What we build, and don’t build

I usually like to explore around the edges of County problems, but I feel it’s time to be uncharacteristically blunt. I’m not liking where we’re going. It’s like when you leave Quinte Mall, and can’t remember where you parked. So you roam around to try to find the memory of where you were when you left it. It’s like that, but we still can’t find our car. (I know you love my weird analogies!)

So here we go. This is about housing. So I will do a point by point:

HOUSING PRICES ARE OUT OF CONTROL.
When I married in the ’70s, we bought a house on Ontario Street. We paid $29,000. Jumping ahead, this is now the cost of ONE of my press bills. So things have changed. Places in Bloomfield that sold for $60K when I opened my shop there are now worth (or shall I say cost? Worth is questionable) over $300K. With little alterations, other than replacing the burned-out light bulb in the bathroom.

The slow increase in house costs was disturbing. But we had no idea of what was to come.

YAY! WE GOT DISCOVERED!
In days gone by, if you were buying a house, you would barter for the best price you could get. If the owner held firm, you would try to ‘throw in’ things like a washer/dryer combo or the gaudy chandelier in the living room, and a deal was struck. Not the way it goes anymore.

Remember the days when you could buy a ‘fixer-upper’ for dirt cheap, knowing (or thinking) you had the skills to bring it back to life, making sure the County building officers didn’t know you were doing it?

New buyers don’t care. They will buy houses that rats and racoons are unwilling to vacate by outbidding interested buyers by thousands of dollars. They then hire contactors (and exterminators) to add a couple of hundred thousand dollars to fix up the ‘fixer-upper’.

THE ‘STARTER HOME’ IS EXTINCT.
It used to be you could buy a small home, and gather your money to buy a bigger home, especially if you had kids, or a stuffed elephant collection, requiring another room. Those days are gone.

Here is a fake interview I just made up: “Hi, I’m Tiffany and I’m a waitress at a local restaurant. I’m so happy I managed to buy a starter home for only $375,000. My bank manager said, ‘Waitress? The sky’s the limit for you!’.” Which brings me to:

PEOPLE WITH MONEY JUMP AHEAD; PEOPLE WITHOUT ARE LEFT BEHIND
I’ve written about this several times, but nothing changes. I get it. You can’t back up the train. Although trains do have a reverse shifter. Hmmm. Trouble is, this is a train that can’t be stopped.

WHO’S TO BLAME?
I don’t blame Council for our bad situation, any more than I can blame Hydro when my power goes out in a windstorm. The difference is: Hydro fixes it, and I’m happy again. Not so in this case.

WHO’S DOING WHAT?
I know running the County is tough, but they often don’t know what they’re doing. “We want affordable housing! No not that, and no not that one.” It’s like when we designed a business card for my worst client who said, “I don’t know what I want, but that’s not it.” What do you do with that? Without direction, the problem can’t be fixed.

It’s the same with Council. They have a lot of rules to follow—most of them not set by them. But we’re out here watching, and it makes no sense to us. “We need housing developments, but not you and not you.” Council would be my worst client. Fishing around, accepting and rejecting does not good policy make.

Focusing on the job at hand, and attempting to solve it? That might be the way to go. Why doesn’t this happen? That brings us to …

MONEY
It’s been said it’s the root of all evil. I would like to modify that to: Money messes everything up. I have some money, as most County people do. I no longer need to stretch a box of Kraft Dinner into five days of meals, and I don’t miss those days.

To me, money comes and money goes. That’s pretty much how most of us live. We pay, we live. We watch prices of everything we need to ‘live’ go up and up. Sometimes we need to cut back on our imported caviar expenditures, and move our massage treatments to three days a week.

Having said that, I note that we control our money. We decide where we spend our money. (More on this later.) None of us have a concept of the value of money. We spend more on a two-litre bottle of Coke than we do on gas for our cars. We have clients who freak out because we charge 15 cents for a photocopy, when they can get it at Staples for seven cents. I send them to Staples. On the way, they will pick up a Starbuck’s Mocha Cappuccino + the gas + the time consumed—to save eight cents per copy. This is how money messes us up.

BIG MONEY
This brings us up to Council level. If you had millions of dollars, how would you spend it? If it were us, we would say: “Pay off my mortgage, divorce my nagging money-sucking wife, buy a yacht, and live on an island.” Fortunately, councillors don’t tend to do that. (But keep your eyes open!) Think about it for a second. We’re pretty much stuck where we are. We work. We don’t get raises. Inflation is chewing into our lives.

TIME FOR A RESET
We need a reset. Council plans for growth, and tries to ready themselves for it. I get that. I say: This is not a time for growth, it is a time for stabilization.

If you destroy the communities you are sworn to protect, you are wrong. We will lose what we are, and just become real estate offered to the highest bidder. Money runs the game, but we are unwilling participants in the game.

We are not real estate. We are the people who made the County attractive to those who wished to cash in. They’ll be happy. They will hug and do ‘kiss-kiss’ on the cheeks, and we will have a whole new County. Except without us.

Running the County is not about roads and recycling and garbage pickup, or water rates and taxes. It seriously is about us. Remember us? The people who have lived here for years, and painfully watched the County send bouquets to people they don’t know, and entice them because they have dollars to spend, and they’d like to have a piece of that?

This is not how communities are built. Communities are not built on money and budgets and developers’ demands and consultants’ predictions, and expectations of future growth.

Communities are what you have, in hand, right now. We’re not part of the equation right now, because Council has other, more pressing things on their minds. They don’t seem to know: If they lose us, they lose everything. Then we’ll just be Mississauga East, and they’ll all love each other in their new expensive real estate acquisitions.

And the people who drew them here will head for another place that is as comfortable and perfect and creative as we once were.

countymag@bellnet.ca