Have we lost what’s important about our homes?
In a country where health and education are free, shouldn’t housing be on the same list?
This long winter of our collective anxiety about the pandemic set me thinking about our house and homes and what they mean for us.
My partner and I have the good fortune to be retired and without immediate financial concerns unlike so many who are facing potential unemployment, job losses and worst of all losing the place they can return to at the end of the day secure in the knowledge that, if all else fails, it is their place of sanctuary.
We live on a street near the lake which at one time was full of small orchards. The houses, mostly post-World War Two, were red brick ranch styles with a smattering of split levels a style popular at that time.
My partner has lived on this street for more than 40 years and slowly these red brick homes, all with large gardens, mature trees and bushes, are being replaced with much larger two-storey houses which are increasingly pushing the footprints of the property to the limit and narrowing the garden space to make way for large decks and swimming pools.
Ihave lived there for only five years and in that time have watched at least six of these homes demolished and replaced by much larger rather characterless new ones. The mature old gardens replaced by sods of new grass and landscaping.
Soon, at this rate, my partner will have the only older ranch style left on the street but will still possess a large and very lovely backyard framed by two enormous walnut trees.
Houses have become in many instances a commodity or an investment and more often a source of income for developers.
Prices are skyrocketing with no apparent end in sight. My husband and I bought our first house in 1964 for the exorbitant price of $18,500. That same house a few years ago sold for over $1,000,000 and half the garden had already been severed a few years previously for another much larger house.
One has to wonder: How much does a family of four or five need in order to live comfortably? Are four bathrooms enough? Does a marble top kitchen ensure better cooking skills?
My aunt, a doughty Scotswoman from the Black Isle, brought up a family of six in a modest council house in Glasgow. She produced mouth watering meals in a small galley kitchen on a four-burner gas stove.
Canada has consistently been named one of the best countries in the world to live and bring up a family. COVID has laid bare what has been evident for years.
We have a huge housing crisis and the gaps between those who can afford a comfortable secure place to live and those who cannot is widening. Homelessness has become an increasingly worrisome problem.
It is hard for those of us fairly secure in our places of residence to even begin to imagine what it must be like not to have that luxury.
Tent cities are springing up like mushrooms and people wearily picking up their meagre belongings to hopefully find somewhere else as they are moved along.
Our elderly citizens, too often found in long-term-care homes, have paid the ultimate price in COVID deaths. Our northern communities are still living in substandard housing having to boil drinking water after more than 20 years. Conditions which Archbishop Tutu many years ago described as similar to Third World conditions.
Many people on fixed incomes or unable to work are condemned to live basement apartments or subsidized highrises with cockroaches, leaking pipes and falling plaster.
The fortunate citizens who can afford these more expensive and much larger homes are providing work and income for the building trades and workmen.
No one will dispute this. But surely for a country as rich in resources as Canada we can also provide for our more vulnerable population a secure and safe refuge also.
We have free access to health care and education, surely housing should be added to that list.
Perhaps Shakespeare sums it up best: “People usually are the happiest at home.”