The great, ongoing Canadian current events and politics thread

[Muffin]

@RickJay

Yes, apartments are relatively cheaper than houses. Which is why they’re cheaper. Also, people generally don’t like apartments as much as houses. That’s why they’re cheaper. So you’re proposing we save money by telling people they can’t live in detached houses.

You aren’t seriously proposing this as a solution, are you?

Good heavens, no!

Concrete/cinder apartments with live-in superintendents pertains to the issue of on-reserve public housing (not even the issue of private housing on reserves – a lot of folks seem to think that the only housing on reserves is public housing, which simply is not true. Just as off-reserve, people who can afford it buy or build their own homes, and people who can not afford it rent from the private market or from public housing); it certainly does not pertain to the issue of how to deal with the problem of impoverished remote reserves:

@Muffin

In my opinion, the way to go for public housing on remote reserves that have extremely limited water and waste water facilities, that generate all their electricity by diesel, and that have incredible problems with people destroying their own homes and/or failing to properly maintain their homes, would be to build cinder block/concrete apartment buildings that have live-in building supervisors/maintenance workers.

When it comes to the issue of impoverished remote reserves, I put forth the following in the other thread:

@Muffin

All in all, I think that there needs to be better oversight of funds given to reserves, with specific targets for deliverables, and specific consequences for failing to meet the targets without good cause. There is no reason why the bulk of a program’s fund should be bled away rather than be used to actually deliver the program.

I also think that personal property ownership combined with property taxes based on assessed property values would help bring some of the misdirected funds back into the community.

Ultimately, however, I think that very small, isolated communities that are nearly entirely economically dependent on government assistance are neither economically viable nor socially healthy. I do not think that there is a solution to this overarching problem, for the culture of people who live on these reserves will be destroyed through generation after generation of poverty just as certainly as it will be destroyed if there is a diaspora into the mainstream non-aboriginal Canadian communities to the south.

You might be interested in the recent Tsawwassen agreement. The negotiations came close to getting rid of the reserve, but ended up expanding the reserve. More importantly, the agreement put in place what all parties hope will be the foundations of economic self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, I can’t see this working for remote reserves without there being some sort of resource to develop.