City needs more social housing

Opinion

The mayor of Brandon quipped that housing prices are at risk of rising if there is no action taken to enable future growth in the city (i.e., upgrade wastewater treatment), but housing prices have been rising steadily for decades despite new houses being built. The cause of rising housing prices must be something else.

I sent an email to the mayor and council recommending the city make developers pay for infrastructure upgrades (like upgrades to wastewater management), since it is the developers who benefit financially from public infrastructure spending. The city pays for the unprofitable infrastructure that developers need to complete profitable projects. The city goes into debt, making it difficult to maintain infrastructure without raising taxes, and developers get rich by creating inadequate, expensive (but cheap), and poorly planned neighbourhoods, lowering the spatial quality of the city and its environment.

In my email, I stressed that the city needs to focus on finding ways to improve water-use efficiency and reduce water consumption, as projections show climate change will make Brandon much drier and hotter than it is today. The Assiniboine will likely run low, and water rationing may be necessary. Building the infrastructure to conserve water today will leave Brandon better prepared to deal with future droughts, and lowering water consumption will reduce the need for upgrades to water treatment infrastructure.

The final concern I raised is the presence of lead pipes in the city’s core, and my dismay at the city’s inaction since the problem came to light 10 years ago. Lead levels in drinking water continue to exceed the national guidelines by as much as four times, according to a study done by the city. The lead pipe problem is an example of how the city fails to prioritize the health of citizens and fails to upgrade existing infrastructure to meet national standards. Growth will not replace lead pipes. Growth will ensure there is no shortage of crumbling infrastructure the city will be ill equipped to maintain. The city must find ways of effectively addressing the problems it is facing, rather than hiding behind growth ambitions and the deception of growth as a cure-all.

Back to the purpose of this letter: affordable housing. Cheap houses can be found on the market in Bulgaria, rural Italy and rural France. These are places struggling to retain populations, and it is unlikely that Brandon will depopulate any time soon. Recently, people with more money than they know what to do with have been purchasing secondary (or tertiary) homes and/or keeping houses empty to rent out as Airbnbs in popular locations. During the pandemic, Torontonians bought secondary homes in Nova Scotia, causing prices to skyrocket beyond what the locals can afford. These movements could not have been predicted, but now have a significant impact on the availability of housing, by excluding those who can’t afford the prices of someone who can afford two or more houses.

Human behaviour plays a significant role in housing prices. It doesn’t matter if the house is in worse condition than when it was bought, houses are viewed as commodities and people who own houses plan to make money from them, as do real estate agents. Since people are always trying to make money from selling houses, housing prices will always rise to the point of eventually becoming unaffordable for many, and people are going deeper into debt to pay for housing. To fix the problem of unaffordable housing, there needs to be an intervention.

If rising housing prices are caused by our view of houses as commodities, then decommodification is needed to lower the price of housing. Decommodification can be partially achieved by the municipal government if money is earmarked for social housing annually. The city should begin to invest 2.5 per cent to five per cent of its annual budget into social housing (or $2.5 to $5 million), adding about 30 quality and affordable city-owned units to the housing stock each year. Strengthening the social housing option would take pressure off private rents and drive down prices. This has been demonstrated by the extremely successful social housing program in Vienna.

Over time, Brandon’s social housing units could be a source of revenue to fund future social housing in the city. After 30 years of building 30 units per year and keeping the rent at $500 per month, the city will have added 900 affordable units and brought in an annual income of $5.4 million to reinvest in social housing. If only this decommodification project started 30 years ago, 900 more families in Brandon would be living in affordable housing today. The addition of municipal-owned decommodified houses to the city’s stock is one way of improving affordability. It is a project worth pursuing, but requires a local government that is willing to act and has the support of its citizens, and a change in how we view housing.

GRAHAM JANZ

Gothenburg, Sweden

Former Brandon resident

MSc, Spatial Planning