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Thrusting
right along
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HOW planners. 1commit -rape. _ by Boyce
Richardson
Developers-planners-politicians, each a corner in an eternal triangle and each blaming the others that Canadians do not have people most in need, the housing they deserve.. . meanwhilethe the poorest 20 percent of the population, has no access to - adequate housing. The following speech by Boyce Richardson, associate editor of the Montreal Star, to the august convention of the town planning institute of Canada points to many injustices presently suffered by Canadians at the hands of not merely planners, but politicians and developers as well. And his words are strong, to a bbdy of professional planners that has increasingly been criticised for lack of action in planning for people’s needs rather than wants.
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I read the stuff .I was handed when I arrived. I read this little booklet on the low-cost $200 million housing programme. The figures shohed that the federal government loaned money to people whose earnings were between $4,000 and 64,206 at a rate of interest of 7% per cent. Their monthly payments amounted to 26.5 per cent of their inc-omes. If a man was lucky enough to earn $5,000 or more, the federal government would only charge him 9’/2 j)er cent.
But terest.
to the
big companies
- zero
in-
I looked into these figures’ a little more. Here was a much-heralded special fund for experimental programes for lowcost housing - one would be justified in assuming the idea was to serve the poor. The upper level of income provided for in this noble experiment was $10,000 a year: th ’ _ . charged for this experimental Low-cost housing was $250 a month. Much is made in the booklet that the experiment was designed to make housing available for people earning between $4,000 and $6,000; and that the average income of the homeowner under the programme was ,Cl’ilS BS,600 a year, compared with $9,325 under normal conditions.
What about the poorest?
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QW I CAME here thinking quite a bit about what seemed to me to be the two major problems confronting this country. One is that the province of Quebec seems to be making its way out of Canada. This is a national meeting of a group of professionals cintrally concerned with building this country, and I know that many of you in the English-speaking parts of Canada must have been asking yourselves a simple but troubling question: “If Robert Bourassa, a convinced federalist, with a comfortable majority in his provincial legislature, could not accept the constitutional deal recently offered to him, just exactly what kind of deal can Quebec accept and under what kind of leader?” Whatever your excuse may be for not having reflected the existence of this great problem, I cannot think that YOU ‘have any-excuse for the fact that the second problem, that is to say, the increasing American takeover of the Canadian economy, has also notfigured in your discussions at all. That is strange. One of the developers enlightened us with quotations from the mayors of american cities, and concluded that we have much to be proud of in Canada that we have not permitted our cities to Jegenerate to such a degree. Like him, I believe it could happen here: and it may do so unless we recognize that there are fundamental differences in the values which we are applying to our city management from thhose operating in the home of private enterprise.
Unrestrained
power
A challenge before us now is to push those differences further by deliberate and conscious policies. To do that we are to have to confront the going unrestrained power - of the big corporations. Nobody talked about it. A couple of passing references were made to Eric Kierarrs drid his thesis that the Canadian government, with a system of
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and depreciation tax allowances allowances that is wildly out of balance, american comis practically forcing panies to take--over Canadian competitors. I thought, before I get on to summarizing what has been said, I would just mentibn some of these things that have not been said. For in much of what was said, the implications were clear enough. Mr. Kierans - and remember that he is a former president of the Montreal and Toronto stock exchanges - in his recent speech in Newfoundland, exposed a fact which really forms a background to much of the talk we have-had here about the way that people are trying to by-pass the electoral system. He identified what he called, I think - I do not have the. text before me, and speak from memory - the deferred depreciation tax loan fund, that is to say the amount of depreciation that cornpanies can deduct from their tax returns, and carry forward, so long as they reinvest it. This has reached at last count, the staggering fugure of some 3’/2 billion dollars, and Mr. Kierans says that this is, in effect, a loan made by the federal goverflment, at zero interest - at zero interest - to the biggest companies in the land. Besides this loan fund at zero interest, other sources of loans for individuals and smaller companies are from chartere.d banks, chickenfeed: unless I am mistaken, some $I% or from the industrial maybe $2 billion: c!evelopment fund especially set up for that purpose, some $350 million. This is what the young radicals today describe as the Corporate Ripoff - and the startling fact is that the federal government is hand in glove with the most powerful and ‘the richest people in the land in aiding and abetting this ripoff.
Very impressive: except that I happen to have had on hand this little j’ublication, Last Post, containing the report on Canadian poverty, written by the four young men who in their own inelegant words, told Senator Croll to get stuffed. They show that among the 4,500,OOO Canadians living in poverty, that is to say -- 21 per cent of the Canadian population, the average family income in 1969 was between $2,500 and $3,000. So the lowcost housing experiment didn’t reach a single one of the poorest fifth of *our society, the people most in need. Just another phony: is it any wonder that people are losing faith in the established political processes? Now please don’t get alarmed, I do intend to summarize what has been said: but I wanted to establish that to my mind there was a huge field of concern which should have been brought out at this conference but was not. Let me mention just one other thing. Here we are in 1970 spending a lot of money on an experimental low-cost housing programe, and it is loaded with high-rise apartment buildings for families with children. You cannot tell from the booklet how many. They carefully do not say. I will admit we have heard quite a lot about high-rise apartments. The developers were quite clearly devoted to them. Even Mr. Steinhart said he has nothing against them, and in fact promotes them. No one wants to say anything nasty about them without first apologizing for his temerity. In another publication that was handed out here, Robert Badley writes that neighborhoods have been transformed from closely knit single family units to sterile impersonal high-rise
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giants. And then he adds: “I am not in any way suggesting that the high-rise way of life is less desirable.” What the hell does that mean? We are living in 1970. Every survey taken that I have ever seen of families living in high-rise apartments, publicly or privately owned, reaches the same result: 80 per cent of the peo& would rather have a house. It is even suggested in England in a recent report that a whole generation of emotionally deformed children is now being raised in high-rise apartments. I have raised three small children in a fou; room London apartment myself, and transplanted them suddenly into the space and freedom of life in Montreal: what a difference in those children! Yet here is a group of professional plannas who apparently think we should still be building high-rise experimental housing for children to live in, and who did not really challenge either the politicians or businessmen about their attitudes to this extremely vital subject. Okay: let’s move onto the conference itself. I have been asked to summarize and comment. Of course, as you can tell, I am a model of objectivity, so you will have no difficulty in telling what is summary and what comment. tjans l~Iut~~ct~ield, looking like a mischievous pixie behind that great lectern, got us away to an excellent start. Others before me have seized on some of his remarks. There ain’t no such anim$ as a planner, he said, we are all planners, 1 his non-c~xistctlt atiitiIal Leas under the dangerous illusion. sometimes, that he was Lad: I wonder, is that an argument for the non-existence of God? He said planning is the task of foreseeing evik that are likely to occur without planning. And he gave the professional planners credit for being able “to a very limited extent” to foresee what the reactions, interactions and so on of any particular event might be. Then we had the minister, Mr. Andras. Mr. Andras said he has discovered that a lot of federal departments are involved in the cities, and he has managed to convince his colleagues that that is so. The Prime Minister is even convinced ot: it.* SO Mr. Andras is free with blessings trotii on high to go ahead and coordinate the actions of the federal government. In other words, to clean up a shocking bloody mess, at last. Not only do we have a strong leader:,. able to whisk all those separatists into jail at the stroke of a pen - only to find them, unfortunately, popping up at his shoulder in the constitutional conference - but we have a leader who has the welfare of the cities at heart. Mr. Andras has discovered two key words: co-ordination and consultation two words to set the pulses of Canadians throbbing. On the one hand that seems to mean that if they build an airport they will make sure they also have some road.leading in and out of it; and on the other, they will keep on setting up more committees.
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