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Greed and the WHA jackpot

I don’t know about you but I’ve had one of those on-again, off-again love affairs with the seven deadly sins ever since I learned they not only existed but had been codified.
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I don’t know about you but I’ve had one of those on-again, off-again love affairs with the seven deadly sins ever since I learned they not only existed but had been codified. I mean, these aren’t just your run of the mill sins or minor transgressions, these are deadly sins, one-way tickets to hell, absent any snivelling apology on your part or divine intervention. Burn baby, burn.

Problem is, I’ve never been as good at them as I’d like to be and some of them I’ve failed to make much headway on at all. For example, there aren’t very many things I’ve ever done well enough to engender much pride. There are a lot of things I do with varying degrees of skill and success but I grew up – unfounded assumption – before self-esteem was invented and never mastered being proud of my shining mediocrity.

After spending the better part of a day I couldn’t think of a better way to spend cleaning and polishing my aging motorcycle, a friend commented, "You must be proud of that." I didn’t know what to say. Proud? He may have been right but I wasn’t convinced; I thought I was just being obsessive, a family trait I try hard to keep in check.

I mostly use the deadly sin of sloth to thwart my obsessive gene. Now I thought I mastered sloth early in life. I thank television for that. There was, in fact, a time when I thought my mastery of sloth just might give me a handle on pride. But then I suddenly started doing things and now there hardly seems enough hours in the day to finish what I started. Only time will tell if I’ve lost my grip on sloth, assuming I ever get around to measuring my success.

Gluttony came so easy for me, like breathing; I was born fat. But I can’t really take gluttony seriously as a deadly sin. Leading as it did to becoming a slothful, fat blob, gluttony eventually embodied my concept of hell on earth about as well as any self-inflicted condition I could imagine. Why even bother elevating it to deadly sin status? I finally whipped gluttony when my hormones kicked in and I discovered…

Lust. The coincidence of my birth managed to place me high atop the enormous cultural wave known as the Sexual Revolution. To torture a metaphor, I bodysurfed that wave for all it was worth and if I burn in hell for it, hey, it was so worth it. Lust? Check.

Now come the hard parts. There’s not much I envy. Oh, I’d like to be taller and every now and then I cast an envious glance at some bling or another but on the whole, I’ve rarely been visited by envy. There’s still hope. I haven’t given up completely on envy and in fact, sometimes my lack of envy makes me angry. But I know that’s just a pale rationalization for my unwrathful nature. Yeah, I complain about things, get pissed off even, but on the fury scale, I’m as much a failure at anger as I am at envy.

But great news: there’s hope for greed. As a child, like all children, I thought I had greed in the bag. I wanted everything I saw and, those tortuous hours on Sundays excepted, never gave a passing thought to the spiritual rewards I was ignoring in my material quest. But I lost my grip on greed as an adult. I spent so long as a semi-impoverished student, I never really got into the swing of conspicuous consumption when disposable income finally flowed my way. I even bailed on a job that skyrocketed me into the top tax bracket to become a ski bum. I was a failure at greed.

But not any more. Now, well not now but maybe by the end of the year, I’m going to own – a misuse of the word or a misspelling of owe, not sure which – a Whistler Housing Authority home. And one thing is becoming perfectly clear. Like night following day, greed seems to follow WHA home ownership.

Okay, that’s an overstatement. I know there are people who own WHA homes who haven’t become greedheads and I don’t mean to tar them with too broad a brush. So here’s the caveat: If you’re one of those people who haven’t succumbed to WHA-induced greed, good on ya. But remember, the exception proves the rule. Consider yourself both an exception and an endangered species.

I pretty much thought the WHA greed thing had found its most strident voice when the Barnfield people launched their lawsuit to weasel their way out of the appreciation cap. But then I read Shelley Quinn’s comments in last week’s Pique. You go, girl. You’ve not only got a handle on what I considered the slipperiest of the deadlies, you’ve taken it places that leave me breathless… and hopeful.

Shelley hit the WHA jackpot. She bought into a 19 Mile Creek unit. It is one of the jackpot projects. You see, the imperfect, human people who run and ran the WHA blew it with their first appreciation cap formula. It was a tricky formula, tied to Royal Bank prime and, because those duplicitous Liberals did such a good job at wrestling inflation to the ground, it left the early WHA projects with virtually no appreciation. In fact, applied mechanistically, it resulted in depreciation.

Now, the WHA units were always flogged as a "nest, not a nestegg" but even they had a heart. They put on their thinking caps and came up with another formula, this time tied to the housing market in the GVRD. Big mistake. But an honest one. Who knew the Vancouver housing market would get so silly.

As a result, Shelley’s place appreciated like crazy. So much so, it’s becoming unaffordable to the worker bees on the waitlist. And, lest we forget, the whole crux of WHA’s efforts is affordable housing for the future, not just the first buyers. So, they’ve changed the formula again. For the next purchasers of Shelley’s unit. Assuming anyone wants to buy her place at whatever the old formula says it’s worth when she decides to sell, she’ll get what she bargained for. But that’s not good enough for her and, it seems, many of the other jackpot project owners. Go figure.

Her really intriguing idea though was a tiered system. If I understand correctly, under Shelley’s system, the more you invest in WHA housing, the greater return you should get. I like it. Actually though, I think it’s an idea stolen from the Republican party. Isn’t that what George Bush and the neocons have been doing for years now? More for the high rollers, less for the pissants?

Personally though, I’d like to expand the greed thing. I think Whistler should just give us houses. But why stop there? Toss in a car and a big TV while you’re at it. Hell, with all that, I can go back to feeding my inner sloth.