Nimby and wartime houses

an old look at a modern concern

As our city government debates affordable housing even today, I have a little story of how I stumbled into a evening of learning how deep this issue really is.

I grew up in a small Saskatchewan town.

I also grew up in what was called a wartime house.

I grew up in a house that was financed and built around an old-fashioned idea called the “common good”.  The government played a big part in the modest comfortable affordable home that I grew up in.

There were two important principles in that piece of Canadian history.  The first was that public service or government was an entity conceived eons ago, whereby you invested part of your individual income or wealth in a project collectively.  In plain language, it takes some money from you and your fellow humans and puts it into a large cookpot.  It then sees what is needed most and then ladles it back out to you and your fellow citizens, in goods and services like roads, education, protection and so on.  You and all the other contributing humans, would realize a bigger bang for your bucks that way.  Like in business, you get a bigger return on your investment than if you tried to hire your own cop or nurse.  It seems obvious that you could accomplish more things together than you could ever do alone.

Simple.  Grade five civics.

The second core principle was the concept of local.  We found comfort and progress in words like neighborhood, community and hometown.  Generally, people who lived in the same vicinity were as concerned for the people around them as they were for themselves.

Today we have folks challenging that concept.  Fueled by the likes of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, we now have the rise and desire for total free markets, privatization and the singular, individual needs and wants trumping the collective wisdom, success and support of the plural. 

Common good seems as missing as common sense.

So, today’s story from the ordinary, has me reflecting on what the heck happened with housing?

It started with a strange evening.

I have a modest history of collecting leadership and engagement tools both for the workplace and the civic arena.  I was even cheeky enough to write a little book on the subject.  So, I was not totally surprised to have a civic leader and a faith leader ask me if I could design and host an evening in a local neighbourhood around the current hot button issue of affordable housing.

I immediately made some bad assumptions.

For some time now, we have been caught in the swirl of private and public conversations about the looming fact that our kids and grandkids are struggling and sometimes failing, to put a roof over their heads.  Not just young people, but real stories of forty-year-old professionals in North Vancouver who lost their apartment and could not afford the new high rental nut and had to reluctantly move back with their parents.

So, I imagined that the folks coming to this particular meeting and their neighbours would now be concerned for their own kids and grandkids entering the housing crisis. I also assumed that they were probably hard-working folks tired of the same old meetings and would welcome the opportunity to have a productive session without a pre-set agenda, no PowerPoint and a unique conversation tool.  This would allow them to have an open dialogue about a unique program simply designed to help them make a common good housing decision for their own kin.   

Well…not so much.

So, on to that evening.

We know our civic officials recognize that they have to do a much better job on housing.  It’s not often that the policy folks, the planners and the decision makers are given an outside, golden opportunity.  This one came from a faith community.   A local legacy church was losing its base and all that was left was a pretty sweet piece of land. 

They had a couple of choices.  They could just sell it off to a developer creating both a profit for themselves and the good Lord.  The profits for the corporate developer need not be a source of anyone’s concern.

But these old school Christians thought they might do it one better and leave a different foot print in that community other than the empty ruins of a church building. They worked with a not-for-profit developer and the city to imagine, on that once sacred acreage, a project that could have multiple affordable housing units, perhaps a daycare, perhaps a community space, maybe a coffee shop or whatever the neighbours might enjoy.

So, I walked into the church basement that evening with a well-practiced engagement tool and perhaps a little too much confidence about community, conversation and my own abilities. 

Well, the audience got real angry, real fast.  They didn’t quite kick me out but they made sure I was securely tethered to a non-speaking hitching pole.  They sure as heck did not want a neighbourhood conversation that evening.  All seventy of them let fly with the artillery of their own quite well made-up minds.  The absolute righteousness of their belief washed over, in a hot sauce of anger, the faith guy, the professional guy and yours truly, the hosting guy.  If there could be a sh*tstorm between a generous God and the avarice of Mammon, it was previewed that night in that church basement.  Affordable housing was not to be shoved down their throats by an evil partnership of church and government and oiled up by some slick facilitator.

So, these days, I understand this project is still in play, but thanks be, I have mercifully not been invited back.

So, I have been trying to understand.

Later, one of the angry, trying to help one of the battered, suggested that what we (the oily facilitator, the overreaching government and the irrelevant church) might better understand is that the whole evening was about the dream, the individual family dream.

These folks, he believes, were on the ramparts to fight and protect their individual holdings from the hordes who wanted and needed a shared, affordable place to live. Common good be damned.  We now have houses that may soon be worth a million dollars and that’s a pretty fine dream. Shove your collective dreams for the next generation somewhere else.  This neighbourhood was not for sharing.

So, what did I learn:

I guess I learned that this philosophy of individual neoliberalism is not just the subject of a university course.  It is a really big deal out there in our life and neighbourhoods.  I shudder to think that something as benign as a family dream has created the eco/economic debacle of overbuilt sprawling suburbs, inner city expensive gentrification and the full loss of affordable modest housing anywhere. 

Housing affluence is apparently our new stock market and everyone wants to buy low and sell high and dream of how much my bungalow will be worth next year. 

It is more an investment now, not so much a home.

I knew of course, that there have always been angry folks.   But boy, oh boy, this new anger is rocket fueled by disinformation, divisiveness and self-absorption.  I heard that night that many now believe that there is nothing more to learn.  We have the right answers even if they may come from a dubious electronic source.  As an example, we heard from one person that affordable housing attracts perverts who will groom our children.  This is in partnership with the prostitutes who will come as well and perhaps groom our spouses.  One lady warned that we know what those clergy do in those church basements.

I also learned that if I were to sit and have a coffee with every one of those folks, I would like them.  This makes me crazy.

So that night, big fuel, little matches. So much for offered gifts.

Ronald Reagan’s struck that little match of “the government isn’t here to solve problems, it is the problem.”  The little fire he lit is now a full wildfire threatening our very democracy.

It is clear that most people would rather unequivocally trust the seldom critiqued, corporate, for-profit sector.  We now save up our anger for the faith based, public and not for profit sectors, blaming them and yet expecting them to solve all the wicked problems like housing.

Well, how’s that going so far?

Back to my father.

The government, back in the early fifties had thousands of returning soldiers coming home from defending democracy (common good) and fighting fascism.  They were generally broke, with no home to live in.  So, the federal government stepped into leadership and created real, affordable housing for these young men and their new families. Wartime homes they were called.  There may still be some in your neighbourhood.

There was gratitude.  My dad had it.

I found it quite heartbreaking to know that many of the lovely little homes in that angry community are old school wartime homes.  How many of these neighbours know that many of their million-dollar homes were built by the government, now their sworn enemy.

They were built in that spirit of “common good” and are now inhabited by “my personal dream.”

The singular has triumphed over the plurality.  Singular and plural.  Mrs. MacMillan my grade eight English teacher would say that I still have not grasped grammar that well, but she’s gone, just like common good.

Just another story from the ordinary.