Affordable housing

I’ve told this story before.

When my dear father (who just celebrated his 85th, and may God bless him with many more!..) got off the boat back in ’56 his first job was shovelling coal. With a hand shovel.

By the time I was in my teens he’d remade himself as a real estate broker. I remember all us kids emptied our piggy banks to be part of the investment syndicate when he bought his first investment property.

Then we were all corralled into doing whatever we were capable of, from scraping old paint to applying new paint, so he could turn that place around.

The term “flip” had yet to be coined.

Dad was well on his way to joining the pantheon of post-war immigrants who done good in real estate.

And there was a ton of them. Germans, Italians, Ukrainians, Jews from all over, I got to know lots of immigrants who did very well in the real estate business.

Some of them got seriously rich.

Most of them, and my father would be in this group, never got “rich,” but they got seriously comfortable.

As a result of my father’s success in that business, I was somewhat drawn to it myself, so I’d pick Dad’s brain to get a handle on things.

So how do you know what a property is really worth?

It’s worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it.

What is “affordable housing?”

If somebody bought it, it was obviously affordable… and so on.

OK.

By that metric, when somebody pays five million for a penthouse condo in Toronto, it’s obviously “affordable housing.”

But that’s not the definition of “affordable” that obtains when we discuss affordable housing today.

And that’s where the private sector affordable housing model falls flat on its face. A $14/hr minimum wage means you’ll never afford decent housing in places like Toronto.

Which is why governments need to get serious about public housing.

That’s why we need a robust public housing strategy.