Hovel Hunters International, Ep. 4. People from Dresden.

(Stolen photo.)

Okay. So, apparently this place is listed for $69,000.00 and the unofficial word is, it won't be on the market for long. I’ve been told the lot is 25’ wide, and this is reflected in the fact that the municipal property taxes are around $500.00 a year.

You’re looking at about four rooms on two levels, with a crawl space but no basement.

This implies some sort of staircase, underneath which might be some closet space, or a hole to get down to the ground under the house.

Presumably, there is a bathroom, as the lot is just too small for an outhouse although previous owners have had up to five big dogs on the site. This would smell roughly the same.

According to the pictures on the real estate website, the interior is fixed up, simple but nice.

This home is featured on the Sarnia Blight website. We are not affiliated with Sarnia Blight, but we were just looking for pictures and they came up first.

Last we heard, some people from Dresden were interested in having a look. They’ll put in some kind of a low-ball offer, possibly throwing in their camper-truck with built-beside Florida room on a seasonal lot in Shetland or maybe even an X-Box II or some sort of Game-Boy, or possibly a 1992 Dodge Ram pickup truck with a bit of rust, needing a muffler and 362,000 kilometres on the clock and, ah, maybe even a couple of purebred Rottweiler/Chihuahua/Shitzu puppies (with papers) to sweeten the deal.

Let’s hope Man-Boy and Girlie-Wife enjoy their new property for a long time to come. If that chick ain’t on ODSP, then I don’t know nothing. As for the guy, we hear he’s itching to become a welder on some sort of government employment program, although there ain’t much call for sixteen year-old welders around here. Good luck, and the food bank is only six blocks away. The mental health outreach program is a bit further off, but who knows, it might still happen. If you’re really hurting, you can always go to the hospital emerg and rip a bunch of copper wire and piping from the walls.

...people from Dresden.

The thing is, with Sarnia Blight after you, the entertainment never stops. There are other cultural attractions in the area as well. They say the Imperial Oil flaring (a controlled explosion, basically), is really something on a hot winter’s night.

Thanks to Shirley and Doug for the tip.

***

I get some mail from the ODSP sometimes and my guts just churn. I wonder how quickly I could move out and where in hell I might go. But apparently, my income was on hold and they hand-bombed it so the deposit will be there after all. Also, I've been reporting my income and expenses on the 16th of the month (approximately). This letter tells me they want it by the seventh. The irony, of course, is that they only review my income at the end of the year! But there is also that power imbalance, which needs to be emphasized in case we get too big for our britches and start thinking we're citizens or people or something really unrealistic like that. So far, two months have gone by and no indication as to whether they will be reducing my income based on last year's earnings—in my opinion, they shouldn't as I strongly doubt I went over the $200.00 a month limit, taking into account legitimate business and employment expense deductions. The funny thing is, when they do make a decision, they won't share the magical mathematical formula by which they arrived at their decision. Which makes it difficult to appeal, as your appeal has to be based on facts, the provisions in the guidelines, and information that you yourself provided. What's really funny is that the provincial government is still talking about an experiment in 'basic personal income', and the federal government is presently 'consulting' with Canadians on some form of poverty reduction plan. What a fucking joke that is. Both, really.

Even more hilarious, my submission has been disallowed on the federal website because of certain words, which, in my opinion, really needed to be said.

If I bought a house, say using next month’s pension benefit as a down-payment, in some sort of rent to own sort of thing, the ODSP would go absolutely ape-shit, and cut me off five times a year until they got tired of it…all the while, insisting that they treat all clients equally.

This is true, oddly enough.

They treat us all like shit.

Other than that, fuck them.

END

Thank you for reading.

Hovel Hunters International, Ep. 3. About the $1,200.00 Electricity Bill.

J. Thornton.

“With all due respect to the disabled lady working fifteen hours a day and raising four kids.”

This story, “Her Hydro Bill $1200.00” was recently in the Peterborough Examiner.

The cherry-pickers will scream about that $1,200.00 electrical bill, but then there’s an election in 2018 and the Conservatives can almost taste that lovely election win. Yet this woman also has a $900.00 mortgage. We must assume some sort of transportation costs. 

There is home insurance, gas for the heat, money for the phone/cable/internet, water rates, etc. If she only has $56.00 left every two weeks, (with no information on other costs provided, and no information on non-taxable entitlements provided), then taking her figures as Gospel, her monthly income is $2,212.00 after taxes and $26,544.00 per year after taxes.


Question: did you consume $1,200.00 a month in electricity, or did the bill go into arrears? 

HOW did you consume $1,200.00 a month in electricity...??? How in the hell did you do that?


Also, for me to buy a house on disability would appear to be rather optimistic, and I work three jobs just trying to keep my head above water, lining up at food banks as often as I am permitted, etc. I doubt if it would be an easy ride at $26,544.00 per year, and I’m a single male with no dependents. I’m also talking a mortgage of about $50,000.00, which is not a realistic figure in most markets. It is what I thought I might be able to afford—with some squeezing of the lifestyle. So, if we really want to cherry-pick, we could talk about low wages and the lack of union protection here in Ontario, and in Canada as well. We could talk about the high cost of housing, we could talk about the high price of food. Incidentally, when her kids hit 18 years of age, she’ll lose a significant chunk of income when the Child Tax Credit goes away. Let’s hope she sells the house for a lot more than she paid for it, and let’s hope she’s not afraid to buy another one—as I was, a few years ago.


We might also talk about buying a house when you clearly can’t afford one, although it’s certainly possible the house was part of a divorce or separation agreement with a previous spousal person.

If she sells the house and does not immediately buy another, the ODSP will make her live on the proceeds until it’s all gone, in which case she’s free to reapply...

Four kids under eighteen would be 4 x $350.00 per month in Child Tax Credits. Then there’s HST credits, and maybe some other supplements in there. Also, $900.00 month is something on the order of a $200,000.00 mortgage. That payment might include, principal, interest and municipal property taxes.

If you’re on ODSP, even with four kids, HOW did you scrimp and save for any kind of credible down payment?

That ‘Stop the Carbon Tax’ bit on the sign is indicative. The lady states no party preference, yet is clearly politicking.

What still needs to be said from time to time is that a couple of adults working full time but getting minimum/Walmart/Canadian Tire/Wendy’s-type wages really can’t afford a two or three-hundred thousand dollar house. Some folks, selling the family home and coming up with a good down payment, probably upgraded into four and five-hundred thousand dollar homes.

And yet, because of easy credit and the repackaging of junk mortgages, many people were induced to buy, and many of them got in way over their heads.

We, of course, were immune to that sort of thing here in Canada.

As for the image, that’s kind of a nice little house in the Norman St. neighbourhood here in Sarnia. I can’t say what it would go for, nor what the taxes might be. Even if someone gave me that house, free and clear, on my pension it would still be a tough go.

That’s without making any house payment at all.

END

Thank you for reading.

Hovel Hunters International, Episode 2: Keeping an Open Mind.

This home in the central city is listed at $92,900.00.

I don’t know if I’m looking for a house or not.

What I’m doing, I think, is keeping an open mind.

From personal experience, it’s real hard to buy a house and keep it for any length of time on the Ontario Disability Support Program. Back in about 1999, my elderly Great Aunt Ruth was in the old age home.

She’d been in there about a year and a half, and it was pretty clear she wasn’t coming out again. They’d originally talked her into ‘just giving it a try’ as she was a real bad diabetic. 

She’d fallen and laid on the basement floor for a few days until someone showed up or tried to call, and got no answer for a few days.

Luckily, someone had a key.

I made two or three offers, with the encouragement of my mother and my aunt, who looked after Aunt Ruth and administered things for her. At the time, they must have thought it was a good idea. I ended up buying the house with $1,500.00 down, (a gift from my grandmother), on a mortgage of $50,000.00. Aunt Ruth held that mortgage privately. I was never going to get any other kind of mortgage—not on ODSP. My big problem there was to keep the payments below $300.00 a month, as ODSP at that time was $930.00 a month. Back then, under the Conservative provincial government, there were never any raises in the pension.

We knew that very well.

She was a sweet old lady. When I called, or visited her at the home, she was always so happy to see me. And when we got to the end of that conversation or when it was time to go, she would be in tears. That was partly the up and down roller-coaster ride of the illness, and partly the sheer loneliness of getting old, and not getting all that many visitors although people did their best. It’s just one of the facts of life, for many people.

Here’s the thing. I knew what her previous gas and electricity bills were. It’s not hard to phone up and ask an insurance agent how much home insurance would be. The water rates had been split off a few years previously from the property taxes, and I could at least look at her previous, six-monthly water rates.

I figured it would take an average of $675.00, each and every month, just to keep the place. 

This obviously did not account for food, clothing, entertainment, telephone, or transportation.

It did not account for emergencies, and there was damned little slack in that budget. I had, on average, $255.00 per month to live on. I paid my property taxes quarterly, which meant four times a year I was coughing up over three hundred dollars, this on top of all other expenses…one February, it was really cold and the gas bill came in at about $270.00. That one hurt—I turned the thermostat down to 12 Celsius at night and brought it up to 17 Celsius in the day. There was no sitting around the house barefoot, in shorts and a T-shirt.

Four years later, I sold the house for $72,000.00. There was very little equity, a thousand, fifteen hundred or so, but my payments were small and it was a twenty-five year mortgage. 

Ultimately, I made about $22,000.00 for my efforts, and paid off roughly $48,500.00 plus the four years of payments, resulting in a price of $62,500.00 to my Aunt, or what the house might have been worth if it had been in any sort of shape when I bought it. Generally speaking, most sellers can't wait for a payout, as they're looking to either move into another place or simply liquidate in the case of an estate.

No one wants to wait four years, or accept a measly $300.00 a month.

It also took four years and a lot of work.

When I moved in, the front hall, the living room and the central hallway were pink. One bedroom was peach, one was pale green. It was all oil-based paint, thirty years old. I spent months block-sanding it and hitting it with Killz and Zinsser mould and stain-beating primers. 

My Great Uncle John smoked cigarettes, cigars and a pipe. They had heated with oil for many years. There was no header fan over the gas stove...the walls were pretty soaked with smoke and grease.

There was a pile of rotting curtains and fabrics in the basement. I took out an oil tank, complete with 175 gallons of heating oil from an old furnace—the place had been converted to gas heat in the 1970s, but that tank was still there. I took out a gas dryer and a gas stove and all the gas pipes, just to get rid of that constant smell. I took up rotten rugs, scraped up tile from the recreation room in the basement, took down an old antenna tower, and a 75-foot maple tree. 

A few pine trees came down, and I put a new roof on the garage. I insulated the basement, dry-walled it, and fixed a couple of leaks in the poured-concrete foundations. I never did paint—I had about five coats of white primer in all the major rooms, although I did do the kitchen in beige and dark brown, with white for the cupboards. When I was done, with hardwood floors everywhere except the bathroom and the kitchen, it looked pretty nice inside. I took out a 60-amp fusebox and put in a 100-amp breaker panel with 48 breakers. I rewired the whole house from top to bottom, putting in extra receptacles, and installing GFI circuits in the kitchen and bath...I put in a new toilet, and a new bathroom floor. I did all kinds of little jobs to make it look good inside, some of which only made sense if a person was planning to live there long-term. They weren't really necessary in order to flip a house. The outside at least had some 'curb appeal' or I probably wouldn't have gone for it in the first place. Oh, and if you're going to flip a house, don't take four years to do it!

When I moved out of there I weighed 178 lbs. I was riding my bike, and lining up at food banks. When my brother offered me a bit of work, I bought a crummy little shit-box of a truck and began driving to London, picking up two hours here and four hours there, stripping roofs and doing clean-up for him. He was doing a lot of aluminum shingles, which pays good and they’re a lot lighter than asphalt shingles, which weigh 90 to 110 lbs. per bundle. That was hard, for a middle-aged guy with three compression-fractured vertebra…I was starved for sleep. When the neighbours were partying, when they came and went, they were pounding their fists on the side of my house. It's who they were, I guess. That man, (one guy was the instigator, but he had a real big mouth and a lot of friends), must have disapproved of me very strongly.

It was a tough go, and the ODSP freaked when they saw that I had money. I was afraid to buy another house. I was borderline suicidal for a year and a half, but then I ‘lost’ my home in a story that is much longer. I will withhold much of that—

Here's the thing, okay. If you rent a place for the exact same price and move out four years later, you're not getting any of your money back. Not a penny. And at some point I will be 65 years old and finally free of the ODSP. That is a consideration.

Time has gone by and much of that pain, that trauma and that resentment has faded.

I don’t know if I’m quite ready to do it again, though.

When you’re on ODSP, it is just not worth taking the risk.

Buying a house, moving in, and then getting a letter from them saying you’re cut off is hard to deal with. They did that to me five times in the first year, but then I was also trying to start a business, which is legal as long as you follow their guidelines...

With the ODSP, you are guilty until you go downtown and somehow prove yourself innocent.

The same went for the neighbours, working class guys who probably didn’t much like getting up in the morning and going to work when some guy who ‘ripped off his elderly aunt’ gets to 'stay home and get paid to sit about doing nothing' buys the house next door and starts lowering the local property values merely by his presence.

END