Homelessness
I was at a Homeless Memorial Service on Tuesday where one speaker characterised the relative lack of expenditure on homelessness as (basically) a result of "tax cuts for the rich hurting the poor".
That has a certain amount of effective truth -- "keeping taxes low" tends to benefit the rich more than it does the moderately well off, and much more than it benefits the poor -- but it is, essentially, a lie which makes the speakers / listeners in a largely middle-class or working-class crowd feel better about themselves than they should.
The evidence from the last municipal election, looking at a ward-level breakdown (if we take votes for Ford as those most committed to keeping tax rates low, and least likely to allocate resources to reducing homelessness[1]) is that it is the less well-off -- the working poor, essentially -- who made up a very large part of the Ford vote, based on ward-level analyses. Much of the rest of that vote was classically middle class. (The really well-off tended to vote for Tory, with Chow as a second choice.) There are obviously other contributing factors -- right/libertarian political views among some of the well-off and the right end of the political spectrum -- but simply pointing at the rich is to let all the rest of us off too lightly.
At a provincial/federal level, other factors enter, of course, but even those are hard to categorise as simply rich vs. poor. (A resentment of large cities by rural and small-town voters, for example, is a factor here, especially for a Federal government which has a rural/suburban base; so is the resentment of Ontario in other parts of the federation.)
At the same gathering, Michael Shapcott (who was in my year in Law School) noted that there were on the order of 90,000 applicants on the current waiting list for assisted housing and approximately 700 units being built.
This got me to thinking: assume that the way to address homelessness in a tight market is simply to build a lot of assisted rental stock[2]. (Discount the cost here, temporarily, even though it's on the order of, at a guess, 30 billion dollars[3]: in principle the federal government could raise the money, if necessary by raising taxes. Do note, though, that this is ten times the size of the 2014 deficit.) Likewise, assume that a single high-density building is about 25 stories high and has about 20 units on each floor. (This falls somewhere between 60-floor Le Corbusier projects and low-rise developments with far less density but more liveability.) Then each building would have 500 units. To address a list of 90,000 head-on would mean building 180 buildings; In addition, assume that you want liveability, so no more than five buildings per development, with a mix of green space and market-rate units as well, and commercial units to avoid the problems of e.g. "food deserts". Then you have 36 separate high-density developments spread throughout the city... what would they displace? What would be the impact on labour availability for other construction projects? What sorts of transit infrastructure would be needed? If you assume lower-density developments, the area required expands...
90,000 is the number of inhabitants, not units, in a reasonable-sized city and the TCHC currently handles about 58,000 units. Current residential building starts of all categories currently is running at a little over 25,000 units per year, although it has bounced around between about 50,000 / year to about 25,000 / year.
It's clear that this approach is just not feasible politically: aside from the tax increases (30 billion is over 10% of the existing expenditures in the federal budget, and that doesn't include costs for electrical, sewer, transit, and other infrastructure which would be required), the firestorm from expropriating the land needed would be immense. It's the scale of project which typically takes place only after something like a tsunami, earthquake, or the Blitz. This doesn't mean, though, that this sort of thing would be impractical if it had been a priority all along -- building units gradually as demand increased would be practicable in a way that a head-on assault on the backlog is not, though still posing political challenges.
Michael cited Medicine Hat's Housing First initiative in his remarks. The linked article indicates that Medicine Hat had 1,147 people using emergency shelters, and cites no numbers for an assisted housing waiting list; Toronto has 4,635 spaces, and demand at times effectively exceeds capacity. This suggests that Michael was (probably deliberately, for rhetorical effect) mixing apples and oranges by raising this example but also citing the waiting list size: eliminating the demand on shelters by using a Housing First approach is a daunting but feasible project; addressing the 90,000 waiting list he mentioned in the same way is not. (And that itself ignores the claims of queue-jumping if people in shelters get housing ahead of people at the head of the TCHC waiting list.)
That doesn't mean that pressuring all levels of government to address the supply of units directly isn't worthwhile: no matter what, that in itself clearly is insufficient at present. But treating that as the primary component of a programme to reduce or eliminate homelessness and housing shortages is almost certainly misguided; a broader approach is clearly needed.
[1]This was a theme in Chow's campaign, although it didn't get highlighted, and it is certainly emerging as a theme in Tory's administration, although it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
[2]Which is probably not even the general direction of a right approach, although certainly an expansion in available flats to rent is a necessary component in a tight market. The more fruitful approach would be to address root causes with a mix of a guaranteed annual income policy towards income support, tighter rent controls (to prevent simple profit-taking by landlords of increased income in the hands of renters), better mental health support to assist with the bottom rung of the homeless as well as other mental health costs which society does not deal very well with, aggressive educational supports, etc.
[3]Assuming about 300,000 per unit at cost, which is a wild guess based on non-luxury condominium prices and subtracting an assumed profit percentage; it's at the right order of magnitude, at least. A big chunk of that would be expropriation of land, which would have a knock-on effect op putting pressure on the rest of Toronto's housing stock. The demand this would place on labour, though, might drive wages up. On the good side, unemployment would temporarily drop.
That has a certain amount of effective truth -- "keeping taxes low" tends to benefit the rich more than it does the moderately well off, and much more than it benefits the poor -- but it is, essentially, a lie which makes the speakers / listeners in a largely middle-class or working-class crowd feel better about themselves than they should.
The evidence from the last municipal election, looking at a ward-level breakdown (if we take votes for Ford as those most committed to keeping tax rates low, and least likely to allocate resources to reducing homelessness[1]) is that it is the less well-off -- the working poor, essentially -- who made up a very large part of the Ford vote, based on ward-level analyses. Much of the rest of that vote was classically middle class. (The really well-off tended to vote for Tory, with Chow as a second choice.) There are obviously other contributing factors -- right/libertarian political views among some of the well-off and the right end of the political spectrum -- but simply pointing at the rich is to let all the rest of us off too lightly.
At a provincial/federal level, other factors enter, of course, but even those are hard to categorise as simply rich vs. poor. (A resentment of large cities by rural and small-town voters, for example, is a factor here, especially for a Federal government which has a rural/suburban base; so is the resentment of Ontario in other parts of the federation.)
At the same gathering, Michael Shapcott (who was in my year in Law School) noted that there were on the order of 90,000 applicants on the current waiting list for assisted housing and approximately 700 units being built.
This got me to thinking: assume that the way to address homelessness in a tight market is simply to build a lot of assisted rental stock[2]. (Discount the cost here, temporarily, even though it's on the order of, at a guess, 30 billion dollars[3]: in principle the federal government could raise the money, if necessary by raising taxes. Do note, though, that this is ten times the size of the 2014 deficit.) Likewise, assume that a single high-density building is about 25 stories high and has about 20 units on each floor. (This falls somewhere between 60-floor Le Corbusier projects and low-rise developments with far less density but more liveability.) Then each building would have 500 units. To address a list of 90,000 head-on would mean building 180 buildings; In addition, assume that you want liveability, so no more than five buildings per development, with a mix of green space and market-rate units as well, and commercial units to avoid the problems of e.g. "food deserts". Then you have 36 separate high-density developments spread throughout the city... what would they displace? What would be the impact on labour availability for other construction projects? What sorts of transit infrastructure would be needed? If you assume lower-density developments, the area required expands...
90,000 is the number of inhabitants, not units, in a reasonable-sized city and the TCHC currently handles about 58,000 units. Current residential building starts of all categories currently is running at a little over 25,000 units per year, although it has bounced around between about 50,000 / year to about 25,000 / year.
It's clear that this approach is just not feasible politically: aside from the tax increases (30 billion is over 10% of the existing expenditures in the federal budget, and that doesn't include costs for electrical, sewer, transit, and other infrastructure which would be required), the firestorm from expropriating the land needed would be immense. It's the scale of project which typically takes place only after something like a tsunami, earthquake, or the Blitz. This doesn't mean, though, that this sort of thing would be impractical if it had been a priority all along -- building units gradually as demand increased would be practicable in a way that a head-on assault on the backlog is not, though still posing political challenges.
Michael cited Medicine Hat's Housing First initiative in his remarks. The linked article indicates that Medicine Hat had 1,147 people using emergency shelters, and cites no numbers for an assisted housing waiting list; Toronto has 4,635 spaces, and demand at times effectively exceeds capacity. This suggests that Michael was (probably deliberately, for rhetorical effect) mixing apples and oranges by raising this example but also citing the waiting list size: eliminating the demand on shelters by using a Housing First approach is a daunting but feasible project; addressing the 90,000 waiting list he mentioned in the same way is not. (And that itself ignores the claims of queue-jumping if people in shelters get housing ahead of people at the head of the TCHC waiting list.)
That doesn't mean that pressuring all levels of government to address the supply of units directly isn't worthwhile: no matter what, that in itself clearly is insufficient at present. But treating that as the primary component of a programme to reduce or eliminate homelessness and housing shortages is almost certainly misguided; a broader approach is clearly needed.
[1]This was a theme in Chow's campaign, although it didn't get highlighted, and it is certainly emerging as a theme in Tory's administration, although it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
[2]Which is probably not even the general direction of a right approach, although certainly an expansion in available flats to rent is a necessary component in a tight market. The more fruitful approach would be to address root causes with a mix of a guaranteed annual income policy towards income support, tighter rent controls (to prevent simple profit-taking by landlords of increased income in the hands of renters), better mental health support to assist with the bottom rung of the homeless as well as other mental health costs which society does not deal very well with, aggressive educational supports, etc.
[3]Assuming about 300,000 per unit at cost, which is a wild guess based on non-luxury condominium prices and subtracting an assumed profit percentage; it's at the right order of magnitude, at least. A big chunk of that would be expropriation of land, which would have a knock-on effect op putting pressure on the rest of Toronto's housing stock. The demand this would place on labour, though, might drive wages up. On the good side, unemployment would temporarily drop.