Home truths
One of the coolest parts of my work is to get advanced copies of books I’m dying to read and tell you what I think of them. Carolyn Whitzman’s excellent Home Truths in one you won’t want to miss when it becomes available in a couple of weeks.
In my Ottawa Citizen column I call it a unicorn. As someone who’s published a dozen books, I can tell you writing something that’s clear and concise yet well-researched and comprehensive is freaking hard. Whitzman manages to accomplish this, giving readers a complete picture of what caused the current crisis and how we can fix it.
I write these lines at Newark airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Ottawa. I got to spend a lovely week in Huntsville, Alabama, as I enjoy doing every chance I get. I fell in love with this city three years ago and am fortunate to have beautiful friends there who treat me to all manner of wonderful experiences, from swimming in the Tennessee River (enthusiastic thumbs up) to eating fried alligator (meh) to petting backyard goats (yippee).
Huntsville is also an endlessly fascinating study in how to build a city right. One that works for most of the people who live there. Not for nothing has it been named (often) one of the top ten cities to live in the United States.
One thing I’ve observed over the last three years is the real-estate revolution happening throughout the city. Houses are renovated or (more often than not) replaced by newer ones, and everywhere new apartment buildings are popping up. Not towers like we see in Ottawa. Buildings of four or six stories.
In 2023 Huntsville built over 8,400 new housing units, for a population that is a little under 250,000 people. If Ottawa built housing at the same rate, we’d see more than 33,000 new homes built every year. Think about what that would mean…
The building boom in Huntsville has not been universally welcomed, to put it gently. There are real concerns that so much gentrification and the tearing down of projects result in vulnerable tenants being pushed into even worse living conditions. And all the many thousands of new rental units being built are market rentals; not especially designed to be affordable — although they are cheaper than anything you can find in Ottawa even taking into account the exchange rate.
Huntsville is a dynamic and fast-growing city for many reasons. Among the ones that really get my attention: It’s pleasant to live there. In addition to bountiful housing options there are all kinds of places for people like the excellent Stovehouse and my absolute fav, the Lowe Mill Arts & Entertainment Center.
Lowe Mill and the brand-new apartment complex in front of it.
Stovehouse and the still-being-finished apartments around it.
It’s not a great comment on Ottawa — the capital city of a G7 country with over a million people including some very smart and creative humans — to get its ass kicked like that by a much smaller Northern Alabama town. As much as I love Huntsville and plan on continuing to spend as much time there as I can get away with, I want Ottawa to have enough ambition to be at least as good to live in as the Rocket City.
