Cam Guthrie had a good point at this week’s council meeting. I know I don’t type those words very often, but credit where credit is due.
The topic was the update to the demolition bylaw, and there was a delegation that mentioned the concept of demolition by neglect, a phrase meaning that a property owner will let a building deteriorate until there’s no choice but to tear it down in the name of health and safety. Guthrie pointedly asked city staff if they needed some direction from council to find a way to make it harder for property owners to get away with demolition by neglect.
It's a good question because no matter where you live, in most areas of Guelph, there’s probably that one house or building that’s notorious. It’s been empty for years, even long-time residents don’t remember the last time it was occupied, and all you can do is watch the building decline before your eyes and sometimes talk about its status with your neighbours.
Caught in this Samuel Beckett-esque cycle, there are a lot things to consider…
First, despite proclamations inside city hall that housing is a human right, a lot of us still see it as a commodity. In 2022, one out of every five houses sold in Guelph was not used as that owner’s primary residence meaning it was a second home, investment property, or a place to park money for a while without any of the strings in the banking system.
Second, if there’s a health and safety concern, then there’s no fee to demolish a property, and the demolition permit doesn’t ask you how long you’ve owned a property, or why you let the building fall into such a terrible state of disrepair. There’s a definite lack of curiosity at an official level when it comes to managing local housing assets.
Third, there’s nothing the average citizen can do to get answers. If the house on the corner is starting to fall apart, you can call bylaw and property standards, but by that point it might be too late to save it. Who do you call when the house has been empty for a year? Who do you call if a tree falls in the backyard even if there’s no damage? How do you find out who owns that building?
Of course that’s how neglectful owners like it, ignorance is part of the game.
The Kidd barn and the Blair farmhouse were back in the news this week as the property owner there is now taking the heritage designation of those buildings to the Ontario Land Tribunal. They’re play to this point has been to plead ignorance about the importance of saving one of Ontario’s last stone barns, that they didn’t know how bad it was deteriorating, and now it’s too late.
But their appeal to the OLT seems to be taking a new tact, housing. They claim that the requirement to keep the two centuries old buildings means that they’ll have to shave hundreds of units off the plan for the property’s redevelopment, and there is precedent for successfully playing the housing card to skirt responsibility for heritage protection.
In a very real way, this issue is about housing at its core, and it’s about responsibility and the way we ensure property owners are responsible for the upkeep and care of the buildings they own. What mechanisms do we have to do that? Well, there is property standards, but there has to be a problem before anything’s said, and by and large, so long as the trees are trimmed and the grass is cut, an owner can get away with neglect for years.
That’s why we need a vacancy tax. Or, at the very least, it’s why we need a fulsome conversation about a vacancy tax with data and reports and numbers.
When the topic of a vacancy tax has come up in the past, city staff have been very quick to swat the idea down. I did a quick search of the City’s website, and there was a magnificent lack of information about a “vacancy tax” or a “vacant home tax”, so what ever work that has been done on the idea has not made it to the official record.
At a budget town hall last November, the City of Guelph’s treasurer Tara Baker said that the reason her staff wasn’t looking at a vacancy tax was because their “high level scan” showed that there wasn’t a lot of revenue to squeeze out of it, only so many municipalities bother to do it, and they’ve never been directed by council to make one.
Quick follow up question: Does council have to direct you to use the bathroom when you need it?
You might have heard about the budget crunch at city hall, and you also might have heard about the housing crisis. It seems like a vacant home tax sits at the intersection where both these issues meet, and if every dollar saved matters, and ever home built matters – as we’re constantly being told – then why does the size of sample prevent the City from collecting a fee, or giving someone a place to live?
There’s also the point that there’s an information vacuum on this topic, so just doing the work in order to have something to point at might make staff’s lives easier. I went for a walk with local activists to check out buildings that are believed to be vacant in the fall of 2022, and you could count off about two dozen properties in just the immediate Ward/downtown area. The walk was compelling, but not conclusive since this was not a formal or scientific investigation.
We know demolition by neglect is real, but it’s irresponsible for the city to have no say about the management of a precious resource like housing until it’s too late to do anything. It’s like having cancer and being given no treatment options but being allowed to decide which way you want to die when you’re hours away from being killed by the cancer.
Graphic, I know, but how is watching perfectly good houses get eaten away by the cancer of demolition by neglect any better?
