What is an Accessible Home. Analysis by Louis Shalako.

Knee room under all surfaces...

 

Louis Shalako

What would an accessible dwelling look like.

What if a person were in a wheelchair, what if they were blind, what if they were deaf.

What if they were just small and frail.

Where I live, it is a three-floor walk-up. Only the ground floor is accessible to a wheelchair user, and only from the back parking lot. A person in a wheelchair could enter the building through the back door, which appears to be wide enough. Individual units, on the ground floor, have relatively wide doors from the hallway. Once you’re in the door, it is a slightly different story.

My own apartment entrance has a little strip to keep out drafts. One side is the carpet of the hallway, and one side is the tile in the apartment. It’s a half an inch high, across the doorway, and one would hope that someone in a wheelchair could surmount this little hurdle, and actually get into their apartment and maybe even close the door behind them.

***

My friend Jerry was deaf. He was able-bodied, he was able to work. He could afford an apartment, the only trouble was, he could not hear…he had a special set-up, and this was back in the 1990s. When the phone rang, a naked light bulb in a small table lamp, set beside the television, would light up. The doorbell was rigged the same way, or friends and family never would have gotten in without a key.

When the landline phone rang, Jerry picked it up and put it in a cradle. He hit a switch.

He pulled a keyboard over, and used the remote to change the channel on the TV. Since he could not hear, a ‘scrambler’ sort of thingy turned the words into text that he could see on screen, and so could I, sitting there in the living room. I watched as he talked to his mother on the phone…

Jerry was quick on the keyboard, although the spelling wasn’t so good. Deaf people have one hell of a time getting any kind of education, and that is just the truth…the black box beside the television did one other thing, it put closed captions on every show, every channel, the code embedded in the signal right from the broadcaster.

This was a big thing at the time—

Jerry spoke fairly well, although a lot of people just assumed he was ‘retarded.’ Deaf people get no audio feedback—they can’t hear themselves talk, and this affects their pronunciation. Jerry did not have an inside voice, or an outside voice. He had one voice for all circumstances. Jerry owned a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and he rode it to work in the summer months. He was unusual, for the Harley owner. Jerry didn’t pull the baffles from the exhaust system to make it louder. What would have been the point. He was never going to hear it anyways, but as for accessibility, his apartment really didn’t require a lot of expensive modifications, and what little help he needed came from some sort of government program for the deaf. Which is terribly nice of the government, and the taxpayers, when you think about it. A lot of it comes from charitable donations to foundations for the deaf and all of that sort of thing. We have traditionally underfunded all such programs, and you don’t mess lightly with people’s traditions…

***

Jerry was deaf, but he could at least keep a job.

In my science-fiction story, The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue, Mister Scott Nettles is blind. When I was engaged in writing the book, I turned off all the lights, I closed all the curtains. When I closed the bathroom door, it was pretty dark in there, and I had to wonder how a person maneuvers their way around without vision. The fears of falling in the shower, or tripping over the cat—this is why Scott, lonely as he is, doesn’t have one—I suppose we can all empathize with the challenges of daily life, for surely we all have them in our own degree. A blind person might have a big problem with a simple touch-screen, which the rest of us take for granted.

I wondered how a person finds their way around town, how do they shop, how do they find anything in the cupboards. Scott lives in a major city on the eastern seaboard of the United States, in a slightly-dystopian future, and one wonders just how people do it sometimes…

If you want to try the experiment, wait until nightfall, put on a pair of cheap sunglasses, and feel around in the cupboards for the spare bottle of ketchup. Bend over in complete darkness and rummage around in the bottom of the fridge for a couple of carrots, and then the kitchen drawer to find the vegetable peeler. What would it be like to cook your dinner in complete darkness.

A story really ought to have a point, it makes it so much more interesting for the listener. That is right out of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, with Steve Martin and John Candy.

The point is, is that there is a difference between supportive housing, which all the ineffectual do-gooders are talking about these days, and accessible housing, which also includes the ability to pay the rent. Supportive housing is where the social workers knock on the door of your eight by twelve and remind you to take your meds—or maybe to stop taking your other meds…and it’s only another eighteen months before you get into rehab and while we’re at it, can we slap a tourniquet on that terrible boiling abscess on your face where you burned yourself toking meth off a bit of tinfoil and flaming that with a high-end butane lighter…???

Oh, and how is that special ointment we gave you, and is that helping to remove the stigma of mental health. We’d like to put that on the front page of the newspaper. Do you have enough Nalaxone kits on hand? ‘Cause we give them out free, in a clump of bushes, down by the riverbank…

***

Hates his kitchen...

My kitchen is small enough that I have come to hate it. I bitch, and whine, and piss and moan something awful, problem is, I’m too broke for fast food and too lazy to go to the soup kitchen. I just fucking hate it in there, but there’s no alternative. There is no way in hell that a person in a wheelchair could do very much of anything on their own. This ignores the fact that this is a third-floor apartment. The bathroom, if anything, is worse. Never mind bars and grips and handholds, there just isn’t enough room to even get the chair into the room, let alone get out of it, and onto the toilet or into the bath or shower.

Gut instinct says you’d have to triple the floor space of the bathroom, at a minimum, that’s just for the chair, and more likely quadruple the square footage of the kitchen. This at least allows a person to turn the wheelchair around…otherwise, if you think about it, you either have to back up and start again, or go out the other end, circle back around through some other room, presumably, and come back in the door again. People would have to be able to reach things, and bending myself in half to grab an onion out of the bottom of the fridge doesn’t even get close to the physical challenges of sitting in a chair, with armrests and a footrest, and reaching down or up or just plain into, just about any storage space.

Then there’s the whole boiling-water thing, and cooking on a hot surface, or in an oven sort of challenge. This is where simple clearance between the knees and the arms of the chair comes into play, and there has to be an open space below pretty much anything, in order to even get close. Rinsing the peanut butter off of a knife begins to take on a whole new meaning.

The fridge or stove in this apartment, could not have cost $500.00 when new. Appliances for the wheelchair user are far, far more expensive. So is that additional square footage, whether it is additional to the living unit, or whether something designed into a standard footprint has to give something up somewhere else, is a question of decisions—everything has a cost, one way or another.

We are asking a landlord or developer, to build in some appreciable percentage of accessible housing units, in any proposed development, or a major renovation of an existing housing unit. We’re asking them to do it, because someone has to do it.

***

In this building, the first floor is at ground level. A similar building across the street, has the ground floor three feet down below grade. Either way, it represents certain challenges. In this building, the lobby is five feet above street level. The east end also has a porch. In order to get in the front door, one has to navigate a sidewalk, five or six steps up, a small porch, an outer door, and an inner door, and now you are in the lobby. In order to get out of the lobby, you need to go either five feet down, a few steps, (to the ‘ground’ floor), where there is another door, or up one or two flights to the upper floors, each of which has its own door for fire code compliance.

The best place to retrofit an elevator, is in the lobby, which is two stories high. Above that is the one bachelor unit in this building. The elevator would have to have a structure above the roof, in order to install the hoisting gear. Having given up one unit in terms of income, cutting holes and putting in supportive structures, the cost to make above-ground units accessible is likely to be unattractive to for-profit housing providers. That is not to say that it could not be done.

In a recent survey, twenty-seven percent of Canadians identified as having some element of disability. We have to determine what small percentage constitutes blind people, deaf people, people with mobility issues, including wheelchair users, and then there is a whole spectrum of other disabilities which presumably, don’t require so much physical adaptation in the design of affordable housing units. At the far end of that spectrum would be padded cells and bars and cages and all of that sort of thing…that’s a subject for another day.

***

#screenshots

A serious diabetic may not be able to earn a living, without serious supports, and a person with Down’s syndrome may be ‘physically able’, and still require supportive housing, without fitting into any other stereotype or other negative categorization of a self-serving nature, ultimately resulting in some sort of cop-out or other on the part of the taxpayers, who will surely have to invest to some degree or face the consequences, for example tent encampments in parks downtown…by folks you, yourselves, cheerfully admit are kind of disabled by all this mental health and addictions stuff all over the front page.

***

The balcony. In this building, the patio doors all have a six-inch sill. On the ground floor, this keeps water out in high winds and heavy rain. It also means that someone in a wheelchair would either need one hell of a ramp inside, and the balcony is so small that a corresponding ramp is impossible outside, or we have to remove the sills and put the patio door right at deck level—in which case now we have the possibility of rain coming in through the bottom of the door. In the case of fire, the hallways filled with smoke, it might be nice to be able to get out onto the balcony, sit there and wait for rescue.

It’s just one more thing, one more consideration, one more design headache, all of which adds to cost, time and complexity, in any project, whether it’s a new build or a ‘major renovation’. There is a solution, one which requires some flexibility of thinking. What if, in units designated ‘accessible’, the patio or balcony door has a threshold that is as low as possible, and in all other units, the developer can keep the high sill, in order to address questions of wind and rain. It does take something away from standardization, where every unit has the exact same door. Standardization is not the be-all and end-all of good design. You have to give up one thing in order to get another. It’s a compromise.

***

This building was 'renovicted' and all tenants have been out since about the end of May last year. There has been sporadic and intermittent activity. We have not seen contractors here in some time...there are a few lights on in the building, and you can see refrigerators standing through the windows, pulled out from the wall but not disposed of or anything like that. One wonders what the game is...here's a thing. There is a shutdown going on at Suncor. Union members, who might very well moonlight in the off season and between jobs, would prefer to work the union job, for thirty to fifty dollars an hour, rather than twenty or twenty-five dollars an hour for some scab employer. There is a labour shortage by all accounts. There may have been cash-flow or financing problems. We simply don't know. Not too far away, there was a small fire, involving one or two units, and some smoke damage. That landlord is currently appealing fines of $35,000.00 per count, for unlawful practices in locking tenants out.

How in the hell does a guy in a wheelchair get into bed? Do they all order food for delivery, do they live on fast food and twelve-dollar delivery charges? You’d better have money, and a high-end phone with the ability to do that. You have to have the app, right.

Otherwise, you starve.

How do you convince a landlord or developer that there will be sufficient demand, for space devoted to accessible units, and that the tenants will be able to sustain those units, over any measurable period of time, in order to get some return on investment, in a manner which will make that investment worthwhile. When they move out, who moves in, or do you have to renovate again?

This all applies to small bungalows, laneway suites, garage conversions, and granny-type secondary housing units in residential areas. They are either accessible, or they are not.

If a person cannot earn the income, where does the money come from? We find ourselves in the predicament where we’re putting a million dollars of the taxpayers’ money into an apartment, geared-to-income, with a forty-seven year waiting list, and the tenant is paying one-third of their $733.00 welfare payment for the privilege of having an accessible roof over their heads and still lining up at food banks, soup kitchens, and this is what it costs to get them out of a tent down in a park on the waterfront. This is what happens when folks, through no fault of their own, are unable to maintain regular and renumerative employment, to borrow a definition from the Ontario Disability Support Program.

If supportive housing is impossible enough, then accessible housing is even more impossibler.

END

Notes. The building across the street, where dozens of households were renovicted about June 1/23, is still deserted. I haven’t observed contractors on the site in quite some time. One wonders what’s going on there. Then there is the building on Earlscourt. There was a fire which damaged a unit, caused smoke damage in several others, and the owner evicted fifty something households due to ‘safety concerns’. One wonders if this ‘major renoviction’, where the owner is currently appealing a series of $35,000.00 fines, can show any evidence of conforming to Province of Ontario law regarding accessible housing.

Accessible bathrooms in new construction and major renovations: The next time we get a mass renoviction in this town, hit them with this: major renovations must include accessible bathrooms, accessible kitchens, storage, laundry and all other amenities in equal measure.

While pricing shall be commensurate, within affordable guidelines, it will not be predatory or discriminatory.

How to design an accessible bathroom:

Accessible appliances as per the Americans with Disabilities Act:

Accessible housing, Wikipedia entry:

How much to put an elevator in a (new) three-story building:

Nowhere to Go: The Brenchley St. Renoviction, (Sarnia Journal).

Groundbreaking Fines for Locking Out Tenants, (Sarnia Observer).

Here is the free audiobook of The Mysterious Case of Betty Blue.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles. (Wiki)

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Serving the Higher Goddess. Geoff Lane, Radio, Television and Journalism Arts Instructor. Louis Shalako.

Geoff Lane and student Corey McCrindle in the newsroom.

Louis Shalako

 

LANE, Geoffrey Helliar - Peacefully at his residence on Tuesday, August 28, 2012, Geoff Lane passed away at the age of 83. Beloved husband of Ilse Lane (nee Knight). Loving father of Stephen Geoffrey Lane and Marcus Ashley Lane. Cherished grandfather of Morgan Ashley Lane and Zachary Andrew Lane. Geoff was a dedicated family man, journalist, educator and sailor who delighted in taking family, friends and students on his sailboat. He was passionate about world affairs, communications and the world of nature. 

A simple obituary, in twenty-five words or less, can tell you an awful lot, and at the same time, virtually nothing, about a man’s life.

I know so little about him. It seems presumptuous to write about Geoff, and yet he had a huge influence, on my life to some degree, and so many others, but also to my attitudes and my way of looking at things. Facts, in particular.

In a recent column for First Monday, veteran journalist Dan McCaffery mentioned Geoff Lane, Lambton College and the RTJ, (Radio, Television and Journalism Arts) course, where he attended in 1971 according to the story. Lambton College was officially dedicated in 1969, and there is in fact a cornerstone marking that occasion.

It is unclear to me if Geoff created the RTJ program from scratch. If so, he would have had help. In the very first year they would have had teachers for Broadcasting, Graphic Arts, Photography, English 101, and they would have all had to work together in order to have everything ready for that first class.

Geoff came to Sarnia from the Detroit Free Press. He was the editor of the Sarnia Observer for many years. He was very British. Yet I can’t say for sure where he was born. I do not know where he was educated—one can almost assume it was not Oxford or Cambridge, to say that he studied at an industrial college in London or somewhere in the heartlands would only be a set of assumptions. I would like more information than that.

As for why someone would emigrate from the U.K., that is somewhat easier to guess.

After the Second World War, Britain was bankrupt. Unemployment would have been high. A real block to employment for the young and inexperienced would have been created by the demobilization of hundreds of thousands of service men and women. It takes time to switch from tanks and aircraft to consumer goods. It takes time to pay off a huge national debt. It took time to create the modern social welfare state, in the meantime, things were not very good. The motivation would have been there. This was a disciplined young man, and one must also assume that as a young person alive during WW II, Geoff would have been reading the daily papers. He would have listened to the BBC on the radio, sitting around in the front room with the rest of the family…all of this would have been up close, and very, very personal when V-1 buzz bombs are falling down from the sky.

It was not something you could ignore, and we might also consider the likelihood that all the male figures in his life had served. He had a lot to live up to, if you take my meaning.

This is pure speculation on my part. I have no real facts. Memory is a reconstructive process, and it is hardly accurate in that sense.

But. You don’t edit the local daily without some strong element of self-control. Geoff had a story, he probably told it to every first-year class he taught. He had been in the Royal Army. It was 1948, in Palestine, and he was part of a detachment of troops detailed to escort the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem down to a ship in Haifa harbour, which would take him to safety in Cyprus or somewhere. It was a dangerous time. The situation was fraught with danger, what with the creation of an Israeli state, with Arab and Jewish terror gangs, and the U.K. troops slated to withdraw. This kind of experience, military experience, is one of the keys to understanding his character. He was there, it was a part of history, and it was the birth of a nation, for better or worse, one which still dominates the headlines of today.

It was an important story, and that is why he told it.

A modern college or university newsroom...

Did Geoff love his students? Dumb question, but I think he just loved people. You have to have a reason to choose journalism as a career, and that one’s a big plus. It was a kind of service. In December of 1983, knowing that I was having money problems, Geoff went to the Bursar’s office and came back with a cheque for $500.00. My old man was so impressed, he gave me $500.00 for Christmas so that I could stay in school.

That only lasted so long, and at the end of January, Geoff made a couple of phone calls.

A weekly in Dresden was looking for a reporter, and I drove down there, and showed the editor a few samples of my work. All of which came from the Lambton Leader, the student newspaper published by the good old RTJ program. Well, they couldn’t really use me, (I had zero experience), but the gentleman made a couple more phone calls…Ted Cranston, the publisher of Cash Crop Farming Publications, would give me an interview. First thing Monday morning. Located in Delhi, Ontario, they had three weekly papers and two or three small industrial magazines. The rest is history, and this story really isn’t about me. A journalist does not inject himself into the story. It’s not all about me, in other words.

Anyhow, chalk one up for the old boy network.

Trouble is, there’s more. On our class trip, the whole bunch of us boarded a couple of passenger vans and headed for Detroit. Our first stop was to watch a taping of Kelly and Company, a syndicated local production of Channel 7, WDIV as I recall. It was a live audience. At some point, it was giveaway time. We were told to check the number under our seats. Mine was Number 51. And I had won a gift certificate from Hudson’s, a high-end department store, for a Seiko watch, valued at $140.00 U.S., in 1983 dollars no less. So, Geoff takes the whole darned busload to a store in Southfield, Michigan, where I ran in, got my watch, and ran out, and then it was a quick stop at the Renaissance Centre, running around, riding the elevators, and goggling like tourists, (or school kids), and then over the bridge to Windsor, where we toured the Windsor Star among other places. Yeah, when they called my number, the co-host, Marilyn Turner, came over. I stood up and told her I was part of a group from Lambton College…and it was, quite a group, as a ragged cheer rose up through the crowd and kids were chanting ‘Louis…Louis…Louis…yay’.

I guess maybe that’s why Geoff did it—that and a few other reasons, one must suppose.

Where did Geoff meet Ilse? Did they emigrate at the same time, or did they meet in North America. If nothing else, these are good questions. How did they end up in Detroit, how did they decide to come to Sarnia. Why did Geoff leave the Observer? My instinct, rather than my recollection, is that the paper changed hands, in which case a change of management, editorial and otherwise, would be de rigeur for any new owner…

Geoff would have been editor while Lambton College was being built. The whole community college thing was a new initiative, and would have been front-page news when Sarnia had a population of 50,000 people, not counting Point Edward and the old Township of Sarnia. It would be an opportunity, and then there is that sailboat. Teachers have the whole summer off, and he had a young family…the man was nothing if not intelligent.

Journalism is the first draft of history, and Geoff certainly knew that. There is also that work-life balance, and he knew that too.

One of our first assignments was to pick a story from the daily news and write our own version of it. I picked a story of a ship collision in the St. Clair River. I don’t think too many people phoned first-hand sources, no one went around with their camera and got their own head-and-shoulders shots. It was September or October and we were a bunch of first year students. With several local papers and radio stations, the evening news out of Windsor, London, Detroit and Toronto, the basic facts were clear enough…I don’t recall too many of the details, perhaps it was the name of a ship or the captain or whatever, but something struck me, and I wrote it as a humorous story. Geoff hauled me aside the next day, and politely informed me, “We don’t make fun of death and destruction.”

That’s fair enough. I had never seriously considered a career as an anchorman on the evening news. Unlike some of the other males, I wasn’t too interested in being a DJ on the radio—those guys mostly dropped journalism within three weeks, even though writing for the news and having some regard for factuality might have been helpful in the local radio industry. The daily grind of community journalism is more work than play, (I suppose I could have done it), but the truth is, I just wanted someone to teach me how to write a story. I wanted to write books, and the RTJ program was at least something—it was at least relevant, and if nothing else, you get paid a little money to go to school and then you have a reason, to write a story. There is also someone who will read it, and a bit of feedback from someone other than your mother is extremely helpful. Geoff knew that about me—he told me once, “You need to get some criticism from someone who doesn’t love you—”

I grinned and nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. It wasn’t exactly an unspoken message. He wasn’t all that interested in reading my fiction, ladies and gentlemen.

Can’t say as I blame him for that.

He had a saying.

“Check your sources.”

Marc's Facebook page is not very active, but we have reached out and may get more info.

If you are covering a story in a small town, far, far away, you have no idea of what a bridge or culvert, or any other project should cost. We are essentially reporting statements, made by other people, and how in the hell would I know if a bridge is worth six million, or five million, or four and a half million, or whether someone is corrupt and simply lying. On the other hand, some big conspiracy is also kind of unlikely. The point is, we take other people’s word for an awful lot of things in this life, but in journalism, it’s wise to check what we can.

This was amply demonstrated to me one day. I have no idea of whether Geoff was pissed off at me, or whether he simply picked one student in any particular class, and ran a bit of a game on them, and relying on us to talk about it. But. It went a little bit like this. The college was bringing in paid parking. One dollar a day, one can imagine the controversy at the time. I am being facetious, but young people being what they are, students being generally broke as they are, but the school paper had some obligation to cover it. Geoff asked me to go next door—literally, the very next door down the hallway and talk to Tom Neal. A school has a faculty. It has an administration, and it has those people dedicated to plant and property. Simply put, the college president doesn’t necessarily decide who gets the snow-plowing and grass-cutting contracts. Tom Neal was one of my mother’s cousins, (it’s a small town after all), I knew that much, and he worked in that particular department.

So, with trusty pen and notebook in hand, I went next door. There were a few glass-fronted office cubicles at the back of a larger space, there was a male sitting there at his desk, and the sign beside the door said ‘Tom Neal’.

The gentleman had reddish hair, blue eyes and at least something, of a family resemblance. I sort of figured this had to be it. I knocked, introduced myself, and proceeded to talk to him, and read off my half a dozen questions or so…

My little story appeared in the paper. Several days later, in our regular journalism lab, a very hands-on course it was, the phone rings and Geoff interrupts himself to answer it. He says it’s for me. The other students have no idea, of course—but then, neither did I.

I am speaking to Tom Neal. He thanks me for the story, that’s all right I tell him. He says he agrees with everything in it. Huh? Only real problem is, he doesn’t remember speaking to me. He does not recall any such interview. He has no idea of who the hell I am—and what’s up, exactly. All you can do is to apologize. To offer to print a retraction. He says—essentially—what’s the point, and in fact we never did print any sort of retraction, apology, explanation. I have no idea of what really happened there. I have no idea, to this day, of who that other guy really was. Maybe there really was no other guy, and maybe it was just a very hands-on kind of lesson.

This is what I meant when I spoke of facts in the first part of this story.

Ma'at, wearing the Feather of Truth.

What the hell is a fact. A fact is whatever some person says is a fact—a fact is a matter of opinion, on some level. There are no universal truths.

***

Geoff had a thirty foot Grampian sailboat, tied up at the Sarnia Yacht Club. It is true, it was something of a tradition to take out the graduating class, those of us, who were left.

The attrition was something in that course. A first year class, on day one, might number up to thirty or more students. By day two, five or six were already gone. Two weeks later, you were left with a couple of dozen, by the end of the year, less than twenty. The second year class rarely started off with more than a dozen students, but by this time, simple persistence and stick-to-it-iveness had come into play and a good six or seven of us went out on the boat with Geoff. It was a warm, sunny, late spring day, with a light wind out of the northwest and just a nice chop to the water.

A Grampian 30.

I remember Geoff opened up a little panel, pressed a button and the auxiliary motor started up. One or two of us cast off the lines. This is how we backed out of the slip and maneuvered out of the harbour. This is how little I knew about sailboats. It had simply never occurred to me before—well, you learn something new every day, right.

I had, actually sailed a boat before, a thirteen-foot dinghy, and after a while, it was my turn to take over the tiller. I had a couple of the more attractive young women crank on the windlasses, tighten up them sails, and heeling over about as far as she was going to go, we set sail for the Bluewater Bridge and home.

Looking at the speedometer, a large, nautical gauge on the bulkhead where a small door led below, she was reading nine knots, which I reckon was about as fast as that thing ever went.

He gave me a little nod, which is about as good as it ever gets when you think about it…as for people, either you love them or they suck, big-time. The choice is yours, and make of it what you will.

As for Geoff, he served the higher goddess. Her name was not Money, or Power, or Rank or Privilege. Her name is Truth, ladies and gentlemen.

Her name is Truth.

 

END

 

Images: top photo by Louis Shalako, taken in September or October 1983. Students from Getty Images. Grampian 30 by Ahunt. The image of Ma’at, the Egyptian Goddess of Truth and Honesty, is in the public domain.

 

Louis has a free audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery.

See his works onArtPal.

Louis has ebooks and paperbacks available from Amazon.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

In this email, I refer to Chris Cooke as editor of the Sarnia Observer. This is incorrect, he was editor of the Sarnia Gazette. A little help is important in a news story. Writing fiction, I am entirely on my own.

Notes. The story on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem states that he escaped to Egypt in 1946. Again, the dangers of relying on memory come into play here...maybe I just got the wrong date.

 

I've been thinking about this story for two or three months. I am writing it one sentence at a time, the subject is important on some personal level, and it's worth doing well. It's non-fiction and some semblance of facts might be helpful...especially as it's a tribute to my old journalism instructor, who passed away in 2012. I had planned to attend the funeral--that's the day my brother called, a bit of an emergency, and I had to go to London to help him move out in something of a hurry. I was a little pissed off, but there was this young woman, and I was sort of wondering if she'd turn up at the funeral. (I might want to leave that part out.)

#writing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Analysis: Turning Federal Buildings Into Housing. Louis Shalako.

The balconies take up interior space, but are an option. (Google Street View).

 

Louis Shalako

The federal government is in the process of selling off or otherwise conveying surplus land and buildings in what is stated to be a stimulus for building more homes faster.

The man in charge of tens of millions of square feet of federal office space is aiming to double the government's lumbering pace for off-loading buildings.

Mark Quinlan, assistant deputy minister of real property services at Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), said the department has a "special group" in place to speed up property disposals.

"Historically, the government is not very good at disposing of surplus properties," he told a city building summit organized by the Ottawa Board of Trade Tuesday.

Policies require PSPC to consult with provinces, municipalities, other departments and Indigenous partners before putting a property up for sale. (CBC)

Analysis.

Turning an office building into residential units will require a huge retrofit of plumbing, drains, electrical, and firewall barriers between individual units. There will have to be heating, cooling and ventilation for every unit. Units will require child-safe, screened windows that open, and all of this takes time, labour and capital. It takes vision and financing. It takes zoning, something of a hot topic in the housing debate, and a factor in the success of NIMBYism. The structural addition of balconies, which is desirable enough, adds more time and complexity to any project. Now we are cutting holes in a building’s exterior, sticking in and fastening steel I-beams, forming up the typical concrete pad, adding in a sliding balcony door, adding proper railings and the like. Yet an apartment or condominium unit without a balcony makes it a somewhat harder sell.

Pictured above is the old Polysar corporate headquarters, now housing. We can see the ‘balcony problem’ has been solved at the expense of interior space. Yet it is an option.

In the building I live in, the company redid the balconies some years ago. Once the railings were down, our patio doors were screwed shut, so you could open up about five inches but children and adults could not go out onto the balcony—which, obviously, were a hazard as they had no rails. Old concrete was broken up, and what was left was a series of I-beams sticking out. You don’t just bolt that to brick walls. It has to be tied in properly to the rest of the structure. Any kind of angled truss-type bracing would interfere with the balcony and patio door directly below it, and the balcony above your unit would do the same. It’s not impossible, but it might be unsightly with a heavy frame and angle-brackets down the walls.

Cutting holes in long expanses of load-bearing structures, in order for every unit to have their own door is another consideration. Each doorway would have to be framed in heavy steel, in order to take the load of previously-existing reinforced concrete above. One way around that would be ‘vestibules’, with one (heavily-reinforced) opening from the hallway into a small common area—the vestibule. Entrance to several units would involve openings in the new, concrete-floor-to-concrete-ceiling firewalls. The vestibule would be a common area, and requires cooperation to succeed, or it becomes a hazard, with bicycles, patio furniture, when it really ought to be in storage. This area becomes a little more like a co-op, where tenants are expected to pitch in on common chores—asking folks to help shovel snow off the sidewalks and vacuum the halls is a bit of a tough ask.

However. This saves a few holes cut into load-bearing structures on a common hallway.

Here, the door framing only has to support the load of concrete blocks up to the reinforced concrete ‘deck’ of the floor above, without reference to the weight of the building above.

Baseboard heaters, all would be based on the individual unit, replacing common heat for a large corporate building, with such costs factored into the leases. This implies each unit has its own thermostat, its own electrical and water metering…another complication in the conversion process.

Reinforced concrete before the pour.

This is why old schools are not particularly good prospects for conversion, whether single or multi-story, no matter how structurally sound. In a single-story school, with no basement infrastructure, that would require all services to be overhead, in a false ceiling which must carry the water pipes, for example. All of that has to go through fire-rated wall structures. Drainage, requires cutting concrete and digging trenches below frost level…we are beginning to get the picture now.

Theoretically, one classroom, in terms of square footage, would make one small apartment. It is the services that are lacking. Each unit needs a kitchen and a bathroom, with plumbing, drainage, ventilation, all up to modern standards. With only one door, it might need some method of fire escape…

In and of itself, offloading surplus federal lands and buildings is not necessarily a bad thing.

Okay, so we’re offloading lands and buildings for a nominal sale price of $1.00, a building for a dollar, ladies and gentlemen. This is a form of subsidy, and yet most would agree that any form of subsidy is desirable, in our current very tight housing market.

That in no way makes the job of conversion any faster or easier—whether it makes it any cheaper remains to be seen.

This plan may be of great interest in the Ottawa area, Toronto, other large centres. Here in Sarnia, Ontario, there really aren’t too many federal buildings or even federal lands available for conversion or new-build housing. There is the ‘federal building’ downtown, presently housing the Post Office. Service Canada operates on Exmouth Street, this looks like a simple leased space to this observer. The courthouse, whether federal or provincial, could be leased space in a mall somewhere, and only then would the building, right across from the county jail, become surplus.

So let’s say the federal government leases space somewhere suitable and releases the old Post Office to some form of development. 

Fair enough, but waterfront property is at a premium. The likeliest outcome would be a proposal for demolition and then the construction of high-end condo or rental/leasing units. This does little to reduce housing costs in the missing middle and the low-end of apartment units. It does nothing in the face of NIMBYism.

It’s also fair to say that the process of disposing of federal assets is likely to be slow and not likely to budge the needle on the housing crisis anytime soon, although it is part of a longer-term solution.

Around here, not much joy, in other words.

Additional: In the major earthquake in Turkey, large numbers of apartment buildings came down, partly due to the magnitude of the quake, but also due to lack of proper building and construction inspections. This was exacerbated by unauthorized, un-permitted building modifications where landlords and unqualified persons were cutting windows and doors in structural elements, in order to create more units by subdividing spaces within. This comes from news sources such as Reuters and others. I really should have included this in my analysis.

#analysis

 

END

#Louis

 

Here is the full story from the CBC.

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon, in ebook, paperback and one, Speak Softly My Love, in audiobook format.

 

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

I, Dill Bennis, Armed With Strong Mayor Powers.

Dill Bennis, Strong Mayor.

Dill Bennis

Guest Columnist

Heads will roll when I become Mayor of Sarnia, armed with the Province of Ontario’s Strong Mayor Powers, and I would sure like to thank Doug Ford, the Premier for that.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, on my first day of office, the new broom will sweep very, very clean, as the saying goes. Disruption is good, continuity is bad, as are any sort of intellectual considerations at all, as those are mostly theoretical and have no real application in life.

Up first, are all those weak and incompetent City Hall bureaucrats. I’m going to fire every little Baby Jesus-denying one of them in one fell swoop. It will be a veritable Symphony of Destruction, and about time, too. They should have been aborted at birth, and that way, at least their mothers might have learned some responsibility. (A technical point. They have the right to life before they are born, after that fuck them as they’re all probably going to grow up as weak, incompetent socialists, study piercing, or esthetics and sticking bones through their noses and plastering their hair in white mud and wearing saffron robes in some sort of anti-social, and rather gay fashion statement.)

Let them sue the city for wrongful dismissal. No cost is too high to rid the city of these appointed socialists, these sandals and shorts and floral-printed shirt-wearing pinko commie basterds…tax-sucking parasites, every damned one of them.

Let them call the lying press, let them go to the Human Rights Tribunal, which takes forever anyhow. No price is too high—we’ll get the money from the disabled, who have no reason to live because they just can’t afford it anyways.

They stand slightly to the left of Chairman Mao. Well, just so you know, I stand slightly to the left of Adolf Hitler; and I shall show no mercy to these pedophile Liberal child-groomers and polyamorous, effeminate slobs with their tattoos and their Prius hybrids and transvestite dogs and cats that lick themselves in all the wrong places…

While there may be some disruption, it will be short as we will be skipping the usual recruitment and selection process. As Strong Mayor, I will quickly appoint their successors, with minimal professional input by Liberal Elites…obey the right. Conform to the norm. I read that somewhere…

These strong and highly-competent appointees will of course be selected outside of their particular areas of expertise, as I distrust expertise, even though no one knows more than I do, and I gave up a half a million dollar a year job to become Mayor. Which as you know only pays about fifty grand a year.

That’s how much I love my city.

***

An extremely conservative person, I believe ever so strongly in democracy. One of my first bylaws will be the Democratic Freedom in Sexuality Guidelines. Under these guidelines, your neighbours will have the right to determine your gender, your orientation, and therefore, your worth as a human being, bearing in mind you should have been aborted but technically we are against that sort of thing. If they don’t like your name, they will choose a more appropriate one for you. A simple majority will rule, unless the verdict is wrong, in which case I will cast the tie-breaker in all cases, or I will phone that in from my palatial but characterless home in Bright’s Grove, to my designated deputy; who quite frankly could use a transfusion of good, red, Canadian blood and maybe a bit of a chin transplant.

The only exception shall be lesbians. Everybody loves lesbians, who, at the very least, can’t get pregnant and if nothing else, they can pretend they’re just friends and share an apartment and everyone, even their mothers, just sort of accepts it…what saves them is a physical inability to bum-fuck.

Lesbians hate kids, so we don’t have to worry so much about that. And I promise not to create a toxic work environment, not like that last guy anyways.

...lesbians hate kids, ladies and gentlemen...

But the truth is, you cannot be trusted to decide who (or what) you are. That especially holds true for children, who cannot be trusted to choose for themselves, and it is too important to leave discretion to the parents. That sort of thing is best left to guys like me, and it will be. All decisions are final, with no recourse to appeal, and all of you child-grooming sickos will just have to live with our decision, made in the interests of society, which above all requires order, and in order to have order, we must have authority. Trust me, I lie awake all night sometimes, worrying about your children.

Under this bylaw, accusation is proof of guilt and you’re lucky we provide you with a letter to sew on your prison coveralls free of charge…

***

I have always believed, like Ronald Reagan, that the best social program is a job. For that reason, all unemployed persons and other undesirables, will be employed on a rock pile, with big hammers, smashing out gravel, which will be sold at the going rate, about three dollars per ton—their income potential is unlimited, all they have to do is to put in the hours, never mind that conscript labour, harsh conditions and no real reward with which to better themselves, is the most inefficient labour of all. After costs, we will be subsidizing builders and cement workers to the tune of five or sixteen hundred dollars per ton, as the rocks will have to be trucked in, and the workers fed, clothed and housed, however temporarily. These will be accessible workplaces, as I have always believed in physical disabilities, although the cognitive ones not so much—there are too many ODSP scammers out there and we need to crack down on that too. The truth is, when you were renovicted, you made your bed and now you must lie upon it. But it’s okay, I have a plan to create hundreds of sampans, anchored in Sarnia Bay, and you can cook your tiny silver little fish on twigs and moss in an old Volkwagen hub-cap. You’re all pansies anyway.

You’re just a big bunch of fuzzy sock-lickers, that’s what I always say.

That being said, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as society, even though there is something, and if nothing else, I will be in charge of bogus aphorisms around here from now on.

***

When the Sarnia Police Services request a 27 % budget increase, I will bring down my gavel, which is real enough as I got it off of Ebay, and rubber-stamp that in a heartbeat.

A Sampan.

The police are always heroes, all of the time, in all circumstances, without exception, always have been, always are, and always will be, selfless and unselfish, for all of time past and present, and no price is too high to pay for men, women, whatever. We’re not too sure about one or two, but we will weed them out, trust me on that one. I will never vote to defund the police, which one has to admit, isn’t much of a bargaining position but I said it in the paper and now we’re sort of screwed, but hey—that is who I am after all.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for these fairies to learn how to suck the cock of the fire god.

Thank you for listening, and please vote for Dill Bennis, Strong Mayor, in the event you turn up to vote at all. Quite frankly, the fewer the better, in which case I might even stand a chance—be that as it may.

Incidentally, you don’t have to click any other boxes on the ballot, one click in the right place would be enough.

Those other folks are all weak and incompetent. I would give their names, but even I am smart enough, with good legal advice from a free half-hour consultation, which I would advise for any well-to-do person, not so much their victims; ah, not to engage in libel, slander, or defamation of character.

Oh. They’re stupid, too.

 

END

 

This weird-ass Louis Shalako guy has a free audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

A Three-Dollar Calculator Cuts Through Endless Bullshit. Louis Shalako.

The world's safest, most effective #penis_enlarger

Louis Shalako

A three-dollar calculator will cut through endless amounts of bullshit.

How much is the ‘carbon tax’ per litre of gas in 2024?

As of April 2024, the federal minimum price is set at CA$80.00 per tonne of CO 2 equivalent. This roughly translates to 14.3 cents per litre of gasoline. Provinces and territories with their own carbon pricing systems can use the proceeds as they see fit.

(This is the result of a quick Google search on the internet.)

So, if I spent approximately $2,151.00 on fuel in 2023, and if the average price of a litre of fuel is roughly $1.50/per litre, then I bought 1,434 litres of fuel. Multiply that by 14.3 cents...that's a little over $205.00 in increased fuel costs. I get $134.00 four times a year in carbon tax rebate, (that's going up to $140.00 this April.) Four times $134.00 is $536.00 per year in carbon tax rebates, for a net gain of $536 - $205 = $331.00 in cash, in my pocket, that I did not have to work for.

Any money that I do not have to work for is good money, ladies and gentlemen.

The carbon tax rate was 23 % less in 2023, so the savings are actually 23 % greater. Much has been made of a ‘23 % raise in the carbon tax’, this roughly equates to the raise from $65.00 per tonne to $80.00 per tonne.

Yet it’s only an increase of three-point-three cents per litre at the pump. You could save 10 % in fuel costs simply by slowing down, or you could get similar savings by planning your trips and cutting out unnecessary cruising for entertainment. Interestingly, I haven’t heard the term ‘energy conservation’ in over thirty years. Not in this country. Not while we’re sixth overall in terms of global energy production…not while there’s piss-pots of money still to be made from it, and that is for sure.

No one wants to talk about that ‘conservation’ sort of thing anymore. Oh, and when the federal carbon tax goes up three-point-three cents, and the cost of fuel goes up by ten or fifteen cents, that tells you more about the refiners than it does the federal government.

Admittedly, fuel conservation will not be a popular option for younger people, who may be experiencing that first taste of freedom, (for the most part, without the onerous burden of additional responsibility), or possibly just out having fun with their first vehicle. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing myself. In fact, my first vehicle was an Austin Mini, which had exactly 38 horsepower. They don’t make cars like that anymore, do they. On a paved side-road, cruising in fourth gear at 60 or 65 kph, you could easily get thirty or forty miles per gallon. 

Funny thing is, it is their future that we are talking about…the kids, I mean.

When I pull up to the gas pumps and the readout shows that the person before me has put in $150.00 worth of fuel, that is not my problem. That is your problem. Not mine—

I’m just here to put twenty bucks in the tank, and maybe, hopefully, make it through one more fucking day.

All pissed-off at the carbon tax. It's like they have a God-given right, somehow.

***

We could divide $80.00/tonne and find out just exactly how many litres of fuel it takes to generate one tonne of carbon dioxide and spew that out into the atmosphere. What is most disturbing about the carbon tax debate is the sheer sense of entitlement that some folks seem to feel about their right to poison an atmosphere, which is, after all a common good.

It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything. The atmosphere was put here so that poor people wouldn’t starve to death, and that seems to bother some people more than it should. It is the tragedy of the commons. What once belonged to all is exploited, enclosed, and engrossed, and ultimately spoiled, all for the profit of the few. And to hell with the rest of us—

Somehow their rights come ahead of yours and mine—and your children, and your grandchildren. It’s like they haven’t spared a thought for all of those cute little unborn fetuses…that the very same folks profess to care so deeply about, and that goes for all them little black babies in Africa as well.

The math: 80 divided by 0.143 = 559.44. So, if I burn 559 litres of fuel, in six months or a year, I have generated one tonne of carbon dioxide and put it up into the atmosphere.

Please, feel free to check my math, as I dropped out of high school in Grade 10, and if the truth be told, journalism school is sort of lacking in math-related subjects. Why, I have often wondered. It’s like they don’t want you to know, sometimes. Maybe they’re just fooling themselves.

***

In a more perfect world, we would all have the right to propose one rule, only problem, is that we would also have to live by it; with no power of compulsion over the rest of the human race.

In a more perfect world, every student of journalism, on the first day of journalism school, would have to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of their future readers, (or maybe just the instructor), that they owned a three-dollar calculator and actually knew how to use it.

Poolever bought a doughnut or something...

At the time of this writing, Monsieur Pierre Poilievre, leader of the federal Conservative Party and head of the Official Opposition in Parliament is leading in the polls by twenty points. His first priority, day one, if he should become Prime Minister, would be to scrap the carbon tax. I don’t think he will do it—I think he will keep the tax, by any other name. All he has to do is to rename it, and simply stop paying out the rebates to low-income Canadians, and that, somehow, magically, will suddenly make everything all right again.

The bourgeoisie is all too predictable, sometimes. Hatred is blind and unreasoning, and it poisons every mind that it touches. Funny thing is, they’d be the first to tell you they hate the carbon tax, they hate Justin Trudeau and they hate Liberals. While claiming to love Canada, (and freedom), they don’t seem to have too much regard for their fellow Canadians, no matter who they are or where they came from. They have a long list of hates and a very short list of things they love.

Anyhow, that’s my opinion, and I see no reason to change it.

 

END

Images: Likely stolen from the internet. 

Here is Louis Shalako’s free audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play.

Check out this free, online calculator.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.