Is It Time To Think About The Housing Continuum Differently?

By
Rosemary Foulds
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turquoise aurora borealis over brown house with orange trim. Also a fire next to the left hand side of the house.
‘LG G프로2’, 세계 최초 오로라 촬영 성공 (4) photo by LGEPR is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Deed
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada a place for spectacular skies and housing wisdom.

Some countries, Canada being one, have developed a housing continuum to guide housing policy. It is design to help Canadians to move away from ‘one size fits all’ home ownership.

Canada’s housing continuum includes homelessness, shelters and transitional housing, community housing, affordable rental, market rental, and homeownership1.”‘

A group of researchers documented difficulties with Canada’s current housing continuum when they organized a workshop in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. Some of the difficulties were specific to Yellowknife’s remote location and its housing market2, but some apply in communities throughout the country.

The housing continuum is represented graphically as a line with homelessness at one end and market homeownership at the other. Using a line suggests a progression away from homelessness toward the ultimate goal of market homeownership. In the workshop, there were multiple instances when market homeownership would not be a good fit. Here are three examples:

    • You own a house with a partner who beats you and your kids. Leaving the relationship risks becoming homeless and potentially losing custody of your children.
    • Your job requires you to move to a new community every two years. Renting is a more practical housing tenure.
    • You own your home. It’s a lot of work to keep up and bigger than you need, but you can’t afford to move.

The participants at the workshop revised the housing continuum to be less focussed on market home ownership. The revised design worked better as a framework for meeting the housing needs in their community.

The workshop highlights potential limitations of Canada’s housing continuum in other communities across the country3. The report from the workshop in Yellowknife also offers a model for revising the housing continuum at a local scale. The report could also be helpful in thinking about revising housing policy at a national level in Canada and other countries that are using a linear continuum to guide housing policy.

Read more at At Home In The North: A Home for All Northerners: Towards a Northern Housing Ecosystem Approach

Footnotes

  1. This comes from the glossary of terms in CMHC’s National Housing Strategy
  2. Here’s a post about Yellowknife’s housing market: Cold Facts: While The Govts Snooze, The REITs Abuse And The Tenants Lose
  3. Residents in Kelowna, British Columbia also steered clear of a linear housing continuum. Kelownans instead landed on the idea of a wheelhouse. For more on the Kelowna model, try: Facing The Facts About Renting A Home In Canada – Part I