Commentary, Opinion

If you build it…

July 23, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

If you have been around long enough, you may remember the old TV show, WKRP in Cincinnati.

Maybe you have seen it in syndication because it has aged well, even though it only lasted four seasons.

I always thought it was a great show, with fun characters. It’s hard to forget Doctor Johnny Fever, the aging hippie, Herb Tarlek, the belt and shoes matching sleazy salesman, Les Nessman, the befuddled reporter, and of course, ‘The Big Guy’ Mr. Carlson, who uttered the famous, still quoted line, “as God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

Doctor Fever was a favourite character, a bit of a free spirit. He lost his previous radio hosting job for saying ‘booger’ on the air and found a job at radio station WKRP in Cincinnati, playing really horrible, easy-listening music.

The premise of the show was that the new program director, Andy Travis, arrived one day and suddenly turned the format into a rock n’ roll radio station by telling the Doctor to play whatever he wanted to.

Doctor Fever was reborn with a new zest for life when he finally got to play the music he liked.

In one episode, Doctor Fever, who had a good heart despite his wild living ways, was involved with a charity group of rich people who were going to donate in support of a local homeless men’s shelter.

At the charity gala, Doctor Fever arrived with some of the men from the homeless shelter. The rich people were appalled at the sight of homeless people being in the same room with them.

The good Doctor asked them why they would be offended by meeting some of the very people that they had pledged to help?

I think the current ‘affordable home’ situation runs along the same lines. Everyone talks about it, but no one seems to really do anything about it.

Affordable housing, as it is called, has been in the news a lot over the past decade.

It was difficult to define the affordable housing that has been built.

There are six fairly new subdivisions developed or being built near where I live. Three of those developments are mostly single-family dwellings in the modern cookie-cutter fashion. Take your choice of three models, none of which come with an actual dining room!

Two of the subdivisions on the west side of town have large homes, although on a small amount of land. Pretty much all are single-family dwellings. The homes on the south side average 3,000 to 5,000 square feet.

The sixth development is, again, almost entirely single-family homes. Although too close together as far as I’m concerned.

So where is the affordable housing? These homes are affordable if you are a person making a very good salary.

Although there are a lot of people with really expensive cars or big homes, who also have no money in the bank and are in such debt that they can’t afford to go to a bowling alley for a game or go out for dinner on occasion.

It seems the province’s answer to affordable housing is to jam as many people as possible into a square block.

I recently visited the Town of Ajax. What a nightmare that once nice town has become.

There are solid blocks of people living attached to one another in a mess of steel and concrete.

If a kid comes from a low-income family, does that mean he doesn’t deserve to have a backyard?

There have been attempts to create ‘affordable housing,’ but, of course, whenever government is involved, it goes wrong.

The ‘projects’ in New York were a huge attempt to create housing for low-income people. It produced dangerous ghettos. Other cities have largely demolished or greatly reduced the size of housing projects for that very reason.

A mid-size city in the Niagara Region just announced its first ‘affordable housing’ project. Yes, that’s what they called it – a project.

Of course, everyone deserves a decent place to live. Some people work harder to achieve a goal and maybe have a nicer house.

Developers could choose to build some subdivisions with smaller, less expensive homes, but they aren’t doing that because they won’t make as much money.

The government trying to create low-income housing just won’t work. It never has. It leaves people trapped in a place they don’t want to be.

I’m still waiting to see the ‘affordable housing’, in terms of smaller, less expensive homes,  because so far, it hasn’t been happening – at least not where I live.

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