Archive for July, 2011

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July 27, 2011

The complex origins of vacant and abandoned homes in a neighbourhood

Recent lessons from the housing crash in the United States described families simply walking away from their homes, leaving their front doors unlocked, because they couldn’t afford to carry their mortgages anymore. Financial abandonment is one of the starkest reasons residences are left untended.

However, like most things, it’s always more complicated. Just how empty and derelict does a building have to be to be abandoned? The octogenarian who lives only in two rooms of her house, having sealed off the rest, still holds domain over it all. But what if she was hospitalized? And then sent to long-term care? And then failed to pay her taxes?

In my neighbourhood, I can think of eight homes that, depending on the definition used, are vacant or abandoned. None of them, that I know of, are haunted or marijuana grow-ops:

  • After a fire started by a basement tenant put one family out of their new and hard-earned home, their re-building was abandoned because of lack of funds and the complexity of (re-)building without a contractor.  That’s been about ten years now since they lost their dream.
  • Another house on the same street also suffered a fire. The house attached to it also suffered damage. Neither household had insurance to re-build. It took two or three years for the first home to be sold to a speculator, who hired cheaply, and then sold it with fresh paint and pot lights “as is.” The family moved out of the attached house, and the landlord rented to a poorer tenants less able to complain.
  • There are three other homes in the neighbourhood where elderly residents have moved to homes for the aged, none of them interested in selling. One of these homes has been empty for over twenty years, the other fledges various young family members every few years, and the third has rats for inhabitants.
  • Another family home in the neighbourhood was sold to the owner’s brother who had no interest in living in it nor in renting it out. It has sat, preserving the family capital, for a quarter century.
  • Another home was bought by a resident in the adjoining house, so as he could enjoy some peace, but the cost of re-zoning the properties to make them a single home is too prohibitive. So, officially, that home is empty.
  • A final house in my neighbourhood acts as a storage locker for a couple who live across the street from it. Vans are unloaded into and out of the house but no one lives there. Census-takers knock futilely every five years. (Another neighbour tells me of a similar house a few streets away which someone else uses to keep their cats and dogs housed – and yes, it smells.)
When this was a working-class neighbourhood, houses were cheap, and few took note of these alternate uses. This was long before housing prices climbed, when only affordable housing activists and a few academics saw such rough, unused gems as valuable housing stock.
In 2008, the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre (PARC), an activist group called Abandonment Issues and York University’s City Centre partnered to look at cycles of reinvestment and disinvestment in the Toronto area. They explored the housing cycles that happen as neighbourhoods are abandoned and then “discovered” again, creating a small building boon of condos and flow of capital. Some good pressure was raised over the issue but not much changed on the legislative front.
Nowadays neighbours are more likely to talk about the property values of these half million dollars homes left derelict or vacant.
In response to the idea of impact on local property values and the loss of additional housing stock as shortages grow, some other municipalities have adopted “Use it or Lose it” laws.
The City of Toronto’s Affordable Housing Office may, too, be exploring the issues these vacant and abandoned homes create. That’s good news if it doesn’t just provide new fodder for housing speculators.

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July 20, 2011

Census 2011 looms as a failure

I couldn’t convince my own mother to do the long form census from Statistics Canada. Oh sure, she, the mother of a researcher, meant well but it is v-e-r-y long. At least, I console myself,  she recycled the form, meeting that civic participation bar.

A colleague explained that he had tried to complete the on-line the National Household Survey (the long form census) more than three times but he finally gave the task to another household member because each question required another hunt through the family files: housing costs, education levels, etc. Why couldn’t they make it easier, he asked?

This is a small sample, to be sure, but, like doing our taxes, filling out long government forms is no fun. So the response rate to the survey has got to be poor or very uneven.

Jennifer Ditchburn from Canadian Press quoted, “a lot of people shut down the conversation quickly when they find out it’s not mandatory.” She also reported Statistics Canada is not following up on incomplete Household Surveys and is settling for incomplete ones.

What will happen to the quality of the data, then? I recently asked a medical officer of health. He too had heard about the low response rates and despaired how this was what had been predicted during the discussions before parliament when the census revisions emerged. We’ll have to do estimations, he explained, to test how reliable the data is and then we will muddle through.

And that epitomizes the very issue with the census – a census is, by definition, a count of every household (or in the case of the long-form census, one in five random households). This census is no longer a census, but simply a sample of the Canadian population.

While the progress of the data collection is not public, other hints of the (non-)returns tell a worsening story.

The short-form census, the one that basically asked us to re-type what was on the mail label and add family language, must have a poor response rate too.

At the community agency where I work, clients were confused by government messaging. Hadn’t the whole debate about the census concluded that it was voluntary? Staff have had to explain that the short-form census is still required, while the long-form one, no longer called the census, is not.

Confused? I’ll say. So are others, as documented in the Hamilton Spectator and the Halifax Chronicle Herald this week (see the comments section for further evidence even).

I feel particularly mournful about this because, as governments move towards integrated policy responses, such as poverty-reduction strategies, and as our computational capacities increase, the census has become integral to good evidence-based decision-making. So just as the need and our capacity to explore better policy-making are emerging, our ability to do so has been undercut.

What a crying shame.

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