Stuckness
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in August 2024.
I’m part of a team working with four post-graduate students who are exploring tiny houses as a potential solution to our housing dilemma. They’re international students, so the task of finding a view of reality that accommodates their cultural perspectives, academic expectations, the incredibly complex world of housing and the additional complications of rurality is especially challenging. We gathered en groupe at a potential build site to help us get on the same page and move forward together with as much efficiency as possible.
Along with the students and the profs and the program administrators and community project partners were some of the municipal staff who share responsibility for some aspects of the long and twisting story of building housing, including those who have been involved in the early planning stage. Whoever wrote the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel was probably inspired by observing a similar gathering: there were many languages being spoken and the making of meaning came hard and lean. If we’d had to draft a press release, it would be brief: Making housing happen is complicated.
For a few years now, there has been a babel about making housing happen and remarkably little progress. It seems stuck. So much talk, so little action. (We could say the same thing about a few other big problems – dealing with climate change, inhumane and illegal wars, massive displacement of people, to name but a few – but we’ll stick with housing for now.)
My guru, Paulo Freire, describes our process through life as a two-step dance – the rhythmic progression of acting on reflecting and reflecting on action – which I’ve written about before. (And I lie: Freire does not call this a two-step dance -- I named it that. If you want undigested Freire, I recommend Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published about 1961, but being rediscovered recently.) I reference him again because this two-step construct suggests a handy tool for getting unstuck. And we need all the help we can get.
There are two kinds, and only two kinds, of stuckness. One is being stuck in action. The other is being stuck in reflection. The antidote for either is its antithesis. Let’s unpack that a bit with respect to the housing challenge.
Being stuck in action is when you frenetically do this/do that/do the other thing hoping that something will get you to where you want to be, in this case creating the housing Canadians need. We gave the mandate for housing to the free market several decades ago and it has been frenetically building since then. But the thises and thats march to the same drummer, the obligation of the market to create profit, so the scope of what is envisioned is curtailed. The focus of the exercise is not the housing Canadians need but the housing that delivers profit. So we see single family homes increasingly large and upscale, condos increasingly small and shoddily built; urban centres growing, rural settlements dying; commute times expanding, productivity shrinking; economic inequality expanding, social unrest rising.
The market is stuck in action: to get unstuck requires it to stop and reflect on how and the extent to which its actions have moved it toward its purported goal of providing housing for Canadians. Or to fess up that that is not really its goal and that it has indeed been very effective at meeting its real goal of creating profit. In that case, reflection recommends it continue its current path apace, which seems to be largely what’s happening.
Being stuck in reflection is when your brain goes round and round and cannot land on a choice. With respect to housing, that sounds a lot like the Tower of Babelness that our little group experienced locally, but writ much larger. There are the languages of zoning, bylaws, Official Plans, provincial legislation, building regulations, environmental concerns, archeological considerations, infrastructure availability and capacity, transportation, support services, fiduciary complexities, legal complications etc etc etc.
The antidote to being stuck in reflection is to take an action, any action, and see where that gets you. That seems to be the strategy of the provincial government – the burgeoning use of Minister’s Zoning Orders which hoppity-skips over any other jurisdictional powers, the attempted take-over of the Greenbelt for, ironically, more of what the market has already produced, the 3-domiciles-by-right densification requirement (where there is municipal infrastructure). The federal government’s recent move to require cities to adopt 4-plexes if it wants federal funding is a similar move. Where will these leaps into action get us? Too early to tell.
But leaping into action may also be an option increasingly adopted by developers and citizens who are indeed focused on creating the housing Canadians need. Who could blame them?
