Stop Renovictions
Cash for Clunkers and The Road to Wigan Pier
“ After three long years of mounting community pressure, City Hall is finally voting on a renoviction bylaw on July 15th.
It's passed the committee stage BUT it is still weak compared to other cities.
Wednesday is Ottawa's LAST CHANCE to strengthen tenants' protections.
Tell city council Ottawa’s renovation license must include:
A qualified persons report (from an engineer) to ensure vacancy by tenant is absolutely necessary
Temporary accommodations if a tenant must vacate during renovationsRent gap payments if temporary housing is more than current rent
Moving fees covered by the landlord
Ottawa is the only major city trying to pass a renoviction bylaw without these basic pieces.
So let's make our council know that Ottawa deserves better.
We need a strong renoviction bylaw to stop tenant displacement and protect affordable housing.
Add your name to send a message to the Mayor and your city councillor!”
I just used the acorncanada.org site to send an email to city hall about this and I think you should too.
Not only if you are struggling with inflated housing costs yourself, not only if you sympathize with the poor, but indeed, I daresay, you must endorse tenant protections if you want to see climate action at the collective infrastructure scale.
I can’t help but notice the parallels between this part of the economy and the automotive section, which I’ve studied more. The regulatory and financial incentives to renovate for efficiency mirror the incentives for the purchase of electric cars and the subsidies given to automakers. Just as the owners of old cars were penalized for emissions and scrapyards incentivized for scrapping them, taking away the bottom end of the used car market many people depended on, the government was giving subsidies for the purchase of new cars that many can never hope to afford even with a subsidy, and billions to the automakers to produce more new cars at ever-increasing prices. The money goes to people who are already prospering, and the person who needed an affordable car gets nothing.
It is the same now with the renovictions. The HVAC efficiency and energy savings are presented as a benefit to all, but the money goes to the landlords and developers, and the resulting product is affordable only to the rich. The person who needed affordable housing gets nothing.
The idea that we could make housing more energy efficient without lowering the cost to residents should be obvious nonsense to anyone.
Whenever housing comes up, I think of an article I read by George Orwell, more than a decade ago. I will relate what stuck with me for all these years before re-reading it.
I remember Orwell writing about the miners being short while he was too tall and they warned him, how the miners used to get bruises and sores on their knobby spines and called it “buttons down the back”. I remember the wages, how they were based on the price of coal, and the foreman would be paid by the manager and then he would pay the miners in his section.
Sometimes the price of coal would drop too low and there would be no work, but they still had housing. Orwell wrote about the housing arrangements for miners whether they were currently working or not: a room for a single man, a cottage for a married one, and more housing benefit depending on the number of children.
I remember reading all that and thinking how much better we had it at work, compared to those coal miners from a hundred years ago, thanks to unions and journalists like Orwell. But I never stopped thinking about the housing, because it was better than what we were getting in this modern century.
And it was not charity or generosity that gave the miners these municipally guaranteed homes, they were paid for by the taxes on the mine itself and the other profitable enterprises of the rich.
The greedy business men and entitled gentry understood that if they wanted people to work for them, they had to house those people, or they would perish or at least move away to avoid it. It seemed like common sense to me after I read it, and as I said, I’ve thought of it every time the precarity of housing comes up for me politically or personally.
I daresay that the businessmen and the property owning class in the modern era have diverged from sense in their simultaneous pursuit of both profits and rents.
How can people even live near enough to profit you if you charge such high rents? Have you forgotten how the bologna is made?
Read Orwell Free Here: https://files.libcom.org/files/wiganpier.pdf
And click below to send an email to city hall like I did:
In Solidarity,
Jonathan Gibson Davis
Kanata, Ontario
Thank you for sharing this, Jonathan. Great stuff to be known by Ottawan!
“This only affects those who are in work or have recently been in work, because when a man is on the P.A.C. his rent is assessed at a quarter of his dole, and if it is more than this he gets an extra allowance;”
- George Orwell on income adjusted public housing, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937
https://substack.com/@jonnycargo/note/c-294028543