What is luxury?
To some it’s a Tuscan villa, a fancy SUV, or VIP bottle service at a club. For a lot of the old guard left, though, luxury is a tiny box in the sky called a condo.
I’ve learned this fact following Canadian housing and development politics for a couple decades where, inevitably, somebody utters the phrase “luxury condos” as a kind of gotcha slur during community meetings or on list serves and social media.
Look a little closer and the “luxury” in question are the generally small or tiny condo units that the very same people will denigrate as unlivable, a place unfit for a family where even a full-sized bed won’t fit. Funny how that works both ways. Which is it: luxury or Dickensian?
Less funny was seeing NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and the federal NDP lean heavily into this kind of rhetoric recently. While discussing building housing on public land, Singh said it should be 100 per cent affordable and shouldn’t be used to make developers rich or build luxury condos.
Let's unpack this a bit.
Over and over, the people referring to condos as luxury often live in houses they own that are far bigger, have more outdoor space and are more expensive than those "luxury" condos. It’s the weirdest thing and most warped of perceptions, but a given among a large part of the population: they personally don’t live in luxury, but other people do.
The notion of luxury is connected to class. That complicates things because class identity is often subjective and shifty: an awful lot of people who aren’t middle class think they are middle class. Middle class means “normal” or “regular.” It’s why the government endlessly talks about the middle class, as both upper- and lower-income folks all think they’re in the middle. Apart from muddying our perceptions, it means the actual working class have lost their constituency and advocates.
If everyone is middle class, who’s struggling at the bottom? If everything is luxury, what are single family homes that cost more than tiny condos? There are surely many people struggling to get by while living in condos who don't think they're in the lap of luxury.
The developer and luxury rhetoric is aimed directly at a very comfortable and housed old guard lefty base who don’t like change — a dog whistle that can galvanize a lot of people for or against something. In this case, drumming up support for the NDP, but the collateral damage here is new housing support, because those phrases have a lot of weight and history attached to them.
There’s more than a century’s worth of tradition in Toronto of being anti-apartment. It’s why we’re missing a lot of the pre-war walk-ups other cities have. Today, too, we’re seeing teardowns of perfectly good rental apartments and displacement of their residents while vast amounts of house neighbourhoods are untouchable. Condo hate has the same roots.
Sometimes that bad developer trope can arguably be used for good, as in the case of the Greenbelt when developers were, in fact, being bad. I do wonder how successful the campaign to reverse the Greenbelt opening would have been without the built-in antipathy for developers.
Big bad developers don’t help themselves by hiring marketers who push every new project as luxury or use imagery and words that imply as much even when the reality is a tiny box. Yet unless you’re a carpenter with Jesus of Nazareth skills, it’s likely a developer built the place you live, big or small.
The 100 per cent affordable ambition Singh mentioned is good, one I wish was a reality across the country, but I don’t see it actually being fully funded anytime soon. In the meantime, a few generations of Canadians are looking for somewhere reasonable to live and not finding it.
In the past I've called for all levels of government to engage in a housing “war effort” and subsidize, fund and build like we did after World War II, creating the affordable and prosperous landscape baby boomers grew up in.
Even with the NDP holding the balance of power in the Liberal minority government, they haven't declared that war. Instead, Liberals have embarked on systemic tinkering, with Housing Minister Sean Fraser telling cities to open up their zoning to allow more housing or forfeit funding. That’s great. Not near enough, but great to see finally.
I beg the NDP and the old guard left to embrace more nuance when talking about housing and avoid the "luxury" rhetoric. Not because it’s annoying, but because it divides and alienates the people you should be trying to attract to the cause: you’re damaging yourself as much as the housing movement.
There are real critiques of housing policy and the market, like size, design, build quality and funding schemes. What’s often termed the “financialization” of housing, thinking of it as critical investment rather than critical shelter, has been a disaster for this country.
Continue to fight for affordable housing, please, but chill out with polarizing rhetoric.
