I live in social housing
In Hamilton, residents in this ‘rigidly defined’ group are at bottom of the pecking order
A story about the bodily fluids of a man who died alone in his Hamilton CityHousing apartment, leaking into the unit beneath him, received little attention. But it gave pause for thought and drew upon my years in 1970s academia and a political theorem not heard of much today.
It has taken me a long time to be able to say that I live in social housing. After so many years of being a vagabond and holding down odd jobs, thinking myself unfettered and class-free, I am apparently enmeshed in a rigidly defined social group again. Frankly, it was easier to admit that I had a mental health diagnosis.
Despite a nominal fluidity in modern Canadian society such as sociologist John Porter discussed in “Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada” with people moving up and down the social and occupational ladder according to the vicissitudes of capitalist economy, social stratification is a fact of life.
The strictures of class are most evident in the hierarchy of living arrangements we find ourselves in and which we see clearest in our cities. Social housing occupies a unique niche, and until recently, unknown slot.
In Hamilton, newer single-family detached houses from 2,000 to up to 6,000 square feet, mostly in preamalgamation ‘bedroom’ communities, are at the top of the pecking order. Older family homes between 1,000 and 2,000 square feet on the Mountain and south of King Street in the lower city are next. Then come cottages and row houses between 500 and 1,000 square feet in Hamilton’s traditional working class neighbourhoods, north of King, such as Shipley and Gibson-Landsdale. These all comprise the propertied classes or, in archaic parlance, the landed gentry.
Now come renters, or tenants, to maintain the historicity of this class analysis. Using Marxian lexicon, the ‘aristocracy’ are those paying market rent in well maintained apartments. Most market rate tenants are short-term renters waiting to enter one of the housing strata. By serving notice to vacate, they allow landlords to raise rents ad infinitum, keeping them in market rent category. Then comes ‘affordable’ tenancy in older, often poorly maintained apartment buildings with a high percentage of long term or ‘legacy’ tenants. The provincially mandated yearly rent increase sharply separates affordable tenancy from market rate tenancy.
In Hamilton’s superheated housing matrix, in which the number of rental units in all categories is shrinking, six is a crucial threshold. It appears to be the point where landlords are evicting tenants under Form N-12 in the Residential Tenants Act (RTA), claiming the unit for personal use. The city has struck up a subcommittee to study the feasibility of licensing rentals with fewer than six units.
Finally, there is social housing; most of which but not all are subsidized by various levels of government. Consisting largely of concrete slabbed towers inspired by the urban renewal and slum clearance movements in U.S. and U.K., social housing is readily identified by signage of service providers located on-site and a general state of dishevelment.
Social housing is not just a category. It is a way of life, a labyrinth of regulations, protocols, special-needs application forms and a long waiting list with different streams of eligibility.
Chewing up a huge bite of the city’s budget, social housing is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy of supervisors, managers, city-paid superintendents and cityrun tenant associations.
Within social housing are two subcategories, city-owned and operated facilities and privately-owned complexes, which have contracts with social agencies such as March of Dimes or Good Shepherd. These agencies’ clients are judiciously mixed with tenants paying affordable rent. Such is the case at St. John’s Place, where I live.
The ‘homeless,’ an emotive term as well as identifiable group, can be roughly compared to Karl Marx’s amorphous lumpenproletariat. The homeless are invisible, fiercely independent and, by and large, incapable of being politically galvanized.
Shifting from Karl Marx to Jane Jacobs, from dialectic-based determinism to progressive urbanism, I believe the concept of mixed housing is the key to building community.
The first thing I saw visiting Detroit in the mid-1980s was block upon block of crumbling, unmixed housing. There is a well known term initially associated with one ethno-religious group that has been given to this type of brutal, unmixed housing.
While social housing itself cannot reasonably be mixed, the edifice in which tenants are lodged can and should be located amid other types of living arrangements, especially of the propertied kind.
Affordable housing and tenant right activists may balk at the aforementioned simplifications. There are new types of living arrangements like faith-based supportive housing that upset my analysis. Then there are phenomena like senior isolation and mental illness. However, the fact remains that people living in social housing are second-class citizens in Canadian society.