on the west. This is due to low, swampy ground west of Wally-World and simply shortens the distance by going to the west of Chatham.

Otherwise, there is too much two-lane, two-way road, and too much cutting through a city or a town to make it an efficient route from Sarnia to Windsor, bearing in mind the sort of trucking traffic necessary to put any kind of battery plant or EV vehicle plant in Sarnia—we’ve long missed the boat on that one. If one does consider the possibility, it makes more sense to build parts and accessories in Sarnia, and then ship them over the Bluewater Bridges, use the double-stack rail tunnel, or the 1-95 Interstate Highway to get them to Detroit. Detroit—not Windsor.

There is your conundrum. The distance from Sarnia to Detroit is simply shorter than the distance from Sarnia to Windsor. From Sarnia to Windsor, on the Canadian side, is an easy ninety minutes—by car. A big transport truck is just a lot harder to drive, and arguably, slower as a consequence. A four-lane, divided Highway 40, bypassing smaller centres, is a desirable thing in its own right, and it does open up certain possibilities, because it would eliminate one or even two border crossings, for trucking traffic between Sarnia and Detroit, or even Sarnia to Windsor using the I-94 through Michigan…two border crossings means two administrative roadblocks, as all paperwork has to be cleared, some random number of vehicles will be pulled for inspection. It means two security roadblocks, and often huge backups of traffic, at the bridge. This is especially true on holiday weekends. There have been too many accidents along that stretch of the 402, westbound, leading up to the border already. The fact that an all-Canadian route might be a little longer in terms of physical distance, balanced against the hurdles of a double bridge crossing, is a kind of economic and social equation, in which we measure the costs versus the benefits. I see it as economically strategic. The east-west axis is served well enough, it is the north-south axis that has been missing for many years.

An obvious first step would be to double the Highway 40 from Lambton College to South Indian Road. The obvious second step would be to double the highway all the way to Wallaceburg. This could be done in two to three short sections, as the budget and the season allows. Traffic would be slowed by construction, but only for the summer months, and quite frankly, it’s slow enough already. Four lanes all the way would alleviate that and bring important economic benefits all along the line, including Wallaceburg, Chatham and points in between.

There are some other projects which might tie in, just as the original Highway 402 and the Highway 40 tied in with each other, at the time.

It has always baffled me as to how we expect to attract new industry to Chemical Valley, when South Vidal Street is in such poor shape in relative terms. There’s all kinds of industrial space along there, and yet Vidal Street is the first thing prospective buyers see when they go to look at a potential industrial site.

Also, as long as we’re looking at building roads, why not extend Wellington Street all the way to Blackwell Sideroad, which would also require upgrades. This can be seen as an alternative or emergency route when the next big accident closes the Highway 402 and traffic is backed up way out to the airport or even further. This would only be used by heavy trucks in an emergency, but the road surface would be engineered with this type of occasional duty in mind.

It would also tend to take the east-west load off of London Line/Exmouth Street, when people just need to bypass the bottleneck and get to the other side of the city. The only other east-west roads that cut through the entire town would be Lakeshore Road, Michigan Avenue, and Confederation St, with Confederation the only one rated for heavy vehicles.

Anyhow, it’s something to think about. As for the provincial government, they’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

The time to act is now.

 

END

 

A Brief History of Highway 40.

Council Seeks Widening of Highway 40.

MP Says $25 million Sewer Upgrade all That’s Needed.

Windsor Battery Plant 30 % Complete. (CTV)

Honda Commits to Four Ontario Plants in EV ValueChain.

Ineos/Styrolutions to Close.

Highway 402. (Wikipedia)

Highway 40. (Wikipedia)

The New Highway. An excerpt from My Criminal Memoir, available for free as an audiobook from Google Play.

The book on Google Play.

St. Thomas to See Population Surge.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

 

 

Digging Deep. Approvals Are Nothing. Shovels in the Ground Are Everything. Louis Shalako.

This building is under construction at 1550 Venetian Boulevard, Pt. Edward, Ontario.

Louis Shalako

Approvals are Nothing. Shovels in the Ground Are Everything.

Locally, approvals for housing developments of all kinds add up to either 2,400, or even 3,500, depending on who you ask, or maybe just in how we choose to define them. Yet there are very few shovels in the ground. Some of the approvals go back so many years, they have been forgotten.

So, how many affordable, geared-to-income units has the County of Lambton built in the last twelve months? Three, ladies and gentlemen…just three. Habitat for Humanity is doing a better job than that, although mere charity can never be a solution for low-cost housing. It doesn’t even work that well for poverty…

The former Bayside Mall was successfully demolished, and a new building put up for Shared Services and the Ministry of Community and Social Services. Driving by, at some point, one began to wonder at the lack of progress. The Covid-19 pandemic put a hold on a lot of projects. But this one never started up again. No further work has been done, and an announcement has been made that the whole thing is off, whether that is temporary or permanent is a good question. It’s a big, flat area in the middle of downtown, and nothing is happening there.

Affordable, Geared-to-Income Indigenous Housing at 940 Confederation St. has been delayed due to unexpectedly high construction costs. (40 units)

St. Demetrios Church on Murphy Road has hit a roadblock due to funding program changes. (Up to 46  units)

Former Devine St. School to become senior’s housing.(100 units)

An elected official has stated that there was a change in ownership. Whether that means the land or the company have been sold, or whether one or more partners walked away, is unclear.

Former St. Peter’s School to become senior’s housing.(104 units)

Former High Park Church to become affordable housing. (20-23 units)

Housing eyed for former St. Paul’s Church in Sarnia. (Unknown number of units)

Developer has plans for the historic Central United Church. (10-15 accessible units)

Out of the Cold Program to utilize Laurel Lea Church on Exmouth Street. This is a winter-seasonal homeless shelter, with a possible plan for further affordable housing.

So, Kathleen St. has been proposed as the site of some new development for affordable housing. The city owns the land—unfortunately, the county is in charge of social housing, which means that it won’t get built anytime soon, no matter how much fair, impartial and objective news coverage it appears to receive. (50 units)

The city has or is giving away an underused parking lot on Victoria Street, again, the county will be responsible for actually building it. I have a funny feeling that one ain’t going to happen anytime soon. Mayor Mike Bradley, seconded by Councilor Bill Dennis, both members of county council entered a motion challenging Lambton County Social Services to complete any project within eighteen months. This may relate to the council’s response to a request for a study of putting washrooms at Rainbow Park. (See below.)

The county’s project, Maxwell Place, has some serious problems. The project, affordable, geared-to-income housing for vulnerable senior citizens is stalled for the second time. Holes were excavated, foundation work was done. One day all the contractors went home and nothing has been done since. Apparently, the county is looking for a contractor willing and able to complete the project. Which won’t happen as long as litigation is before the courts. Also, people aren’t talking, this is especially true with the possibility or likelihood of litigation before the courts. Another fine mess, whether that has anything to do with the prefab construction methods or what is unknown, however the upper structural modules are said to be in storage locally… (24 units)

So county council, in what appears to be a misinterpretation, refused to put in ‘washrooms’ at the Rainbow Park homeless encampment, when really, portable johns would appear to be desirable as an interim measure. According to Mr. Agar, ‘a city park and a city homeless encampment is a city problem’, I might have had a little more sympathy if the county could actually complete a project of almost any sort, in any sort of time frame, and at almost any sort of cost—

When county council voted pretty much unanimously to fund a five-year study on homelessness and affordable housing shortly after the 2018 election, that was a dead giveaway. And, of course, they can’t do anything until the study is completed, which it was. And it was the most wishy-washy, most waffling sort of document that has been seen in many years around here, with plenty of talk about leveraging synergies and shifting paradigms, and identifying core areas of need, assessing individual requirements and designing one-size-fits-all living spaces, (unless there's something different about you), and partnerships, and stakeholders, and consultations—they can never get enough consultations with stakeholders, ladies and gentlemen. Oddly enough, the only stakeholders not invited are the ones who are actually supposed to live in these places, assuming they ever get one built. In that sense, it’s like the ‘consultations’ undertaken before the legalization of recreational cannabis: the only people who never got to speak were the very people who were supposedly to benefit from said legalization. I may be exaggerating slightly, but I think not—

There are some success stories.

Bayfront is one of a small number of local success stories. It can hardly be described as affordable, even so, it does tend to take the pressure off of other apartments and condominiums in the local area. Presumably, the tenants/lessees aren’t all that interested in home ownership per se, and here, at least on the river side, you have views of the water. Clearly, the tenants can afford to pay the rent.

The Addison is a newly built apartment tower, the property once housed what used to be a grocery store and a department store. It is ‘relatively affordable’, yet no one on disability or welfare could afford even a one-bedroom, even if they had a partner, bearing in mind clients of ODSP lose all or a portion of their ‘shelter portion’, if they attempt to share housing costs. I told the Ministry that this tended to cause homelessness many, many years ago. (They don't care. - ed.) This sort of thing is ‘baked in’ to the legislation. The social workers can’t do much about that, and for governments, Liberal or Conservative, it seems to create some sort of mental block. The result, is that they might study it endlessly, but no one has the guts to take that one big step, which would result in a total, ground-up, nuts and bolts revision of the guidelines. The real problem, is that it costs money, the government is responsible to the taxpayers, and the NIMBYs and nay-sayers are all over the place. They’re down on the riverbank, burning a candle in order to raise awareness of the stigma…etc, etc, etc, and getting some good front-page coverage while doing it.

Looking southeast, London Rd. and Christina St.

The former Sarnia General Hospital Site sat empty and derelict for some years after closure. Homeless people and others were breaking into the site and stealing copper wire, piping, anything that they could turn into a dollar. It was a nightmare for the neighbours, police and the city. The city eventually paid to have it taken down, turned it over to private enterprise, and at least there is semi-detached housing along Elgin Street, and a pair of low-rise towers are presently under construction. They have progressed to the point of brickwork on the exterior, doors and windows are in, one would assume interior finishing work is progressing. What the actual rent scale will be is unknown. The city paid $5.4 million for demolition and the developers paid $1,000.00 for a property estimated at a value of $1.4 million. One hell of an incentive, but maybe that’s what it takes these days.

A development of approximately 154 detached homes is slated for a parcel of land along London Line. A model home appears to have been built. Yet high-end or luxury housing is not going to solve the problem of affordability in this town, this county, or anywhere else in this country. This end of the market really does rely on market forces, rather than any great subsidies from multiple levels of government. This market exists—and the customer can afford to pay the mortgage.

Here’s the County’s own Report Card, in which they give themselves all A’s.

Looking northeast from the same intersection. Churches make bad housing, except for God.

There is a supportive housing thing on London Road. In a recent news story, there were only a small number of at-risk youth in residence. The folks that built it had $1.2 million of their own money to contribute. The money came to some extent from their success with Emergency 401 or something like that.

Here is a proposed combined detached/townhouse development in Petrolia, which seems logical enough as it relies on market conditions and customer demand. It requires some rezoning, which will quickly be granted. This story was published June 6/24. Yet, even if it happens, it does take some time for ‘shovels in the ground’ and the project to come to fruition.

Point Edward Apartment Takes Shape Quickly.

Brush Cleared for Housing in Point Edward.

Former Holmes Foundry Lands Planned for Development.16 Acres in Total.

Poor people study the sports pages. Rich people study the interest rates. The Bank of Canada has just lowered the rate from 5 % to 4.75 %. There are institutional lenders, then there are institutional borrowers. OPM, ‘other people’s money’, a bit of a mantra among entrepreneurs. As my grandfather would have said, don’t bet the farm on it. Very few corporations have a couple of hundred million laying around, just waiting to be thrown at a housing development. This is not like the stock market, where you can make multiple trades a day, totalling in the millions, and perhaps make a quick profit—or a quick loss. There is a time lag. Nothing happens quickly in this industry, and sometimes nothing ever happens at all, even with ‘approvals’. The bigger the project, the longer the time lag. A new development takes time to build, it takes time to sell it out and fill it up, and it takes time to recoup that investment. The real professionals are looking at the ‘split’, how much does it cost to borrow, interest paid, and how long does it take to pay it off—and how long does it take before the development produces a profit for the shareholders. The split is between income and outgo—a word I may have just invented.

When the conditions are right, building and development will begin anew. Until then, not much joy.

Time for analysis. This is where we compare apples, oranges—and green bananas, which as we are all aware, go bad fairly quickly…

First the commonalities. The successful projects were private ventures. Some of the unsuccessful ones were also private ventures. In an assumption, the successful projects had funding secured, arguably, before the pandemic, and before the interest rates started really climbing. Inflation played some role, bearing in mind the Bank of Canada rate was raised from a nominal .25 % up to 5 %, all of which happened in a very short time. However, if you and your bank had signed a contract, and approved your funding at a given rate, the bank will honour that contract unless it is time-limited. Use it or lose it, in other words.

Some, but not all of the unsuccessful projects may not have had their funding secured. They may not have had funding at all, relying on government grants and low or zero-interest loans. Some of those programs were also time-limited. Any government program has only so much funding. It is first come, first served with some of these programs.

Some of the ‘unsuccessful’ projects may not have been the result of serious intention. If you’re trying to interest buyers in your property, the fact that you have perhaps gotten some variance in the zoning or other bylaws, the fact that some pie-in-the-sky project has been approved by a municipal or county council, might carry some weight with potential purchasers.

Some of the even more unsuccessful projects may represent fantasy more than reality. This especially applies to old churches. The congregation may no longer be able to support the costs of such a building, and the mother church may have gone bankrupt.

Yet they hate like hell to see the thing torn down as well. It’s a perfectly good building and a perfectly good cause, right?

In a previous story, I discussed the difficulty of converting the classic 1960s elementary school to housing, and the issues sort of double or triple if the thing is multi-story, for example the old SCITS here in Sarnia, on Wellington Street. Some folks thought it was a no-brainer for affordable housing. Assuming relatively low rents as ‘affordable’ any economic case, not even for profit, just to keep the building going over the longer term, is unsustainable. Affordable rents do not cover the costs of an unaffordable building.

Locally, several of the churches listed above are huge, very old-fashioned structures. They might even be described as beautiful in their own way. Some of them are historic, but only the bats and the chimney swifts really want to live in that big belfry on the end of the building. The rest of the place represents one big, tall, vast space. That space has no supporting structure. To divide that up into floors will require that structure to be put in place. So now, you’re figuring out how to dig foundations deep into the ground. At the very least, you need to get a backhoe into the building…

The writer is not an engineer, what he does do is to ask questions—or maybe just run a few thought experiments. The writer spent much of his life in construction, and structures are not entirely unfamiliar.

Some very nice people are talking about fundraising. At the risk of being rude or insulting, you can’t fund such a project within any sort of time-frame by running bake-sales or charity bingo games.

(Otherwise the Canadian Armed Forces would be doing it. – ed.)

What they are looking for is public funding, or some rather large donations. Yet the government is not unsophisticated when assessing such requests. Neither are the large donors, and not too many people have ten or twelve or more millions laying around, and if they did, you are really going to have to impress them. You are really going to have to make a case, a good case, for that particular building. So far, this has been unsuccessful.

These are the green bananas, going off rather quickly.

There are actually a few shovels in the ground here in Sarnia-Lambton. The skilled trades, the professional contractors, are the only people who can make things happen in the sense of construction and renovation, and they will go where the money is. For the most part, that is private money, paid by professional developers. Any contracting business runs on money. The skilled trades do not work on charity. They have their own homes, families and their own mortgages to feed.

Update: the county has just offered to buy St. Bartholemew Church, which is in the north end of this city. This may be a bit of a revenge ploy on the part of county, as the NIMBYs and naysayers will be freaking out at the thought of poor people moving into the neighbourhood, bringing down property values. This is where that good old stigma rears its very useful head. Essentially, in this scenario the county looks good and the city will be revealed for what it is. This is why they simply must mention mental health and addictions in any news story of poverty, homeless and disability. There will be endless rounds of consultation, site plans, and there is many a slip between the crouch and the leap, as my old sabre instructor used to say...

Also. I mentioned that some of these approvals go back so many years, they have been forgotten. I had forgotten this long-term care development. It doesn't really fit the definition of affordable housing, except that the elderly are people too. This story dates back to May 3, 2021, where the city sold the land for $250,000.00 and the plan is to replace Sumac Lodge. This land is three kilometres from the original site, which is still open. The site had been shut to new admissions, pending health and safety repairs and upgrades. Also, three years have gone by.  Driving by on the way to work, the location of this land is sort of difficult to confirm, although there are open areas in between homes and businesses.

 

Louis spells councillor with one 'L', my dears.

END

Analysis: Turning Federal Buildings into Affordable Housing. Louis Shalako.

Louis has books and stories available from Google Play in ebook and audiobook formats.

Louis has some art and stuff on Fine Art America.

Note. Louis spells councillor with one letter ‘L’. Other than that, he really is quite all right. – ed.

 

Thank you for reading, and listening.