Toronto Affordable Housing Challenge

From Micro Apartment to Macro Consciousness

Fantastical expectations of smaller dwellings!

Content:

A . Human Construct: Perishable Money

B . Corpus Corporatum

C . Our Common Wealth Trust

D . Finders Keepers. Losers Lose.

This submission aims to focus light onto a systemic blind spot regarding housing. The authors naively, and respectfully, protest the premise of the question posed as contributing to the problem by supporting the perpetuation of a systemic materialistic strategy - superficial to the actual problem. Geometry and material, while relevant, are minor factors in a housing crisis. Immediate major factors are money and labour. As money is e mbodied human labour, the causal factor of a housing crisis is our precepts of money. How do architects fix money?

With imagination, reason, and honesty, we uncover 3 fundamental natures of human activity: cultural, legal, and economic. One leads the 3 in dynamic coexisting balance. We intuitively feel an unbalanced tension in these natures. 3 elements of the ‘dynamic coexisting tension’ archetype are: authority, responsibility, accountability (ARA). While individual specialists have final authority over their actions, they must defend a transparent independence and commit to account for the basic needs of all 3 coexisting natures.

With new filtered awareness, a “housing crisis” can be understood as the economic nature presuming dominion over cultural and legal natures by asserting inappropriate authority (ARA) over a cultural-first activity with the help of a weak, subservient, legal nature. The only effective way to correct imbalanced ARA is to consciously redress the imbalance as opposed to seek the opposite to achieve balance: adjust our precept of Nature’s actual concept. In this case, our economic nature needs to coexist with other natures vs. dominate them, to the detriment of all. That is closer to our, true, natural, social order: balanced coexistence.

Beyond superficial symptomological discourse, a sincere consideration of subservient legal constraints, reveals the cultural and economic issues that are seen as a housing crisis. This manifesto proposes to correct the misdiagnosis of a housing crisis. How small, how clever must housing be to resolve the need for profit? What is the true cost of distilling a human right to housing? Can we imagine sustainable actions to stem the massive economic hemorrhage imposed on Canadians, imposed on each other?

A. Human Construct: Perishable Money

A.1 Healthy Economic Life Force

As humanity evolves on its continuum, the contemporary majority of our community becomes increasingly more aware of realities unknown to previous generations: Our precepts become more complete. We innately know it is best to resolve the cause, not the symptoms, of our issues. This requires conscious, honest, effort.

Financial sector regulation and inflation are current aspects of a housing game. Let us ask how: ‘do I want to play this game’, not ‘what are the rules to this insane game’. Especially, when the rules favour the house winning! Are we able to imagine a saner, truly humane, game where everyone can win?

With conscious awareness of what money actually means to us, we will realize its real abstract value is our life’s energies that it embodies. During this new deliberation, we may pass by other social questions that can also be resolved. Architects know, all systems are integrated – they are, in reality, whether we acknowledge that fact or not.

Just as stagnate water is unhealthy to our natural bodies, hoarding money is unhealthy to our social body. Systemic hoarding appears to perpetuate many negative human behaviours.

Money is to economic life what water is to human life: indispensable when clean and fresh. Key to ‘fresh’ is a simple but unknowably beneficial cycle of flowing. The current, disproportionately gargantuan, reservoirs of money held in private accounts are festering our economic life. The content of the reservoirs originates in communal human activity. Perpetual movement through the economic activities is what keeps money “clean and fresh” – healthy for all - including the hoarders!

With the current state of our monetary evolution, it seems easy enough to establish simple ratios related to paper money’s value. Even easier to implement ‘aging money’ principles in our virtual systems. No one should fear their own reservoir will run dry because all their current needs can be resolved with fresh, clean, flowing money – in perpetuity. Or, at least, until our next precept improvement. Our goal should be exponential economic sustainability in support of human will (culture) – not artificially driven by government (legal) – symbiotic balance is the real challenge.

A.2 Work Less is More

Our collective pandemic responses illustrate our capacity for actions in a very practical sense. We (government) can take, previously unfathomable, actions to suit our reality in short order. Change is possible.

Beyond our own personal benefits of shorter working weeks, the immediate impact of reducing individuals’ working week is the immediate creation of more jobs (actual, training, management). This creates more, happy, people. It is an economic-sphere solution to a cultural-sphere problem: personal health as espoused by the many calls for attention to ‘mental health’. This is also an investment in long-term health care cost mitigation, which serves the economic nature in the future.

In concert with other adjustments mentioned herein, this long-term benefit outweighs all short-term costs. More workers means more money flowing with exponential market development potential.

A.3 Money: Tool for Humanity

The healthy flow and access to both money and water is essential for their respective ecosystems. The more activity (cyclical flow) we ”allow” to happen, the more our activity integrates with the ecosystem’s perpetual sustainability. All uses are part of the flow. It is in our interest to keep the quality as healthy as possible by discouraging festering pools or reservoirs and encouraging streamlined flows.

2020 emergency measures prove that most Canadians support supporting each other - for the collective good that our federation is, or simply personal preservation. Why not learn from our challenges? Do away with some bureaucratic-heavy economic support programs, in favour of one simple program: a living wage tied to our collective performance (GDP). As we all ‘do better’, we ensure our collective basic flow of money. Want more from your community? Do more for your community.

Need it? Use it | Spend it! Thank you. | Don’t need it. Return it.

This could simply be administered annually through slight modifications to the Income Tax Act - a process proven functional during the pandemic. Let us inform our expectations of each other (terms and conditions) by implementing, assessing and adjusting rather than abstracting reasons to do nothing.

If we all expect each other to live as a diverse and sustainable social group (garden), restricting the flow of money (water) to the point of negative impact on any individual, hurts our collective endeavour: sustainable human evolution within actual natural context. Current management strategies have developed an unsustainable economic plot: the majority of water is being hoarded and concentrated to a miniscule part of our garden.

Within established guidelines, each individual is free to flow the money to others, ensuring economic health which includes housing – as a free choice, not a prescribed cell in a honeycomb of lies.

B. Corpus Corporatum

B.1 Relative Contribution Ratios

There are many examples of corporations choosing to administer their affairs with sustainable economic strategies. Our existing laws, governing mandatory corporate articles, can simply be amended to mandate ranges for maximum compensation ratios, between highest and lowest paid human beings - no loopholes. Tying corporate money flow to relative ratios ensures equity. This is similar to fixing leaking water treatment plant pipes - other than the person collecting, and hoarding, the leaking water, who thinks that leaks are a good thing? Our system can evolve for all our benefit, let it flow in a healthy way. No one is left wanting in an equitable system. This, again, ensures more money for infrastructure of all types.

B.2 Responsibility: Human | Corporate

Did you know that our constitution’s preamble essentially establishes that: ‘Citizens’ consciousness retains power over the state’ and that, through legislation, corporate bodies are given a right beyond human bodies - ever-lasting life? It then stands as reasonable that these in-corporated bodies also have unique expectations to keep a healthy tension between their responsibilities, accountability, and authority (the living trifecta of healthy human activity) beyond our fragile human bodies. By definition, corporate bodies are beyond-human under the law. Corporate bodies support many human lives and may enjoy privileges forever. There are, and can be more, conditions. Which Body serves whom?

Since Article 2 of our constitution grants us all the freedom to practice idleness, or take stances opposite reason and science, or take action to support healthy human activity, we must presume our love for each other as a baseline. Educate, foster, and encourage a call to action vs. a right to idleness and destruction. Beyond legal words, understand your Article 2:

Citizens shall support the evolution of morality, respect each

other with empathy and freely assemble peacefully.

Citizens, in this case, legally includes human and corporate bodies, with the latter enjoying the additional features of supporting many humans and perpetual existence.

Changing our outlook is more difficult, but faster, than changing our written words, it seems.

Why should human bodies be asked to support the needs of corporate bodies, in priority, beyond the greater good? Simple, yet major, changes can be brought to redress ARA balance to re-order our priorities, aligned to stated values, articles and intent. Lower corporate taxes equates to a few Citizens ‘skimming off the top’ of the communal pot. Are 1:2 or 1:3 ratios not enough to satisfy their needs?

B.3 Time vs. Service

Combining a healthy flow of money and prices including whole life-cycle costs, provides a healthier balance to economic relationships. Price becomes relative. Unsustainable government (legal) subsidies of economic sectors are not required. Subsidies cannot be removed without first making changes to ensure ‘survival’ to benefit our community. If everyone has a healthy amount of money, we can all afford to pay the correct value of products and services, like design fees and taxes. When our economic activities are healthy, transparency is a natural reflex. There is no motivation to outmanoeuver each other, human or corporate. Enterprising becomes associative, active, engaged.

Equitable monetizing naturally balances an economic system, similar to equitable actions in natural ecosystems. Unnatural interventions are the cause of systemic imbalance.

Equitable payment for services rendered, including abstract ideas, becomes normalized when money also flows equitably throughout the economic system of human activities. How to equitably monetize this submission’s precept (impact), flowing through us from others’ previous struggles to capture the broader concept? Should price compensate our time or our needs? Equitably, we need to resolve our needs (past, current, future). Time is not ours to sell.

B.4 Entrepreneurship vs. Community.

Without too much prejudice toward the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Royal Charter precedent, can we agree that summarily granting land, to an in-corporated body, directed by extended family members, in perpetuity, is not a precedent aligned with our current collective goodwill? Centuries later, can citizens imagine some corrective adjustments to a Corporations Act? We will address ‘land’ later.

Emergency measures highlight the power of our citizens’ consciousness over collective morality: empathically respecting each other. We can certainly see that we collectively struggle with this empathy concept. The salient point we have made to ourselves is that major social changes can be made over a few days within existing legal framework. It is possible.

Given that existing copyright/intellectual property protections exist for an author’s life plus 50 years, beyond the details, we can be inspired to understand variations of this 300-year precedent as an original entrepreneur’s legal protection and encouragement of productive activity. Reward risk as thanks for benefit. As business activities, in service of wider human benefit, align with our common values, we can understand a precedent where the original founder of this body-corporate have special standing. Surveying lessons learned over the last 400 years, there is no supporting precedent for special legal treatment of antecedent corporate leadership (nepotism). There are now many precedents for supporting corporations as ‘too-big-to-fail’. All citizens’ well being relies on many corporations, every day. This surely satisfies the “important” qualification. Why not focus ‘baseline’ regulations on a moral “too-important-to-fail”?

Just as the value of money is a collective abstraction we agree on. Corporate value is literally created with real human activity - a collective community activity - not only the founder’s. Wages are but a small benefit of this collective interaction. Over time, corporate direction attracts the best qualified humans for the task. It is a trifecta of the original entrepreneur, employees and clients that cultivated both corporate and community value. It is a symbiotic relationship. It disturbs a system’s balance when corporate directorship is passed over in inheritance to family. Upon the founder’s passing, there can be a process for the transition of direction accounting for the public-benefit of a corporation continuing its life in service of the community. This process does not preclude family but simply integrates an accountability of competence responding to the actual symbiotic conditions.

The legal founding goal of a corporation is never to simply make money, the goal is a human activity. Money serves the activity. There is no need to protect the abstract value of money in perpetuity. The founder’s family and friends are also citizens, with their own destinies, and subject to our collective support. Inheritance is not a human right. The indirect risk of incompetence and impact of business closure is the community’s to resolve. Basic risk management dictates reasonable action to mitigate risk. There are many precedents supporting ‘greater good’ interventions.

Reward entrepreneurship | Support growth | Protect community.

B.5 Transfusions vs. Infarctions

Before death, it is unthinkable to remove all the living forces from a body, we actually consider it a great crime. As money is the abstract embodiment of human forces, it should be a crime against the community to remove large amounts of money from its integrated corporations. There is however a sustainable amount of forces that can be extracted without adversely affecting the body in the longer term. Before the passing of a corporate founder but upon their wish to give up the directorship of the corporation, it would be possible for the citizens’ collective consciousness (government) to establish a transparent process (corporations act article) to assess and sustainably extract a percentage of increase in value to benefit the founding corporate director(s) where the corporation has integrated community value – ensuring a sustainable symbiotic relationship for the future health of the community.

An ethical “too-important-to-fail” solution aligned to our Article 2, would ensure fair consideration of founding director(s) while not threatening public benefit (jobs, wages, services, tax revenues). Stability in urban planning underpins many facets of social and housing challenges.

C Our Common Wealth Trust

C.1 Guiding Premise

Excluding ‘why’, we are literally born out of, and onto the Earth. When we understand that Article 2 enshrines a bond or a ‘duty-to-care’, not simply a ‘right to selective ignorance’, human and corporate actions can adjust laws to be in the service of healthy symbiotic relationships. Abstract rights to manage Nature are absurd. The natural world exists beyond humans, despite us. Citizens’ consciousness (government) has a responsibility to coexist within the reality of Nature’s bountiful limitations. Laws that protect do not inversely transform into rights to exploit.

In Canada, less than 0.0004% of the world’s citizens claim dominion over 2% of the Earth’s landmass. Conditions in Canada are appropriate for practical change, potentially worthy of imitation by all of Earth’s citizens. With open-hearts and imaginations, all Canadians could set aside their right to idleness for a duty-to-care. We can be world leaders in developing laws, infrastructure and technologies aligned with natural forces.

Urban and rural development must be resolved as part of a whole.

C.2 Land: Holistic Benefits | Costs

Is “Land Ownership” a right, privilege, or responsibility? Can we find agreement on “land” and “ownership”? When a majority of Canadians agree that: “Our land” is valued at $0, it is Priceless, we will be able to simply: Enjoy it for free. | Reward improvements. | Pay for land use.

“The Crown” is a legal construct for “Our Community”, accountable to Canadians. It can act, directed by the majority of citizens, to benefit all citizens’ well being, which includes a healthy natural environment.

“Land Benefit”

Where Earth forces are leveraged:

Agriculture: Tax for exploitive effects of mainstream practices and credit for rejuvenating effects biodynamic practices.

Water: Tax for damages / regulation / oversight of negative impacts and credit for rehabilitation of aquifers and water quality.

Energy: Heat... Wind... Currents... Magnetic

“Land Improvement”

Includes all unnatural human interventions, from water pumps to power dams to cottages and high rises. The capital costs need to include a life cycle bond as well as the costs of returning the land value back to $0, back to Priceless! These bonds have value, may be amortized over periods of time but can never be liquidated until the land balance is resolved to $0 by the current ‘owner’. Essentially, “improvements” are all temporary, reversible, human impacts. Corporate bonds? Municipal bonds? Rural residential bonds? Lower bonds for lesser impacts.

“Land Trust”

Where no private corporation choose to render required activities, Trusts can be established to execute activities required by the collective to process natural elements (not resources) such as sustainable energy - For-Public-Benefit. Expertise and jobs may re-allocate themselves in the short-term. In the long-term, healthy balance will evolve. Legal constraints exists, only human will is required in this context.

“Land Exploitation”

Irreversible modifications for human benefit (Anthropocene). The Citizen’s Consciousness, Earth’s Stewards, demand relative restitution for counterbalancing activities supporting regulation, oversight, research, and development in sustainable alternatives. The true cost of the Anthropocene is the simple solution to resolving the contemporary logic that proposes “1=0”. The reality is that “1=1” and all costs must be resolved in service of balance within the Whole. Where exploiters cannot resolve costs, activities must wind up responsibly as dictated by a true life-cycle cost. If it’s not sustainable, why sustain it? Short term impact shocks are absorbed by other implemented measures, noted herein.

“Land Stewardship”

Once mastered by a critical mass, Stewardship becomes an exportable skill with patent-able technologies - a valuable resource for a future built on dynamic symbiotic relationships. There is a substantial wealth of knowledge, on this topic, within Canada – if we wish to inform ourselves authentically.

Canadians could be world-leaders in the most important field of human activity - ever: healing our planet + rehabilitating our Self.

D. Finders keepers. Losers lose.

D.1 Tax Idleness. Credit Investment.

“The State” is the citizen’s collective other than you. You are entitled to returns on your efforts. Credit tangible real estate investments as they ensure the flow of money in our communities. Where the community (others around you) develops land and infrastructure, why should you reap incidental benefits? Real estate, and land use, is not a game of chance.

100% Tax on Real Capital Gains

The State should tax all capital gains not generated by the owner as part of a healthy, perpetual, flow of money. Artificial inflation of property values is generated by the community’s activities, not by the owner’s investments. Reward investments. Motivate constructive activities in support of healthy money flowing. If you simply sit on land (field or parking), while the rest of ‘us’ generate value (develop) around you, why should you have any claim to added profits? Those who develop land benefit proportionally. ‘Sitting on land’ has a crippling effect to constructive urban planning and developing social | cultural infrastructure | tax revenues. Activates private money vs. state funds (drains reservoirs). It is key to our healthy social life: collective infrastructure and money in service of collective human activity. Idleness blocks others’ opportunity to contribute to our community.

Conflict of interest declaration: architects and engineers will benefit from related private-sector-financed infrastructure boom – but not as much as every one of our communities!

In conclusion, financial regulations and inflation are symptoms of our economic nature’s rules not being holistically integrated into cultural and legal natures. Elements of ‘coexisting tension’ between our economic, cultural and legal natures are: authority, responsibility, accountability (ARA). Our challenge is to attend to dynamic needs and tensions, demanding awareness, responsiveness and actions. This manifesto’s provocative ideas are relevant, and appropriate – stripping inexcusable marginal narratives that support inaction. This call for action is not arguing for, or against, a new Architecture design solution; rather we propose fundamental changes to resolve the causal factors of a housing crisis. These entail integrated participation of various constituencies. Toronto’s affordable housing challenge, representatively, may be caused by poor planning, poor design choices, poorly informed policies, and static legal framework appropriate to former, centuries-old, social conditions. Expecting change by repeating past actions is insanity. Otherwise, all contemporary iterative efforts (eco, green, modular, adaptable, expandable, future proof, parametric, affordable) in housing design are in vain.

In Collaboration with Luc Nugent.