Well, I just finished 18 pages of typing about discourse in policy research discussions around affordable housing. And I can safely say I am pissed off...not about the amount of pages I had to write (although that could be the fuel), but about how policy makers make really grand assumptions and EVEN WORSE how that is played out in the local environment.
I actually read a paper that said homeownership produced better and more stable citizens!!! The author of the painfull piece of marginalizing crap actually generated numbers (which he kept saying he didn't have actual stats and still managed to come up with numbers) on how children from rental situations are more likely to be criminal offenders!!
And while this paper was the most blatant piece of writing I had ever seen, the other policy discussions weren't that far behind in their marginalizing discussions about affordable rental housing.
While reading the papers I thought of my own situation. I have never been a homeowner, I have never lived in a home that was owned by my family. I have, all my life, been part of the low-income rental scene. I began to reflect on the ways people talk to me when the find out I am a renter. Always, the discussion comes up about ownership, investment, long term....I generally sit and listen and take it in...but now, after reading a plethora of identity papers around housing and how people in poverty situations become marginalized by notions about home and housing...well now my ears are sensitive. Yes, I am a renter. As a renter, I still pay taxes, I still have to work long hours, I do not wreck property that isn't mine and if I do, I offer to fix it, I have never been charged or sent to jail, while I have dabbled in drug abuse it has never been anything but recreational, and while I may move from place to place, I am a stable person. Yes, I am paying someone else's mortgage, but why should I be persecuted and judged for helping someone else out? (okay I know that is flawed, but work with me)...I am not saying homeowndership is a bad thing (it is freaking expensive and means ALOT of responsibility, which I think I have enough of right now), but neither is being a renter.
So, I follow Bruce Porter, a fellow who adamantly asserts that the Charter needs to be ammended to include housing as a right!! Just like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, everyone in Canada should have the right to a home that is safe, warm and adequate to their needs. Then everyone can back off about why I don't own a home, and my identity can be less about being a renter and more about being ME!!
3 comments:
Yep, renters get a bad rap. I'm interested in the identity bit though...
Is it sort of an internalization of what is expected or perceived as normative and if their self-evaluation doesn't meet up with those standards then they suffer an inability to identify? If so, then what is scary about that is that the source of those standards would probably be very difficult to place, and one could end up (seemingly in a logical manner), becoming active participants in their own differentiation... a self-othering, so to speak.
I've always liked theories about identity... extremely difficult material to grapple with. Awesome ideas She, good luck with it.
PS: 18 pages should be child's play for a student of your calibre... don't you have to hand in 40 or 50 for the thesis? I'll be thinking of you when I take the winter off to read my own list of material, hehe...
Hmm....Homeownership producing criminal offenders? I wonder what the global stats are on those serial rapist and murderers who come from homes they or their parents owned? And what about the thousands of re-possesion that occur in canada every what ? because the big mortgage couldn't be paid....over and over, month after month. Technically speaking, the actuality of home "ownership" is pretty small as most of the pop is still paying the banks, for the title of saying "I own my house....."Making the banks one big Landlord! I agree Gan, And I've been on the ownership scale, you can't take it with you when you die, so why is it so important to own a house? Why is it a big deal? Because the banks make HUGE money off it!! And if the bank isn't making money off you with intrest on your mortgage, then heavens! There must be something criminal about that! Love you honey!
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