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A seniors’ moment

While it seems as though the 21 st century is shaping up to be the epoch when words become more or less meaningless, we're not quite there yet.
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While it seems as though the 21 st century is shaping up to be the epoch when words become more or less meaningless, we're not quite there yet. To be sure, many words have had the guts ripped out of them and been left empty shells, verbal flotsam and jetsam in a swelling tsunami of talk-noise.

This is a natural offshoot of politics becoming polarized and demagogic, and power concentrating more and more in corporations where words are just so much spin and marketing hype. When you read as many press releases as I read, you begin to wonder whether anyone with a working knowledge of English actually reads them and, more to the point, whether the ghost of George Orwell is writing them: war is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.

In Ottawa, Stevie the Hun talks about open, transparent government while bringing the curtain down on the democratic, parliamentary process, all the while hunkering down behind closed doors to avoid the embarrassment accompanying revelations of his government's facial tick that forces them to turn a blind eye to torture. But what can we expect from a man committed to enacting "meaningful" environmental regulation to reign in greenhouse gas escaping from so much overheated talk while gutting the rest of the world's efforts to actually do something about it. Must be time to recalibrate... whatever that word means now.

Closer to home, it's best we don't wade too far into the desert of meaning we've contributed to the concept of sustainability. When Olympic fever breaks, when the last mascot's been given the bum's rush out of town and we stop pretending McDonald's fare is the kind of thing you ought to be feeding athletes, we're going to discover one leg of the sustainability stool - economic - has turned into an outsized club and splintered the other two to kindling.

But despite out best efforts, the one word we haven't rendered entirely meaningless in this town is affordability. We've certainly stretched it, fractured it and turned it into the butt of several good jokes, but we've also embraced it, coddled it and nurtured it along like no other resort town's done before.

The work of successive councils and the Whistler Housing Authority is an unprecedented success. Full stop. There have been set backs and mistakes made as we've scrabbled up the learning curve but let's not lose sight of the fact we've been operating in terra incognita , making things up and making things work on the fly.

Because of those efforts - the successes as well as the failures - our pool of non-market, employee-restricted housing is both the envy of and the model for other resort towns, hell, other towns, around North America. We house a percentage of our workers within our municipal borders other towns only dream of. And we do it without sticking our hand in taxpayers' pockets for subsidies. This isn't social housing we've asked everyone else to pay for. It is a social good, a municipal infrastructure if you will, paid for by the people living in it, people who have traded a market return for affordable buy-in.

There are two main keys to keeping Whistler's non-market housing affordable. The high-profile one is the appreciation cap formula. Now in its third, and with luck its Goldilocks' iteration - the first was too miserly, the second too generous - the cap goes a long way towards ensuring the holy grail of affordability: keeping housing affordable not just for the first people who buy it but for those who come after. If you don't think this is important, and there were a lot of people in power along the way who didn't, take a look at what houses fetch in Whistler Cay and Tapley's Farm. Both of them were first-generation efforts at building affordable, employee housing, one with no cap, one with a cap eventually abandoned, neither affordable any longer.

But the cap won't do it alone. For non-market housing to be affordable in the future, it has to be affordable at the start.

That's where the proposed seniors' project at Rainbow fell short and that's why council rightly rejected it. It wasn't an easy decision, but it was the right decision.

It's also another teachable moment. Past and current councils and the WHA have spent a lot of time and focused a lot of effort on the appreciation cap. They haven't spent enough time really defining what affordable means. That failure is understandable. When the non-market inventory was being built, a more detailed definition of affordable wasn't an issue. Compared to market, $120/square foot was affordable. So were $150 and $190, though that latter number raised some red flags.

But with Rainbow and Cheakamus Crossing, the inevitable upward pressure on affordable pushed the number to $250 and started to embrace absurdities - granite countertops are to affordable what Hummers are to green transportation. Rainbow, flawed from the start, left more than one councillor wishing they'd pulled the plug on that project at the beginning.

There is a crying need for the muni and WHA to finally make seniors' housing a reality. But if we start out wrong, over-priced, we'll only make the dream of aging in place a one-shot deal unavailable to future generations of seniors who haven't had, and won't have, the advantage of exiting market housing to fund their retirement homes.

I have no doubt the members of MAC who negotiated with the developer genuinely find $370/sf affordable... to them. And clearly, council should have stepped in earlier with guidance to staff as to what constitutes affordable, non-market seniors' housing. But if we build the first seniors' project at a price future purchasers - particularly those selling price-restricted WHA housing - can't afford, we won't have begun to meet our goals and we won't have addressed the challenge of aging in place. Since the bed units being used to create this housing are coming from the non-market pool, putting a halt to this is a legitimate and necessary exercise of municipal authority.

Councillor Zeidler's concerns of potential municipal liability are misplaced. For starters, there is no legal obligation to undertake this project, though there is surely a moral one. There is also little doubt suitable, if perhaps less refined, seniors' housing can be built, post-Olympics, for well below $370/sf.

Councillor Forsyth's petulant tantrum is simply in bad taste. Quite frankly, killing this proposal doesn't even crack the top 10 asinine decisions council has made since he's been sitting. And while we might fault the mayor for any number of things, being a dictator is far from one of them. If anything, Kenny should cut him off more often.

It's time to douse the fireworks, boys, and get down to the hard business of making affordable seniors' housing a reality.