Questioning the concept of rent and the cost of living
The other day I read that the housing market in Vancouver and Toronto is now only affordable for the wealthy. I remember in my youth during the late ’80s I used to pay $295 a month in rent for a one bedroom apartment in Hamilton, Ont. I made $660 a month working part time. I had my independence, my place, my home. And I was only 19. Nowadays people are staying with their parents into their 30s. Independence has gone out the window. Today a lot of people are paying more than 50 per cent of their monthly income on rent; some pay 70 per cent. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), paying anything over 30 per cent of our income on rent means that housing security is at risk. Life has become harder for working people and often their biggest expense is housing. The latest CMHC rental market survey for Guelph shows that we have the second lowest vacancy rates in Ontario at 1.2 per cent. A healthy vacancy rate is above 3 per cent, so our vacancy rate means essentially that it’s a landlord’s market. The average rent in Guelph in 2017 increased 3.4 per cent over last year. For 2017, the yearly rent increase allowed by the government for landlords to apply to their rates was 1.5 per cent. But there is a catch: landlords can raise rent to whatever the market will bare for apartments that are turned over; and that’s just what they did in Guelph.
My family came to Canada in 1969. Back then, you could buy a starter home and if you worked hard you could pay it off in 10 years, sometimes less. Now you’re lucky if your house is paid off in 30 years. And a lot of people are remortgaging just to be able to keep paying their bills. If I remember correctly, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society that capitalism can produce a lot of things for people; it is really good at creating gadgets that we don’t need, but it has one main flaw: it cannot produce cheap housing.He argued that our system can produce private goods, but is deficient at producing public goods such as housing, parks, and public transportation. Did you ever wonder why we don’t have bullet trains in the U.S. and Canada? Why we are travelling at the same speeds on VIA Rail trains as we did back in the ’50s?
One of the first decrees of the 1959 Cuban Revolution was to outlaw speculation on residential property. One could not profit from the sale of residential properties. Of course, to us that sounds abominable since a lot of Canadians depend on these savings for their later years. But it doesn’t sound so bad for young Canadians since they are not and won’t be able to buy a home like their parents and grandparents did at their age.
The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25 (1), declares: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” If we ask ourselves whether a human being is free if she lacks housing or is in constant fear of losing it, the answer is surely not, because how can one be free to work creatively or think of a great idea while living in a shelter? Can one be free if they are worried about being able to pay the rent every month? In order to be able to exercise freedom, we have to have the peace of mind and the physical ability to do so. After all, we have a limited amount of intellectual, physical, and emotional energy.
In his book, Sobre la Propiedad de la Tierra, Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Vaz Ferreira criticized the very idea of charging for a place to live, the very idea of rent, which we are so used to that we don’t even question the concept anymore. If we think about it though, rent is a fairly recent concept. For Canada’s First Nations, everyone had a right to a place to live. Vaz Ferreira wrote that up until today, man has only considered land as a source of production, but he suggested the idea of making another distinction and considering another dimension of land: “land for habitation.” Why should one have to pay for a place if one doesn’t ask to be born? Why should a human being be worse than any other animal? Why should we have to pay for a place to inhabit to someone that came before us and bought the land, which in many cases was expropriated, and can now charge for that property in perpetuity? Why should your right to property rent exclude my right to inhabit a place? After all, other animals all have a place to inhabit without asking for permission.
Another reason to offer people housing is the cost to the taxpayer. Maintaining one homeless shelter bed, paying for shelter staff, food, toiletries, etc. is more costly per person per year than paying the yearly rent for an independent apartment for that person. Homelessness increases the risk of developing mental health issues, physical illnesses, and addictions, all of which are expensive to treat. We must begin a conversation about the basic human right of housing. It is a right we have earned due to the mere fact of being born into this world. Housing is a human need, not a choice. The very least our community can offer us is a place to inhabit without price and without permission. Let’s get back to building social housing for need, not for profit. We were once an example to the civilized world in this, but we got distracted 30 years ago. It’s time to get back to formulating smart, sound, and efficient housing policy.
Image edited by Alora Griffiths/The Ontarion via CC0