If there was one key takeaway from my decade of city hall reporting, it’s that nobody wants any houses built anywhere near them. That goes double for any kind of low-income affordable housing, but really, people don’t care what kind of housing it is – a new subdivision with overpriced/underbuilt McMansions, a condo project, a low-rise apartment – doesn’t matter, they just don’t want it near them.
As a general rule, Niagara homeowners are more than happy to pull up the housing ladder behind them, and anyone else trying to overcome the many, many barriers to home-ownership can get bent. Over the years, I’ve listened to homeowners waltz into city hall planning meetings and spout every half-baked excuse they can imagine for why a housing project shouldn’t move forward. I’ve heard it all, from the guy who said a proposed new condo would “literally blot out the sun” to the guy who claimed a proposed apartment building on his street would be filled with drug dealers who were going to steal his snow shovel—because as we all know, drug dealers want nothing more than snow shovels. We’ve all seen Pablo Escobar's infamous vault full of thousands of snow shovels.
Drug dealing shovel thievery aside, the long-winded public speeches in opposition to housing projects almost always touch on the same three things.
One is how the project doesn’t “fit the character of the neighbourhood” which is dragged out anytime a housing project includes an affordable housing component, but is really just code for “we don’t want low-income people moving into our neighbourhood.”
The second thing, and this one happens with every single proposed housing project, is where the dude speaking says he’s not against building more housing, he’s just against this particular proposal. There’s lots of land elsewhere, the dude always says, why don’t they build over there.
Well, no, actually, there isn’t just piles of shovel-ready housing land sitting around. The reason they’re building that housing project beside you is because the pipes and the wires are already there, and if they build it out in some random brownfield, they city will have to build new pipes and run new wires out there, and that’s gonna cost money, and that’s gonna come from your property taxes, and you’re gonna complain about that too, so pick your poison, dude.
The third and final NIMBY complaint that gets dragged out constantly is, to me personally, the most egregious and silly. I guarantee, with every single housing project, at least one person will bring this up: the traffic.
With any public planning meeting for a new project, there will always, always, always be some dude who takes to the podium and prattles on about how the new subdivision or condo will cause a complete traffic meltdown. Absolute gridlock mayhem.
“I won’t even be able to get out of my driveway,” is a line I’ve heard more times than I can count. These dudes always use the same weird faux-math, where they go, “If you build 200 new homes, and every house has two cars, that’s 400 cars extra cars on my street, think about the traffic, it won’t be safe, kids won’t be able to cross the street, blah blah blah.”
There is no bigger swindle in city hall planning than the traffic management study
For starters, not every household has two cars. But let’s say they do, let’s pretend every single house has two cars.
Still doesn’t matter. Why? Because people don’t leave their houses at the same time. I live in a pretty densely built-out subdivision. Hundreds of houses. Lots of two-car driveways. Despite that, I can’t think of a single time I have ever seen more than, maybe, three cars on my street at the same time. This isn’t the 1950s when everyone in town works at Horton Steel and goes for their shift at 8:50 a.m. and then leaves at 5 p.m. when a big air horn goes off.
Half of us work from home now and our cars sit in the driveway all day. The other half who do still go to work, they don’t coordinate their commute and all leave their driveways at the same exact time.
Same goes for the imaginary parking chaos these NIMBY folks are so afraid of happening on their block. One time at a planning meeting, I had to listen to this dude’s hypothetical disaster about how a proposed 100-unit apartment building was going to create a massive bottleneck due to visitor parking. As he pointed out, if every single person in that apartment building had two friends come over for a visit, and every single one of them drove their own car, and parked on the street, that would be 200 cars on the street at once. That math checks out, sure, but in what possible scenario does every single person in a building decide to have two friends over for a visit at the exact same time? Never, that’s when.
My major problem with these traffic whiners is that the city always placates them and orders a traffic management study. There is no bigger swindle in city hall planning than the traffic management study. Pure scam.
Traffic management studies cost thousands of dollars, waste months of time, and always come to the same conclusion: adding more houses will add a few more cars to the road but it’s fine because that’s what roads do, they move people around. Been doing it since the Romans. Works fine.
The only thing a traffic management study has ever done is add more delays to a housing project, which costs money, which then gets added to the price of the home, which worsens the already horrendous housing affordability crisis.
At this point, the only way any young family is going to be able to afford a house is by doing what I did: stealing snow shovels, reselling them on eBay and using the profits for a down payment.
James Culic never drives his wife’s car because the gas tank is always empty. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of the page.
