aka: Prison guards?
No, not prison guards. Take a look at any urban area and you will find lots of apartment buildings and condos, a great many of which have live-in building superintendants, and all of which provide maintenance.
Yours was my first thought, Muffin–a live-in superintendant, who looked after maintenance and basic repair (and who knew who to call when the repairs were beyond basic). No different from any apartment building, really; certainly similar to all the ones I’ve lived in.
It’s a good idea. Wonder why it’s not done.
I don’t know, but I expect it would come down to initial capital combined with a desire to live detached houses rather than in apartment buildings.
I’ve posted more on why, in my opinion, not much is done about housing in general on remote northern Ontario reserves in the Attawapiskat thread.
Supreme Court of Canada shoots down federal securities regulator.
With this decision, the Reference re Assisted Human Reproduction, and the Insite decision, the feds have not had much luck in the SCC the past 18 months.
Unfortunate, but legally it’s probably the right decision. Canada really does need a national regulator, but we have to respect Constitutional boundaries. Even when all that it serves is petty empire-building by the provinces.
Do you want to go and live there to do this job? Any outsider going there is going to look like a babysitter or prison guard. Anyone who takes the job and currently lives there is going to look like a sell out.
And not a single one of which is analogous to your idea.
The difference between your reservation apartment keeper and the guy who maintains my condo building is that I pay for the guy in my building. He’s my employee. I’m paying to live here, and so if I don’t cooperate with the superintendent, the cleaning lady and the security guard, I’m basically screwing myself. If a resident of the building screws them over then I want that resident punished or thrown out, because he’s screwing me. But none do, because we pay for it.
In an apartment building with renters you don’t get as much cooperation as you do in a condo building with owners - but you still get some, because they still have a vested interest in regulating their behaviour and the behaviour of others. Sufficiently poor behaviour in a rental unit in Kitchener will get your ass evicted and make it harder to find equivalent lodgings. Good renters, in any event, feel as if they’re paying for the super, too. They want the super to succeed. They will leave a crap apartment and rent somewhere that like-minded people who’re quiet and clean want to live. Renters don’t have much skin in the game but they have some.
No matter what, if you keep the legalities the same, the problems will be the same. If you build the houses out of cinder blocks (or prisons, which is what they’d sure look like) what you’ll get are shitty houses made out of cinder blocks, since of course you can wreck everything else and anyway cinder blocks aren’t indestructible. If you have “live in superintendant” they either have authority over the buildings, in which case they will be hated outsiders and pseudo-cops and no sane non-psychopath would ever do the job, or they don’t have authority and then there’s no point. Not to mention the fact that you’re now spending thousands upon thousands of dollars paying a guy to live in the prison/apartment, which means less money for maintaining houses.
It doesn’t matter what houses you build on a reserve; you can build them out of cinderblocks or fabricated steel or wood or adamantium. But the houses aren’t the problem. And you can ship up supervisors if you want, but the thing is, the people aren’t really the problem, either.
The RESERVE is the problem. We have to get rid of them.
How do you propose to get rid of reserves?
Just to be clear, private land ownership and taxation on reserves do not require getting rid of reserves.
When I first moved to this region, I lived in a tent, on a reserve, until I found a job a saved up enough money to rent an attic in a slum off-reserve in which an aboriginal was stabbed to death in my back alley the first week I was there, and a bear was shot to death out front the following week. Had someone offered me accommodation as a superintendent in a building populated by aboriginals, I would have jumped at the opportunity rather than continue living in a tent on a reserve or an attic in a slum, had I not been starting a different type of career.
I sit on an appeal tribunal in northwestern Ontario that decides whether to uphold or overturn decisions made to kick people out of public housing. The district covers an area that is close to the size of southern Ontario, with a population about the size of Kingston. There is one city, but otherwise most communities are only a few thousand people. There are thirty-two communities in the district: fifteen communities in our jurisdiction, plus a further seventeen reserves within the district’s boundaries that are not under our jurisdiction due to reserves having control over the use of their own land. Although we do not have jurisdiction over reserves, a very significant proportion of aboriginal people end up living in the non-reserve communities – both those who are trying to find a better life, and those who are so off the rails that they cannot survive on-reserve or are kicked out of their reserve (band councils have the authority to kick out people, including their own members, be it temporarily or permanently – a power that gravely concerns me, for it places far too much power in the hands of the band council without either reasonable limitations or any oversight). For example, over half of the people registered in the reserve that is adjacent to the city actually live in the city, well over 8% of the people in the city are aboriginal, and due to the tremendous aboriginal population boom, it is projected that about a third of the city’s population will be aboriginal in a couple of decades. Almost half of the aboriginal population in the city live below the low-income cut-off. Consequently, aboriginals form a very large part of the people who live in social housing in the district. The same social problems that plague individuals who live on reserves do not stop once they move into social housing in the city or one of the non-reserve communities.
There is a broad variety of social housing in the district, ranging from detached houses to apartment complexes, and both privately owned housing and government owned housing. Concrete and cinder block buildings have lower maintenance costs (and also do not require as much municipal infrastructure (e.g. fewer miles of water, sewer and electrical lines). Buildings with live-in superintendents are kept in better repair than those without. There is no difficulty at all in finding live-in superintendents, including finding live-in superintendents for housing that is predominantly aboriginal.
That should have read: “. . . (and apartment complexes do not require as much municipal infrastructure . . . .”
There is a big difference between being a resident manager of a building off reserve and being an outsider for one on reserve where the politics are completely different. I’ve been the former and it was a nightmare. I’d never want to be the latter.
I don’t have any especially good read: politically possible) ideas. But that remains the solution. I didn’t say it’d be easy.
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? Let’s assume - absent any evidence, but it doesn’t matter - that you can save some money by building a house out of cinder blocks (I cannot believe we are even having this conversation) instad of, say, wood and siding. Let’s further assume the savings amounts to 20% of the cost of housing, which I think is frankly a pretty generous estimate. Now look at *the very numbers you yourself have posted in this thread *an explain how the savings are anything more than a drop of piss in the toilet that is Attawapiskat.
A real solution involves coming up with a long term plan where we aren’t even discussing how the government needs to put aboriginal Canadians in concrete bunkers and sending wardens to ensure the population behaves. We don’t have to have this discussion for anyone else because most of the rest of the people in Canada choose what kind of home they want to live in, and the homes get buuilt by the market. If you’re really down on your luck you end up in social housing, but for many people that’s a temporary stop and it’s the exception, not the rule, and even then in a lot of cases there’s a measure of market force at work. Discussing what construction materials to make reserve homes out of is nothing more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, except in this case tens of thousands of people are drowning, not just 1500.
Here are my three ideas, which are rough and unrealistic given the political environment but they’d at least have a chance at working:
1. Implement a plan whereby within ten years the Indian Act and all native treaties are abolished, and status Indians are paid for a certain period of time. It’s politically impossible but it’d work better than what we have now. In short:
i. Fire most of the people working for Indian/Northern Affairs. I’m sure most are decent and hard working people but they’ve failed. Give them appropriate severance packages and tell them to go find work that might actually help someone.
ii. Constitutionally nullify all First Nations treaties.
iii. Start paying. Take all the money originally assigned to aboriginal spending and increase it by 100%. Whatever that amount is, start sending cheques. Pay status Indians, equally, all of them; chiefs and band leaders get not a cent extra. Throw in extra money to allow for relocation from hellholes like Attapiskawat if they want to leave. Commit to monthly payments for all status Indians and all their future children for ten years, plus a five year commitment to all tax benefits. In ten years, it’s over.
2. Actually give First Nations real sovereignty. I mean a real, honest-to-God country. The little broken-up-into-a-thousand peices reserves won’t work, so again,
i) Revoke all treaties and the Indian Act.
ii) Take a few big swaths of land, and I do mean big, like “All of Northern Ontario, parts of Quebec, all of Nunavut, and then another big swath of Western Canada the size of freakin’ Poland” big, and say they’re separate countries. I mean totally separate - completey independent, sovereign nation-states, as of ten years from the passage of the Aboriginal Sovereignty Act. Pour money into them for ten years to allow for development and offer residency and citizenship in ten years to any member of any band who wants to live in one of the 2-3 new countries. At the end of ten years, if you’ve declared citizenship in one of the new countries, congratulations, you’re a founding member. Raise a flag, elect a government, and Canada will go straight to the UN and sponsor them as a new member. If you haven’t and you’re living in the newer, smaller Canada, you’re a Canadian citizen and no longer recognized as anything else. Welcome aboard.
3. A combination of the above 2.
Are these politically realistic? No, because nobody will want to give up their stake; band leaders have a great scam going, so they won’t want to lose it, provinces won’t want to part with their land and resources to start new countries, and Indian Affairs and like organizations sure don’t want to give up their sweet gigs “helping” the aboriginals. Would these solutions be messy? Hells yes. But in 30 years things would be better, whereas with “solutions” like the ones our government has been cooking up most of my life, in 30 years things will be just like they are now.
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:
When it comes to the issue of impoverished remote reserves, I put forth the following in the other thread:
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.
They are cheaper because they cost a whole lot less to build for a housing unit.
There are a whole lot of people that pay big bucks to own apartments for a variety of reasons, one important one being low maintenance hassles.
I can’t speak for Muffin, but I haven’t heard anyone talking about telling people they can’t live in detached housing. Or that they have to live in an apartment building. Just that they don’t have to be homeless.
Building out of cinderblocks will increase the life of the building compared to lumber. Especially when maintenance tends to get ignored and or when there is a tendancy at times to burn what ever wood you can easily lay your hands on, even if it is your own house, to keep warm. It just actually might be more expensive to build with cinder blocks way up in the north, given transportation costs.
You’ve failed to mention that any long term plan that includes ripping up treaties will require the consent and cooperation of each and every 1st nation.
I don’t know why this is a criteria. They can always move just like the rest of us do when there are no jobs where we currently live.
I don’t think I should have used the word “reserve”, for technically the agreement does not create a reserve, but rather gives land to Tsawwassen in fee simple along with very broad powers to regulate the use of such land.
Deck chairs on the Titanic. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.
Not necessarily, since with an appropriate Constitutional amendment the government could in theory do whatever the hell it wanted, but as I believe I mentioned, it wouldn’t be politically easy. I was asked what would fix the problem, and those ideas would fix it. I wasn’t saying it’d acually happen.