If you’ve been fretting that your house might actually be nice if only politicians had designed it, relax, because they’re from the government and they’re here to cram you into a shoebox. According to our federal housing minister, “I am excited to introduce standardized designs.” Excited, no less. He would be, at regimenting citizens for the greater good. But since my home is my castle, I’m appalled.
Now some spoilsports might wonder whether the same people who created the housing crisis through a mix of arrogant, ill-considered and unpopular policies are the ones to fix it. But there’s also a more cosmic issue: is there any reason to think they should?
It’s like how economists keep telling you socialism can’t work, then G.K. Chesterton chimes in: “Socialistic idealism does not attract me very much, even as idealism. The glimpses it gives of our future happiness depress me very much. They do not remind me of any actual happiness, of any happy day I have ever myself spent.”
I have no reason to think Housing Minister Sean Fraser can shoehorn us all into the “infill” of his dreams. But also no reason to share his dreams because human-compacting units don’t remind me of anywhere I ever wanted to live. Putting yourself as well as your stuff in storage may be very modern. But I’m old-fashioned.
Speaking of which, it may amuse you that the government actually created a catalogue of “small house designs” back in 1965, apparently convinced mere home-builders and hapless home-dwellers didn’t know what a bedroom was or something.
In some ways it’s a very quaint document, featuring such wonders as plywood exterior finish (Design 140) and “cold storage cupboard” (Design 124). And when they say small, they mean it: Design 124 is 912 square feet; 140 is a palatial 1,032. But it’s very up-to-date in its patronizing enthusiasm for government rescuing private citizens from their cluelessness.
And another thing. The 1965 catalogue offers tasteful black-and-white drawings of these compact suburban wonders and … every single one is single-family detached, complete with trees. It’s easy to mock such euphemisms as “Space for eating is provided in the kitchen,” or deplore “Little boxes made of ticky tacky,” in the words of the 1963 hit song. But it sure beat living in a tenement.
Or did it? Not according to the herd of independent minds who stampeded the other way, lowing that we shall all live in state-approved, space-efficient, people-stacking facilities and be happy.
A government press release from December claimed, “This new initiative will help accelerate the delivery of homes by standardizing housing designs, starting with low-rise construction.” Of course it won’t accelerate anything. But it’s revealing that while some “potential catalogue” might offer “modular and prefabricated homes,” for now, there are no actual houses. You didn’t want one anyway. Or know how to build it.
Indeed, the whole initiative even seems to blame us for the housing crisis because while humans have been constructing dwellings for tens of thousands of years, we never knew how until this particular cabinet weighed in. Among various notices about this ghastly initiative, you’ll encounter the claim: “Federal government lays the foundation to change how Canada builds homes.” And again amazement at the hubris jostles horror at the prospect.
I actually find the whole concept of a national “housing minster” absurd. But Fraser is apparently unchastened by the Trudeau administration’s long record of failure on every important file from health care to defence to, well, housing.
He told the Commons transport committee in May that critics should get out of the way of the high-minded: “My view is that people who would suggest that a problem is impossible to solve shouldn’t try to interfere with the person who’s trying to actually solve it. If your goal is to throw up obstacles every way, feel free.”
Yet nobody thinks the problem is impossible to solve. But many think you can’t solve it with the same tools that created it, from undesirable uniformity in housing to letting far too many people into Canada every year to encounter a bloated, suffocating, presumptuous state.
I’m not anti-immigrant. But building a strip mall with apartments from St. John to Vancouver would be nothing to be proud of, like walling off Vancouver’s waterfront with glass-and-steel towers. And there are alternatives.
The most expensive book I ever bought was Christopher Alexander et al.’s 1977 “A Pattern Language,” a manifesto on everything from gardens to houses to urban planning so cities could be nice instead of nasty. And its authors refreshingly combined granola sensibility with hostility to modernist, Bauhaus-type architecture and zoning, a Jane Jacobs “turquoise” marriage of environmentalism with local liberty and voluntarism.
Give people that stuff and they’ll build nice single- or even extended-family houses. Luckily Fraser and his colleagues are from the government and here to prevent it.
National Post