by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

In the beginning there was a giant muddy cosmic miasma and one-celled organisms sprung forth and divided, eventually donning patent red leather boots and cowboy hats with frills, learned a few pick-up lines and started to mate.

I don't know where the universe came from or what was there before it, so don't ask.

Life forms kept mutating in 1,000 ways, some of them good. We started walking on two legs and eventually the know-it-all Homo Sapiens acted quite condescendingly to the old-fashioned Neanderthals. We then split Africa to check out the bananas in Europe, and some hopped on ships looking for China and went totally the wrong way and ended up here.

So we've had people here for quite a while living in huts, lean-tos, wood cabins and split-level duplexes with Italian marble counters.

Just freaking imagine the housing crisis those original settlers had, hiding in deep trenches too terrified to go saw down a birch or elm 20 feet away for fear that there'd be an Indian hiding behind it. Even today, the first thing a Quebecer does when buying a property is to cut down the trees on the property due to the enduring genetic memory of fear.

Eventually plumbing and electricity came to these homes, as has cable TV and the Internet, effectively wiping out any valid reason to ever want to go outside.

Fifty years back, wanton squalor, suffering and misery led the enlightened governments to start taking tax dollars to build homes for the poor. The poor got poor because luck was apparently not in their favour.

Subsidized housing popped up all over the States and suddenly the provincial premier was pushing the new mayor to put one up in the red light zone. Mayor Drapeau, an East Ender, balked. He noted that the west (i.e. English) side was getting posh hotels like the Queen Elizabeth while his beloved east (read French) side was getting a big crap apartment building for the no-money-having set.

Drap went to war and lost. The Habitations Jeanne-Mance got built, complete with ample parking for those needy folks with big cars. It was tossed up in a style that leaves planners now aghast for reasons illustrated last summer, as the site became a market for a wide variety of non-prescription medications.

Governments continued building these places for a while. They're a sweet deal. To get the government to chip in for your apartment, all you need to do is write your name on an application. If you're poor enough, they'll let you move in for a quarter of whatever your monthly earnings are. That's based on whatever fictitious sum you scribbled on last year's tax return.

The problem is that there's way more people applying for these places than will ever get into them. The lineup locally is about 15,000 people long. And the city routinely cuts emergency cases to the front.

Advocates of public housing feel that government should build far more of them. That's not happening, though. So ultimately the result is that a tiny elite of lucky poor get the subsidized deal. Some poor folks get the help. Most don't.

The government likes the current system because it makes it look like they're helping the poor pay their rent. But its generosity leaves most poor out in the cold.

To truly help the poor with their rent, the government must scrap the current system. Sell off its public housing and decommission the administrators, high-priced maintenance dudes and tubthumping priests of the housing battles. Instead, the high-rent paying poor - without exception - should be given cash based on their income and the amount of rent they pay. Just send a boring monthly cheque straight from the government to help pay the rent.

This might upset a few people making a buck off the current system. This includes many housing do-gooders, who get to bemoan the plight of the poor while making money off the housing system. But every system works best without the middlemen.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca