They’re Coming for your Single-Family Homes
The Saturday Huddle is a weekly column that features opinion, analysis, and reflections on Huddle stories, podcasts, and business news in the region. Trevor Nichols is Huddle’s editor.
If we ever hope to solve the housing crises plaguing our cities, we must stop what I’ve come to think of as the “homeowner lobby.”
You know what I’m talking about. From Saint John to Halifax to Quispamsis, every time a project is proposed – and I mean EVERY time – a group of single-family homeowners turn up and throws a tantrum.
They talk about the impact on traffic, road safety, or the environment. They find obscure bylaws and argue the project breaks them. They complain about shadows from tall buildings, construction noise, or that the project doesn’t “fit” with the neighbourhood.
But underneath all of that, what almost all of them are really saying is “I don’t want this building near my house.” They want progress and growth halted because it will personally impact them.
It’s shocking how often they have succeeded in delaying or even outright cancelling a project. Each time, dozens, or hundreds, of potential new homes are lost.
I firmly believe the homeowner lobby is more responsible than any other force on Earth for our housing crisis.
Homeowners, I don’t care about the “character” of your neighbourhoods. I don’t care about shadows from buildings encroaching on your precious tomato garden. I don’t care about a few extra cars on your streets.
And, frankly, the fact that you think any of these small, personal grievances are more important than the housing catastrophes unfolding in our cities smacks of privilege and selfishness.
Cities like Moncton and Halifax are vibrant, growing places packed with people. They’re good places to live because of all these people and if they don’t change along with them, they will die.
Homeowners want to live in these vibrant, changing cities. But the second that vibrancy or change impacts their backyard patio they flock to public meetings to shut it down; they’re happy to deprive the rest of us of affordable homes and livable cities for their personal benefit.
It’s infuriating.
This week, Huddle’s Derek Montague wrote about a public hearing for a relatively modest building project in Fairview that would add apartments and ground-floor commercial space to the neighbourhood.
Homeowner pushback was intense. Residents lamented losing their “peaceful,” residential-only community. One person warned of a “big, bustling ghetto” of small businesses opening in the area.
“Honestly, what are you doing to the area?” she asked.
What the city is doing, of course, is trying to get more desperately needed housing built, and give the people that live in it a place to shop, eat, get their hair cut, or any number of the other services.
In other words, create a vibrant urban community.
An even sadder display of homeowner entitlement came on Thursday when the city tried to host a public information session on an ambitious project to redevelop land around the Halifax Shopping Centre — a project that could create more than 5,000 new homes.
A mob of angry locals, buoyed by an agitator wielding a bullhorn, was so disruptive the city had to pack up and go home. Councillor Shawn Cleary told Joe Thompson he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“I never expected at a public meeting to have an older lady with an actual megaphone get up on a stage and start jacking up the crowd and asking people to oppose this,” Cleary said.
I’ve been reporting on municipal politics in cities and towns across Canada for more than a decade and I can definitively say this kind of behaviour isn’t new. Every time homeowners are asked to sacrifice even a sliver of their privacy for a vital project, or to reimagine their community ever-so-slightly, some portion of them go absolutely berserk.
For a long time, they got away with it.
Governments (at all levels, but especially municipally) have for decades been homeowners’ biggest defenders. Most politicians own homes themselves, and older folks who were lucky enough to buy houses before they became unattainable are the most reliable bloc of voters.
The homeowner lobby lined up nicely with politicians’ interests, so it had an outsized voice and influence, even in cities where huge swaths of people rent.
But now, even some of those long-time defenders are waking up to the toxic influence of the homeowner lobby on our cities. Cleary and other HRM councillors’ increasingly thin patience for their antics are good examples.
In other places, where municipal politicians still won’t stand up to homeowners, regional or national governments have stepped in.
New Zealand recently introduced zoning rules that allow three buildings of up to three storeys to be built on nearly all properties in major cities.
Less than two weeks ago, British Columbia teased similar legislation that will force municipalities to allow as many as four homes on traditional single-family lots.
This kind of small- and medium-scale “infill housing” is what most planners agree is essential to fixing housing crises in our cities. The laws forcing that on municipalities are dramatic, and they supersede the much more restrictive local rules put in place by homeowner-friendly councils. They’re also making homeowners very mad.
Good.
The only way we solve the housing crises in our cities is by building more homes, WAY more homes. And the only way we’re going to truly get enough homes built is by obliterating single-family neighbourhoods.
The homeowner lobby has been standing in our way for too long, and politicians are finally starting to push back. They must push harder, much harder, to even begin to solve this crisis.
I hope more find the courage to do it.