The Five

No one wants to be critical. The ambition of creating affordable housing in our community is noble. Worthy. Yet there is a vast difference between wanting something and recklessly burning taxpayer dollars to make it happen. Just how hard is evidenced by the eight years of fruitless effort and vast resources expended by the County’s arms-length Housing Corp, which has, so far, failed to produce a single affordable unit.

Good intentions—unscrutinized and unexamined— lead inevitably to bad decisions. Repeated failure and incompetence can, over time, acquire a strange appeal. Who doesn’t want to root for the underdog? Especially when playing with other people’s money. The longer folks are allowed to chase their tail without results, the more they come to believe that divine intervention— or a “magic wand waver” as one councillor put it last week—will make everything better. Surely their luck must change soon. Baby needs a new pair of shoes.

They come to believe they are destined for success—if only they keep moving forward. If their cause is righteous, even math and physics will give way before it.

FIVE council members sit on the Housing Corp board. They outnumber the public members. It’s a problem. Phil St-Jean chairs the board. Brad Nieman is vice chair. They are joined by Councillors Kate MacNaughton, John Hirsch and Sam Grosso.

The five councillors appear to be under the influence of aliens or hallucinogens. They talk of angels and of magic. They so badly want their project built that they seem to have lost their minds. They’ve forgotten that it is their duty to scrutinize public investment as if it were their own.

Instead, the FIVE have become hucksters for a rickety Ponzi scheme.

They refuse to ask the difficult questions and have become blind to the hazards directly in front of them. Oblivious, it seems, to the fireswamp of risk they appear determined to drag the municipality into. (See story here).

They are in so deep that they have come to believe their own bovine excrement. They believe that if they somehow manage to scrape together enough cash and deliver it to the saintly Ottawa builder—that it will unleash a torrent of funding opportunities. They know this because the builder told them so.

They speak of themselves as newlyweds attempting to buy their first home—shaking their fists at funding agencies who have repeatedly chosen not to fund the Housing Corp’s business plan, their inexperience and their lack of rigour. The FIVE regard prudence and caution as a hurdle to overcome.

They have become utterly delusional—dislodged from their primary responsibility to probe, analyze and challenge assumptions. Questions such as: How much will they pay for a $2.1 million mortgage over 45 years? (A: $4.68 million, including $2.5 million in interest.) What happens when the untested rental team can’t find renters to pay their posted rates? Or, when renters fail to pay their rent? Or property values decline? Or the product fails to withstand wear and tear? Will it be agile enough to compete in the rental marketplace? Or looked at from another direction—which municipal priorities or plans must be shelved to fund the County’s venture into residential landlording?

It’s a problem because all the FIVE need are a couple more councillors to join their doom cult for this disaster to get off the ground.

Yet they know the right answer—or should know it by now.

Councillor and board member John Hirsch is confident the Housing Corp will be successful in winning funding from the new Build Canada Fund. Great!

If he is right, Hirsch claims the Housing Corp can deliver 8 affordable units rather than the 3 currently on the table. Also great!

If the funding is successful, the Housing Corp won’t need County taxpayers to backstop their business plan. If they land the funding, it will prove they were right to keep pushing. The naysayers were wrong. Their efforts will be vindicated. The risk/reward balance will be restored. All good things!

For these reasons, the Housing Corp must wait until Build Canada says yes or no. It is time to acknowledge that there is no other way forward. There is no prudent or rational basis for proceeding without this federal funding. Bide your time. Make a strong application. Put your best argument forward. Know that it is your only way forward.

The challenges of operating a residential building without experience or expertise will remain. But the risk won’t be entirely borne by County taxpayers.

Get a grip and wait for Build Canada funding.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca