Category: Uncategorized

Towards Solving the Housing Affordability Gap in Ottawa: The Vacant Unit Tax

January 15, 2023

Can a family afford to buy a house in Ottawa? The average family income in Ottawa is $80,000. If they had the money for a 20% down payment for an average Ottawa home costing $620,000, the monthly mortgage cost would be over $2,000. In addition, they would have to pay for utilities, food, and other living costs. The other option, next to buying, would be to rent a house or an apartment, and the family with two children would pay a $2,500 monthly rental cost (a house or a 3-bedroom apartment).

I think there is an affordability gap in Ottawa, or, there is a shortage of housing. Same thing. Economics teaches us that if we increase the supply of a product, it may decrease its price. Home builders built ten thousand dwellings in Ottawa in 2022, a record, but not enough to satisfy demand. Are there other options to increase the supply of housing?

The City of Ottawa thought of another way to increase the supply of housing and introduced a “vacant unit tax” (VUT) on January 1, 2023. There are 20,000 vacant units in Ottawa, five percent of the housing stock. Carrying the higher cost of an investment property may motivate owners and investors to rent or sell their vacant units, increasing the housing supply, and reducing its cost.

The tax is one percent of the assessed value of the property if it is vacant for over six months of the year. Although some people with deep pockets may pay the tax, others would sell or rent it out, perhaps to family members to avoid paying the tax.

How will the City of Ottawa identify vacant units? Following examples in Toronto and Vancouver, with similar taxes for vacant investment properties, Ottawa issued a form letter to all property owners asking them to declare whether their property is their prime residence, rented or vacant. We must submit the declaration by the middle of March. Failing that, the tax is added to the property tax the following year.

What happens if owners claim they rent the property, but it is vacant? How will Ottawa follow up and audit, and enforce the VUT? Would the City check water, gas, and electrical consumption for the dwellings? The City has not disclosed how they intend to audit and enforce its new tax; it could be an arduous process.

The City projects to raise seven million dollars a year from the VUT, which translates into over 1,100 dwellings subject to the new tax ($7 million is one percent of the assessed value of the vacant homes averaging $620,000).

It appears the City is inconveniencing 100 percent of property owners by requiring a declaration to increase the supply of housing by 0.3 percent (1100 units added to the existing 380,000 occupied units). Is it worth inconveniencing the people of Ottawa for such a small gain? Is this just a tax grab, impacting middle-class people?

What I find more objectionable is the creeping regulations limiting our freedom; why could I not have two homes and have one empty without being taxed for it? For example, I could use one as my primary residence and the other as an office or a studio or the guesthouse for visiting family. Or I could live downtown, for the winter, to enjoy the cultural facilities there and move to an ex-urban area for the summer, where I could have a large lot with my vegetable garden. Would this tax encourage families to put one house in the husband’s name and the other in the wife’s name? And both could claim their houses as primary residences while living in one? What is wrong with a two-primary-home existence?

And creeping regulations could go further: following up on the logic of the VUT, Ottawa may prescribe additional living standards. For example, you may be eligible for five hundred square feet of living space per person or one bedroom per person. And come up with the LUT (large-home unit tax). If they can regulate that my dwelling must be occupied, what is stopping them from deciding how much space I am entitled to?

Reflecting on the increasing regulatory power of the City, I thought of the large house we and my neighbors occupy. Yes, my street has large homes with four or more bedrooms and multiple bathrooms occupied by two people; the children are gone but the owners are comfortable in their long-term homes, with no intention of moving or downsizing.

I was in my large basement office filling out the VUT form, thinking that the VUT may not be the efficient answer to the housing affordability gap. Mortgage rates, lack of skilled labor to build houses, and low wages may be more crucial factors to tackle before trying to convert a few vacant homes into occupied ones. Just my opinion.

2022: from Covid Lockdowns to Travel Freedom

January 1, 2023

When we crossed the border to Canada from the United States, driving north on Interstate 81, I asked the Canadian border guard: “no ArriveCan?”. He just laughed and let us through with a quick look at our passports. A few months ago we had to fill out the ArriveCan forms to cross the border and even with a correctly filled out form, which was a challenge to do, it still took a substantial amount of time to get through. And we had to have proof of vaccination and a negative Covid test taken within a day of arriving in Canada.

We have traveled to the US five times in 2022 and this trip was our sixth, to visit family for Xmas.

We used the ArriveCan form until the Canadian Government abandoned its use, partially because of public opposition to its use, and partially because it was a bureaucratic nightmare to administer it. And the Government also ditched the required vaccinations, and a negative Covid test, reflecting the low rate of Covid infections. Both barriers disappeared by the second half of 2022.

But it was not the ArriveCan and Covid requirements that stuck in my mind as a significant feature of 2022; it was the freedom to travel and the ease with which we could travel in late 2022. Traveling gives you the freedom to see different venues, meet people and, of course, visit family.

When the barriers disappeared, we were free to travel again.

Why is travel such an important and motivating activity for me? I found that if you stay home and follow your daily routine; which includes taking the garbage out, paying bills, and shoveling snow, you lose the excitement of living. Of discovering new ideas, fresh places, and meeting people, which keep your mind alert and body in physical shape.

By March 2022, we got fed up with being isolated in Ottawa and decided on the spur of the moment to visit family in North Carolina. So, we packed a suitcase and drove south. We followed up with a trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in May, where we attended our grandson’s high school graduation. It was a lively experience in the basketball arena at Louisiana State University, with hooting parents celebrating their children’s graduation.

In July, we took our granddaughter back home to Durham, North Carolina, after her soccer camp at the University of Ottawa. End of August we spent a week in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. with my brother-in-law and his family. And, of course, we spent Thanksgiving and Xmas with family in North Carolina.

Our Honda CRV accumulated enormous mileage this year, compared to 2021, when we filled the car with gas maybe once every two months.

But our travel this year has been much more than seeing family; we did sightseeing and learned about the Moravians’ arrival in North Carolina. and their historical settlement in Salem; hiked in West Virginia. along abandoned rail lines that served coal mining and learned about mining history. Also enjoyed and walked in a gigantic park in Clemmons, North Carolina, donated to the community by the Reynolds family of tobacco fame. A highlight of one of our trips was attending a Baptist church service  – a first for me – in Clemmons. I found these “discovery” trips and experiences stimulating compared to my usual routine at home, which includes taking the garbage out, paying bills, and shoveling snow.

No question in my mind that the trips and the ease with which we took these trips were the highlights of 2022 for me.

Hiking the Chilkoot Trail in Alaska and Yukon

December 24, 2022

I looked in horror to see Kathy sink in the snow, walking twenty feet in front of me. She was down to her waist before she stopped sinking. I lurched forward and flattened myself on the snow-covered field reaching towards her with my outstretched walking pole. With effort by both of us, she crawled out of the snow with a disbelieving smile on her face.

 Deeply etched in my mind, this memory came back to me when reading someone on Quora – a question-and-answer website – that his most memorable adventure, after traveling in eighty countries, was skating on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa: the 3-mile-long canal frozen during the winter months. I have skated on the canal many times without getting excited over it.

In contrast, hiking the Chilkoot Trail stood out in my memory for its physical challenges, natural beauty, and dangers.

As soon as we decided on our hike, our daughter, Megan, and her husband Jerome from Baton Rouge, LA, and son David and his girlfriend Erica, Chapel Hill, NC, decided to join us. Our camping group increased in size when my friend Lloyd also joined us with his son Neil and Neil’s new bride, Alison. Neil offered the trip to Alison as a honeymoon and presented it like a walk in the park. Well, that was not to be, Alison was not in shape for heavy-duty hiking and did not have proper hiking boots.

We hiked the thirty-three miles long (fifty-three kilometers) Chilkoot Trail from Skagway, Alaska, to Bennett Lake in the Yukon in 2001. (The trail is famous for the Klondike gold rush when over a hundred thousand prospectors panned for gold between 1896 and 1899.) It took us five days of hiking and four days of wilderness camping to complete the trail, enjoying unparalleled scenery, from the coastal rain forest to alpine lakes to above the tree line.

At the trailhead, the park rangers gave us a lecture about grizzly bears and how to distinguish between predators and other bears, a fascinating subject to ponder on embarking on the trail; were the park rangers trying to scare us or merely educate us?

Although the rangers advised us not to use hiking poles because of the fragile ground conditions of the north, we brought along one pole each; a useful additional support on uneven terrain.

From the trailhead, we started on a gentle hill with a path not very well marked or visible, but full of roots and rocks. I found the ascent difficult with a heavy backpack on our back carrying our food for five days and camping gear.

Although most of us started to hike early in the mornings after a quick oatmeal breakfast, Lloyd slept in, and Jerome got off early with nary a breakfast and was always the first to arrive at our destination at night; he reserved the best sites at the camp for our group of nine.

We brought along large chunks of cheese for lunch that did not require refrigeration and had trail mix and chocolate bars for snacks. Our “happy” hour was when we arrived at the designated campsite and set up our tents. The freeze-dried food tasted delicious at dinner time after a hard day of hiking.

Since we had to fill up our large water bottles every day, I made a deal with Neil. He did not have a water filter and borrowed mine. In return, after filling up his and Alison’s water bottles, he filled up mine and Kathy’s.

Being in bear country, the rangers advised us to wash our dishes and utensils carefully after dinner. For the night, we packed up all the food and hung it in our backpacks from a rope strung high between two trees, away from our tents, to make sure that bears could not get to it.

On the third day of hiking, we arrived at the famous “stairs.” I thought there would be stairs cut into the rocky ascent. It was not. I read that during the winters, the stampeders cut fifteen hundred stairs in the ice to make it easier to climb up the slopes. We arrived at the “stairs” in September when there was no ice and the “stairs” were huge rocks, some over ten feet high, that we had to climb. We climbed for hours in a fog so we could not see where the top was. We just kept on climbing. When we arrived at the top, we were euphorious about accomplishing what we thought was a real feat.

Descending from the highest point in our trek on a glacier, Kathy suddenly sunk to her waist in the snow-covered mountain side. It seemed surreal to see her sinking, so I hurried over and lay down on the snow to get traction to reach and pull her out. She was soaked, and we hurried up to warm up. Walking over rocky terrain was a unique challenge; there was melting water among the rocks, and we jumped from rock to rock to avoid the water.

On the fourth day of hiking, we heard loud talking and singing behind us. David, Megan, and Erica were trying to make a lot of noise when they got between a mother bear and her two babies. The mother bear false-charged them. Megan and Erica backed away and David flailed his arms to make him look bigger until the bear moved away. Kathy and I hiked with bear bells clanging, and the rest of our party wore them as well after meeting the bears.

We returned to Skagway in the last car of the White Pass and Yukon Railway, free for the smelly hikers, to avoid mixing with the tourists from the luxury cruise liners docked at Skagway. On arrival we went to a pub to have a cold beer. 

The Nuclear Stress Test of the Heart

December 18, 2022

I drove over to the east end of Ottawa to the Cardiovascular Center in a strip mall. It was a bad move on my part to hit the road in rush hour, especially with all the construction going on. It was difficult sometimes to find the lanes toward my destination with all the traffic cones, although this was my second trip there. The first time they injected some dye into the blood flow to track the circulation. This time, they would track the circulation after stressing my heart out.

The Cardiovascular Center is in one of the most inauspicious strip malls. And within the mall, the center is between an optician and a pharmacy. The other small stores in the mall range from dog obedience school and physiotherapy to a Middle Eastern restaurant with Arabic writing on the storefront.

Driving to the Cardiovascular Center made me relax; I usually get nervous going to medical buildings. This place in the middle of a nondescript shopping mall is certainly not like going to a hospital and seeing uniformed nurses and doctors rushing around the hallways with official tags around their necks.

I checked in with the receptionist sitting behind a plastic window and sat down in the waiting room on a seat away from the sun that was shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows, making the room feel like a hot greenhouse.

The people in the room were all older, like me, some required canes for walking. One couple was talking loudly, otherwise, the room was quiet and I read my cell phone to pass the time.

It did not take long for a nurse to call me into a room furnished with a hospital bed, monitoring equipment, and a treadmill. Aha, I thought I will use the latter for the stress test.

Then the nurse asked me to take off my clothes from the waist up and lie down on the hospital bed. She put a blood pressure monitor on my arm while talking to me, then put electrodes on my chest. The last connection was an IV needle.

Finding a good vein to insert an IV is always a challenge for nurses. Although I drank a lot of water that morning to help show veins, and she said that she saw the veins, she could not find one large enough for the needle around my elbow. After poking me twice by my elbow, she put a smaller IV needle into the top of my hand.

In the meantime, we had a great chat about Ottawa that relaxed me and brought down my blood pressure, which is always high when I visit a medical facility, even if it is in a strip mall.

She started my IV drip with saline solution to help the veins; she explained it is used to deliver medications. After the saline solution, some nuclear material dripped into my veins to stimulate the heart. All this time she kept asking whether I felt nauseous, had a headache, was dizzy, or was just lousy. I did not have any of those symptoms but was getting anxious, as I started imagining that perhaps I should have those symptoms if the test were working. But she repeated the same questions in a few minutes, and I assured her again that I was fine and told her if she did not badger me, I could fall asleep on the comfortable bed. The lack of any sickness on my part was a good sign, she said, and that made me feel good.

The nurse also explained that if I felt sick because of the nuclear material, she would give me an “antidote” via the IV. Since I was not feeling bad, I am not sure if she gave me any antidote.

The bottom of my arm, which had the IV in it, was getting painful with pressure building up in it, and told her so. She explained that it is the rush of the liquids coming from the IV needle and because the veins are small in the lower arm, the flow of the liquid puts pressure on the walls of the veins.

The only other impact beyond the pressure in my arm was my pulse rate exploding from its normally low rate in the fifties. Perhaps it was the anxiety of doing the test. While the IV drip was going on, the nurse was in front of a monitor watching my performance.

After a while, she said that it is time to inject some dye into my veins for the “gamma” camera to track the movement of blood in my veins, especially around my heart. I said that was fine with me; she could have put any liquid, even alcohol, into my IV.

When we finished with all the cocktails entering my veins, she told me to go outside into a small waiting room and eat the snacks that they had directed me to bring. But I asked her, “When are we going to do the stressing”? and pointed to the treadmill. She replied that the stressing was already done and explained that the nuclear material injected into me made the heart race and mimic the action of the heart when one is exercising. Ah! So that was it. I did not feel like I exercised at all – I did not sweat – and felt gypped not having the chance to jog on the treadmill for a little exercise, but glad the first phase of the testing was over.

So, I went into a small waiting room and snacked. I was hungry by this time; as I had been told to fast for four hours before the test.

After a half hour in the waiting room, they took me into another room with a dentist-type chair. On the left side of the chair, there was the gamma camera, a huge L-shaped machine that covered my chest, and the left side. She moved the camera over my chest and told me to sit on the left side of the chair so that the other side of the L was next to my left side, where the heart is. The camera buzzed for four minutes and then after a break, we did it over again, for four minutes. Then I was done.

I felt quite relaxed coming out of the Cardiovascular Center. It was not only because the staff were pleasant but also because of the venue. We were in a strip mall, and I thought this visit was more like going for coffee at Starbucks than getting a medical exam. Maybe we should have all medical clinics in shopping centers instead of medical buildings. Now I just must wait for the results, which may come in a few weeks.

From Railroads to Coal Mines to National Park

December 9, 2022

We hiked along the Southside Trail in the New River Gorge National Park near Fayetteville, West Virginia, over Thanksgiving weekend. The trail is wide, and the grade is easy; it follows an abandoned railroad line used by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad company in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Those with longer legs and strides went ahead. I strolled after them, enjoying the quiet. There were no people on the trail except one fellow walking a couple of dogs.

It was in November; all the leaves had fallen, making the path soft under the foot and letting the sun’s rays come through the trees. The temperature warmed up from near freezing to t-shirt time and I put my jacket and sweatshirt into my backpack.

the Southside Trail

Coal mining in this areagoes back to the 1800s. Coal replaced wood to boil brine to make salt needed for the transport of meat with no refrigeration. Small coal mines had sprung up to respond to the need. The demand for coal further expanded when using coal oil for indoor lamps became popular in the mid-1800s; distilled coal is coal oil, made just like moonshine. The increasing demand for coal triggered the construction of railroads.

I passed by well-preserved coke ovens, left over from the time “King coal” was mined and made into coke in the early 20th century. Taking a rest on my walk, I sat down and looked up the story of coal in this part of West Virginia on my cell phone.

I learned the mining industry was a tough one; miners were mostly immigrants and African-Americans, working for low pay under unsafe conditions. To accommodate the workers, the mining companies built housing for them from scratch, overnight; the housing was segregated with whites on one side and blacks on the other side of the coal chute. The companies also provided a store, since there were no other commercial establishments in the vicinity. And the stores sold items for usurious prices to the miners who had no options but to buy at the company store.

Despite their hard condition, the miners’ spirit could not be contained: they played baseball, and the folklore of the ballad of “John Henry” or the alternate “Take the Hammer” song was born. I checked out the ballads sung by most blues and country singers and the one I like the most is by Tennessee Ernie Ford. You can listen to it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kr6FIXBaZ8

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), formed in 1890, came to unionize the workers, to help improve pay and safety, and fought, often violently, for 43 years. Mary “Mother” Jones of national fame, was one of the principal leaders in the West Virginia labor movement until 1921 and led many marches, culminating in armed fights between the miners and the mine owners. The armed miners could not stand up against the National Guard and the Armed Forces called out by the Governor of West Virginia in one case and President Harding in another case. The mine wars culminated when President Roosevelt let the UMWA organize in 1933.

The trail I followed is next to the “New River,” an ironic name for one of the oldest rivers in North America. There are spectacular views of the river along the trail, which has smooth water parts for canoeing and white water for rafting and kayaking. The New River is in a deep gorge, hundreds of feet down from the rim; the sides of the gorge provide some of the best rock climbing in the Eastern United States.

After a couple of hours of walking, I turned back while the rest of the family went on this seven-mile trail. I engaged in a friendly conversation about the history of the coke ovens with the three people from Virginia I encountered on my return trip to the trailhead.

Our home was a Vacation Rental by Owner (VRBO), a half-hour drive from the trailhead, in Fayetteville with a current population of 2800 people. Fayetteville, incorporated in 1872, used to be a mining town, but to me, it was transitioning to become a tourist town in the center of the New River Gorge National Park.

 The house was close to a thousand square feet in size, fully renovated, and well-appointed, but I felt technically challenged trying to change the thermometer. Equally challenging was following instructions to make coffee on a machine that combined a carafe coffee maker with a Keurig coffee maker.

Sam, the host, came over to help us figure out how to operate the “nest”thermometer. He demonstrated how your finger moving along the perimeter of a circular control knob changes the temperature. 

His wife runs three VRBOs, and he takes care of technical problems when he is home from Alabama, where he now works. Although he was trained as a mining engineer, it was not clear if he was doing mining-related work in Alabama. Perhaps he left town, because there may be no mining jobs left in Fayetteville. The abandoned mines we saw in the area testified to that.

In the afternoon, we walked around the hilly streets of Fayetteville, incorporated in 1872, with small houses like the one we rented. Many of them looked vacant; I wondered if the people owning the vacant units left town for job opportunities elsewhere and converted them to VRBOs.

The downtown area had well-maintained, old commercial buildings. One was a bank. I always recognize the typical small-town banks, stone buildings with Greek columns framing the entrance, and large windows on the sides. This bank was at a street corner, as most of these small-town banks are, with the entrance door located diagonally where the two streets met. 

We came to stay in Fayetteville, a convenient location for visiting the New River Gorge National Park. The area was originally established as a National River in 1978, by President Carter and updated into a National Park in 2020 by President Trump. They show a short film on the history of the National Park at the Visitor Center. On leaving the Visitor Center, a South Korean family asked me to take a picture of them, which I was happy to do.

Observing the mostly out-of-state license plates in the parking lot of the visitor center and meeting someone from South Korea made me think the area is successfully transitioning from the declining mining industry to tourism. According to a National Parks report, the New River Gorge National Park attracted 1.8 million visitors in 2021 who spent over $80 million in the region.

(The coal industry grew from mining two million tons of coal in 1880 and employing 3700 people to mining 168,000 tons of coal in 1948 and employing 125,000 people, at its peak. Today, West Virginia coal mines produce 90,000 tons of coal and employ 49,000 people.)