THE CHALLENGE OF HOUSING FOR EVERYONE

Many people have woken up to the fact that the cost of housing, either to rent or purchase, has risen far faster in recent years than any increase in incomes. This leaves many people on lower incomes in a very difficult situation. The tepid response of the federal political parties has been to provide various incentives for private companies to build more housing. These have proven to be inadequate. One recent example is the plan to build several thousand housing units on the site of the old Blue Bonnets race track. The municipal government sought bids from private companies to build three kinds of housing on the site: social housing where rents are geared to income, moderate priced housing for families, and commercial housing where the developers decide what to build and what to charge for it. It turned out that no companies were prepared to bid on the project as they didn’t see enough profit potential, given the rules that had been established.

Over the past 100 years Canada and other western countries have gradually accepted that not all of society’s needs can be met through the market place. Gradually some aspects of society which used to be treated as private goods or services, that is goods/services that were produced by private companies or charities and purchased by individuals, have become instead social goods/services which are provided by public and para-public organizations and made available to all citizens. Two notable examples of this are education and health care. In 1950 most education in Quebec was provided by private fee-paying schools, and if you went to a hospital the first thing you had to do was write a cheque. Suggestions that these services should be provided as social goods/services and paid for by the state were dismissed as an unaffordable fantasy. Fast forward 73 years and these services are now provided by the state. It turns out that society could afford to do this and that society has reaped huge advantages from having a healthy well-educated population.

We will only solve the housing situation when we treat housing as a social good and provide it to all citizens. We are not prepared to turn children away from schools or sick people from hospitals because they cannot pay, so why is it acceptable to have tens of thousands of our citizens without adequate housing in good repair? The evidence is clear that inadequate housing causes social, health and psychiatric problems, that impose a cost on society.

A major cost of providing housing is the price of urban land. The cost of building a house in Montreal, Blainville or a Laurentian village is pretty much the same. The cost of the land on which the house is built varies enormously, however. Nature provides the land but society creates its value by providing roads, water, sewage lines, parks, metro stations, schools and day-cares. A 4000 square foot building lot in NDG was recently advertized for sale for $649,000. This reality is expressed in the real-estate adage that the three most important aspects of a house are location, location and location.

This is all well and good, you might be thinking, but what can be done now to address this issue? Well it may surprise you to discover that a Liberal government in the 1940s came up with a solution to the problem of an inadequate supply of housing and built tens of thousands of houses and apartments in a few years. It did so under the pressure of WWII which provided the incentive to create a Crown Corporation, Wartime Housing Ltd. The first priority of WHL was to build houses and apartments in areas where there was a huge expansion of wartime factories which required thousands of workers who needed to be housed. Later as the end of the war approached, WHL was used as a vehicle to construct thousands of houses and apartments across the country for returning veterans. In NDG, the Benny Farm development and the hundreds of Cape Cod cottages were the fruit of WHL’s efforts.

What the Liberal government was prepared to do in response to war time pressures, it was not prepared to continue with the end of the war. For ideological reasons it quickly wound down WHL, sold its land and housing and left housing supply to private contractors and developers.

If we accept that housing should be a social good, an NDP government could set up a new Crown corporation, Social Housing Ltd. with the remit to construct housing that is in particularly short supply namely, moderately priced family housing, moderately priced seniors housing, moderately priced student housing and housing adapted to the needs of people with handicaps. If it could be done in WWII, it could be done now, if we are serious about addressing the housing issue. Remember Jack’s advice, “Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done”!

Below, we present a series of articles on the subject of federal government housing programs. Two articles in English outline the history of federal programs since the Second World War and the consequences of their abandonment in the 1990s, while two articles in French provide an even more extensive look at the history of federal programs and the failures of the current approach.