Less is more in terms of housing needs - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston
One of Canada’s big problems these days is the lack of new homes - and the money needed to pay for the homes we have. Younger people are having trouble accumulating enough money to buy a home.
As part of its plans to rejuvenate the Canadian economy, given U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade restrictions, the Canadian federal government has created Build Canada Homes with the promise of building new homes “at a scale and at a speed not seen since the Second World War”.
But have government officials looked at those post-war homes? My wife Jill’s parents were married during World War II and began dreaming of a home of their own. They eventually got it with the help of a mortgage through Central Mortgage and Housing. They built a house on a half-acre lot in Scarborough (a minimum size to get a loan). It was a small house, under 1,000 square feet.
Later, after Jill’s mom died, her father remarried and, with their combined incomes, the couple moved into a much bigger house, which had become the standard.
Houses were way smaller back then. I’ve always been amused by the progression of houses in Blyth’s Howson family. Fred, who moved Howson and Howson to Blyth from Wingham after the Wingham mill was destroyed by the fire, built a new house in Blyth for his family. As his sons became adults, they built homes that were slightly larger. Their children built much bigger homes than their parents.
That’s the way things have gone in general. We simply want bigger, more well-equipped houses. Meanwhile, those who can’t afford these houses make do with apartments, some of which are so small they make post-war houses look huge by comparison.
We live in a farmhouse probably built at the beginning of the last century. It’s big - bigger than we need as retirees, but we like it enough that we’re putting off moving to something smaller, as our kids want. But the comfort we have in this house would have been undreamt of by all previous owners.
My parents bought a farm after my father came home from World War II. Before they moved in, they had electricity installed and a deep well drilled. The cost of that, and low income in the post-war years, left them short of money. They couldn’t afford a refrigerator and for many years kept food in an ice box, cooled by large blocks of ice harvested off the lake. Imagine my grandchildren hearing that!
Yet, here we are, in a time when thousands of people are living in tents in parks and along river banks, something I never heard of when I was younger. Meanwhile, others are living in apartments in tall buildings - either rented or owned.
When we were first married more than 50 years ago, we rented an apartment in Toronto. Later, we moved to this area and lived in four more rented facilities. We were living, and publishing The Blyth Standard, in a house beside Bainton’s, that was recently demolished, when the auctioneer came in to pay his bill and suggested we should buy the house he was selling across the corner (a much smaller version of the house where the Wonky Frog Studio is today).
We went to the auction and ended up buying the house at the ridiculous price by today’s standards of something like $7,000. It needed a lot of work, but we owned our own house (and office).
Later, with a growing family, we sold that house and bought this one. It also needed a lot of work. My favourite improvement was 25 years ago when we removed the woodshed and summer kitchen and added the room I’m working in now, with plenty of windows and a view of the birds and animals in the yard.
My generation has been lucky that way. We’ve been ahead of the trend, able to afford the houses in which we live. Today in Toronto the average price of a house is $1.1 million. Imagine being a young couple and thinking of buying a home at that price. And prices keep going up, so dreaming of waiting a few years and then buying a house looks like a nightmare.
And so the government’s dream of building new homes at a pace not seen since the post-war years seems wishful. We need to lower our dreams and build smaller, less expensive homes if we hope to have more people be able to afford a home of their own.
In a world where millions live without a home, let alone electricity, in Third World countries, and people are homeless in Canada, how well off do we need to be? There’s something indecent about our greedy desires.
Everyone deserves a safe, heated home, both people in Canada and the Third World. If it means we must live in smaller homes, so be it. And if that means saving thousands of acres of valuable farmland for smaller lots, even better!