Self Storage

Every serious discussion should start as a stand-up comedy routine. Not the ha ha, isn’t that cute kind of routine. Like those that start with knock, knock, or a cow, a pig and a horse go into a bar….But more like a bittersweet line or two that gets you thinking more than laughing your guts out. Actually, more like rotting your guts out.

Case in point. I started developing a stand-up routine based on names. There are so many of us on the planet, I mean, how many Jim’s, Jason’s and Jessica’s can we actually have? Quite a few - truth be told, 112.6 out of every 100,000 Americans have the first name of Jim. In 1975, there were 450,000 boys named Jim in the USA, but only 50,000 in 2023. Apparently, my namesakes are dying off and being replaced with other names. And here’s why.

Parents want to differentiate. For instance, naming people after objects, like Rock (also spelt Roc) or River. Others named their children where they were conceived, like the Severn River. Well, what about Kitchen Counter? Hi everyone, please welcome into the world our child, Kitchen Counter - or KC as they will be known.

And then there are company names. For instance, the hair care chain called Blo. I don’t know about you, but my mind immediately starts to wander with a name like that. Is it a front for cocaine dealers? What if you work there? Does that mean you have a Blo Job?

But really, this leads me to the wonderfully named facilities called “Self-Storage”. In real life, it means you walk up, pay for a lockable closet, or a bigger lockable closet or if you live in a condo and have the urge to purge the stuff you thought you were buying for a bungalow, then an extra-large lockable closet. Then you take your stuff and hopefully fit into the lockable closet. Pocket the key and then make a monthly payment for the rest of your life to store things you moved out of your home because you don’t need them.

But no, my mind doesn’t go there (well, it did, but it moved on quickly). It goes. Hmmm. Self-storage. I’ve had a rough week. I need a self-imposed timeout without the frills of a bed, food, heat, or companionship. A Lazarus kind of existence, without the medically induced cryogenic freezing that would actually make that kind of self-storage work.

Oh, but wait. There’s another twist. But that will take the telling of another story first before I get to the punch line, or as I say, to make a short story long….

In 1994, we were lucky to find an affordable house in the Bloor West Village neighbourhood of Toronto. Actually, north of the village as even then prices were still steep as you got close to Bloor Street.

We bought our house from an older couple. He had a stroke, and they were selling their only real asset and moving to Trenton to be close to their only son. We paid them close to what they were asking, as we didn’t want to take advantage of them. They had sold the house on condition of financing, which didn’t come through. In the meantime, they had already made their living arrangements and couldn’t afford both. They were eager to move out, and we were eager to move back to Toronto after a less-than-stellar attempt to live in Hamilton (not condemning Hamilton, but back in the 1980s, it was a very different place than we were used to - like prostitutes on the corner and baseball bats used for their version of the Oxford Debating Society).

We were part of a wave of younger families and couples moving onto the block. The older neighbours, pretty much all blue-collar workers from the rapidly collapsing industrial base in the Junction Stockyards, were leaving the neighbourhood to live in rental units elsewhere in the Greater Toronto Area. Every time a younger family moved in, it was an older couple, often a widow, moving out.

The more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea of older community members leaving for a place removed from their neighbours, the stores and services they love, and their memories. So I, along with a local property owner, came up with a plan for over 100 affordable housing units (no government subsidy necessary!), where local seniors could simply move a few blocks away from their home and still stay close to family and friends.

As I knocked on neighbours’ doors, many of the seniors actually broke down in tears in happiness at the thought of staying in the neighbourhood that they had lived in for their entire adult lives.

The plan lurched from one stage to the next. First, I thought it would be nice to honour the local Maltese community and call it Malta House. I was raked over the coals at a public meeting for trying to steal their identity, while all of the Maltese who supported the project just faded away, leaving me isolated and more than a little bruised.

I had teamed up with a real estate professional, thinking that might make it easier. I ended up doing all the work and still ended up having to share some of the funds with him. The funding from CMHC dried up. The landowner stepped in to cover some of the costs. We got City approval (despite one councillor who insisted that I was just trying to call it seniors housing to avoid having to put in all of the parking spaces a non-seniors building would require).

Business and design plans in place. Check. Land in place. Check. Funding in place. Check. Even a property manager experienced with running seniors’ buildings is in place. Except she was an individual. Not a check. The property owners wanted a company to run it. But no senior’s building management team would touch what I had designed. They wanted government subsidized or places for the rich. Four years, more than a few thousand dollars and the project was abandoned.

So here’s the start of the punchline. While the project was still in the development stage, I realized I was creating self-storage units for warehousing seniors.

Let’s find a convenient, and usually voluntary, way to store old folks while they shuffle their way towards the funeral home. Isn’t that what all of the adult-only residences and nursing homes are really about? Right now, Ontario has managed to build self-storage units for about 200,000 seniors. Some called nursing/long-term care homes, and some called seniors communities. Actually, in the Town of Simcoe, there is a nursing home next door to a funeral home. How convenient, and I wonder if the funeral director is the owner of both? Talk about a captive market! No need for ambulances, just walk the gurney across the parking lot. You could even share the common rooms for birthday parties and memorial services.

Wait a minute, what about students, those with mental health issues, prisoners, impoverished? Haven’t we tried to warehouse them all?

Go to any post-secondary school in North America, and you’ll find most of the buildings are actually warehouses for the students. Keep ‘em close to classes (is that in order to help them get to class quickly or encourage discussion?) Hire some large company - preferably the ones that produce those dubious airplane meals - to feed them. And keep them away from the general population. You never know when a student might stop some unsuspecting soul and challenge them to define the square root of pi, or worse, ramble on about Socrates and the notion of Greek democracy and how it really didn’t work after all. Four years later, they stumble out of residence grasping their degree in one hand, and a couple of bags of clothes in another, trying to find a place to live, a job and some sort of weird expectation that the world cares about them.

Then there are, of course, people we really want to isolate because they can’t seem to exist in society. No, not computer programmers or law students - people who became criminals. Steal a loaf of bread, kill someone, or, at one time, just be poor, and off to prison you go. Keeping society safe from your criminal mind while you are supposed to reflect on the evil you committed with the hope that you will reform. Judging by the response, most people who have done time get, the expectation is that you will commit a felony again. Just hang out behind bars for a few months or your entire life, so we can forget about you (that is, until the cost of prisons is raised in a legislature somewhere).

For a few decades, there has been an attempt to reintegrate criminals back into society through halfway houses and re-education programs, as well as community-based sentencing for minor infractions. I think this was gaining momentum until private companies found it profitable to run prisons.

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the people that most of society wanted to forget - people with mental health issues. Our province used to be dotted with Asylums or, using the language of the deranged people who ran these places, loony bins. In the 1950s, it was common for Toronto kids riding the 501 Queen streetcar to hold their breath when passing the asylum at 999 Queen St West, believing they might “catch the fumes of mental illness.” A former director of that establishment, Joseph Workman, believed that 50 per cent of his alleged “lunacy” cases were curable at home. But with this facility so close at hand, local officials found it a convenient place to drop off their criminals and misfits.

Finally, in the 1970s, we started to figure out that people with mental health issues become a lot healthier and happier in the community. Integration is sort of working for people with mental health issues. Mind you, at first, homelessness in Toronto was driven by former psychiatric patients who weren’t given the necessary support, both financial and mental health, to get and retain housing.

Of course, there are those who are economically challenged and those with no economic barriers at all. Both are warehoused in their own ways.

Regent Park, Alexander Park, and Jane and Finch are all areas where governments built affordable housing for those with limited incomes. Massive buildings, everyone with the same really low income level. The goal was to provide affordable housing, but what happened was people living there became separated from the rest of the community and then became sensationalized news headlines.

Oh, and yes, the wealthy are warehoused too. Baby Point, Forest Hill, the Bridle Path. Out of their own choice! Often, in gated communities, the real way to keep the middle and lower classes out is to build entire communities of really expensive houses. Only household workers and service people venture in, and they’re out before dark.

Wait a minute - not so fast. The list isn’t over yet. What about residential schools? Prisons, which started off life as a dumping ground for people who didn’t follow rules, were soon followed by Residential schools. These were places, funded by the government and run by Christian churches, where those same rules were drilled into indigenous youth, not because they had committed a crime, but because they followed a different set of rules. It’s difficult to force entire generations of young people who spoke many different languages and followed many different cultural practices to adhere to Christian values and speak English or French only if they are scattered across many different small and remote communities.

This is the most insidious grouping of people in our society. And though the stated aims of Egerton Ryerson (one of the architects) were to improve the skills of indigenous youth to find jobs, these schools became the way to strip people of their dignity and, far too often, their actual lives.

But this isn’t a discussion on the horrors of the residential schools, but about how we warehouse similar people, with the stated purpose to provide better services and support. They may do, but they also remove people from their communities and a wider range of ages, thoughts and economic backgrounds.

And the more I thought about how my plan to help the seniors in my community wasn't warehousing the, the more I realized that the solution was in developing large homes with maybe 6-8 units in them throughout every neighbourhood. These homes would be equipped for elderly residents. Wider halls, a common space, simple elevators, and handrails. Easy enough to convert for others to use when the seniors boom dies off (literally). Because of the higher up-front costs and the need to make them affordable, these would have to be built by the government or non-profits. The added benefit is that they would stay affordable for a lot longer than if they were built by for-profits, who naturally are seeking to improve their profitability.

Here’s the killer punch line that you’ve been so patiently waiting for. And as I told you at the beginning, this isn’t one of those ha-ha types of humour.

Here in Canada, we’ll do just about anything to lump people together. Prisoners should be out of sight and out of mind. Seniors should have dignified retirements, preferably away from the hustle and bustle and hidden away. Kids should not be seen and certainly not heard - so best lumped together in dormitories on remote campuses. If you are poor or rich, there are places for both of you to live and nowhere near each other.

And what connects all of them besides being kept apart? What are we afraid of as a society to allow everyone to intermingle? They are all a part of what makes a community whole. Through both good and bad behaviours, similar and unique cultures, slowness of advanced age and speed of youth all contribute to the collective experience that all benefit from a fully integrated society, a whole society, one that knows enough about each other to understand that the similarities and the differences make for a richer life.