HUMAN WRECKAGE

The Skinny on Infills

Cities are a lot like me once I get to talking, they’re never finished. Since most Canadians live in urban environments, most Canadians will understand what I’m talking about. It’s always something.

I dislike other people as much as the next person. Consequently, if there’s a public issue raging in the agora and should I perceive it as having no direct or indirect impact on my life, I don’t care about it; let other people get worked up about nothing. Paradoxically, the grand unified theory of philosophy underpinning my existence postulates that for every human action and reaction in any sphere there will always be unintended consequences – and that fallout, that corrupted rain of incompetence, stupidity, never fails to piss me off. Ergo, I have an opinion about everything because everything is connected and my opinion is informed by the overarching Universal Law of Wham! “If you’re gonna do it, do it right, now!”

Canadian cities are the crumbling foundation of a tower of babble, federal and provincial jurisdictions and powers. Edmonton attempts to sustain its services and infrastructure by collecting property taxes, selling licenses and permits, charging user fees, and levying fines for bylaw violations. There’s no leeway, no alternative legal way to switch red budgetary ink to black. These increasingly dire circumstances have created a sort of utopia for developers, the infill movement.

Infills are new builds on old land. Imagine a charming home surrounded by greenery on a generous lot in an established neighbourhood. It’s for sale. The buyer isn’t its next occupant but instead a profiteer. Everything on the property is razed. The lot is divided into two legal entities, two street numbers surrounded by temporary fencing and populated with weeds. The turquoise portable toilet arrives (if I pissed that colour, I’d go to a clinic).  The noisy excavation(s) and reconstruction(s) are set to begin.

Since Edmonton’s city administrators don’t hold MENSA membership cards, density is perceived as a good thing; they just can’t appropriate land for civic sprawl as was the case in the good old days. The assessed tax on a single dwelling will be doubled. Permits and their application fees generate revenue. The pool of municipal user fees, garbage collection, water treatment, increases incrementally. And so, really, the infill movement is all “big picture” good; a jury-rigged solution for decades of poor urban planning and shortsightedness.

My complaints begin with the small picture, the architect’s rendering, a watercolour wash of the Platonic ideal of a two-storey skinny. Infills don’t resemble homes so much as commercial buildings. They should come with backlit signage, maybe a molar indicating a dental clinic or perhaps some other visual cue that jars with their domestic purpose: 7-Up: You Like It! It Likes You! The colour specification for the monolith now abutting the Crooked 9 is Ralph Lauren “Berlin Wall Grey.” And that choice was something of a relief because nothing looks goofier in a winter city than a new build slathered with an Arizona gated community pastel. Its walls are so tight to the property line that I could spray paint them with Rolling Stones tongue logos and neither the developer nor the future occupants would ever be the wiser. The narrow dead space along the now-wobbly fence line is at best a corridor for neighbourhood cats and local wildlife, hares, skunks and porcupines. It’s impossible not to be reminded of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and The Great Chicago Fire.

Though the developer was rigorous about maintaining a clean work site, I’ve been picking up the detritus of construction for the better part of a year: wood off-cuts, screws, staples, shreds of packaging, coffee cups and energy drink containers. When the snow finally melted in May, some of it didn’t. The lingering white stuff was hundreds of thousands beads of Styrofoam. Stucco needs a surface to cling to and that is a skin of Styrofoam panels (which also do double duty as a layer of rigid insulation) and wire mesh. Its application process required that some of the crew’s scaffolding be anchored on the Crooked 9’s side of the property line.

This stage inspired me somewhat. I conceived a play in which the actors would enter an empty stage and spend two or three acts building the set, erecting the scaffolding. Like the stucco crew next door, a bizarrely arresting mix of backgrounds, language and idiom, they would spend two hours less an intermission talking about their lives, arguing, joking. Because drama requires drama, I as playwright would ensure internal conflict and a tragic, horribly fatal accident; or was it? Curtain would be the unfurling of the tarps before they spray the muck that has speckled my kitchen windows onto its Styrofoam base. Maybe some day, but as John Fogerty sang, “Some day never comes.”

The future neighbours’ expansive backyard deck has been installed. It is 42 inches above grade. The rickety fence between them and the Crooked 9 is just five feet tall. Any paltry suggestion of privacy has been cut off at the knees. Worse, the natural screens, the cedars and the shrubs, are struggling, their roots traumatized by backhoe blades. And God only knows the contents of those five-gallon pails of liquid waste the stucco crew poured into the soil. Should I ever write that play, maybe I will kill them all.        

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of urbane notes on urban living since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is coming soon. Don’t miss out on the literary sensation of 2021. Bookmark this blog for breathless updates.