Discrimination

issues and events related to the prevention or hindering of access to affordable housing based on race, skin colour, religion, health, income, age, gender, sexual orientation and/or other identifiable characteristics of individuals and families

Life In The Land Of Nebulous Ownership Status

Thirty years is a long time to wait with the ownership of your property in limbo. Yet this has been a common experience among people in the United States...

Exposing Barriers To Community-Led Housing

When you read a story about a grass roots group building or purchasing housingHere's a recent example in Hamilton, Ontario, which is reported by the CBC: Hamilton Co-Op Residents...

Wanted: Unreported Experiences Of Homelessness In Canada

Canada’s National Housing CouncilRead more about the National Housing Council here. is asking an important question: is there something about the housing experiences of women and gender diverse...

Broadening The Path Out Of Homelessness

Queer veterans in the United States are on the point of opening a transitional housing project in Seattle called Q'mmunity House. In the United States, the Department of Veterans Affairs...

Unmasking The Consequences Of Homelessness Counts

A.J. Withers has done a great service for people who have questions about using point-in-time counts of people who are homeless. Withers reviewed and analysed 165 reports of homeless...

A Gem Of A Study In Google Scholar

On any given day, a search on Google Scholar for articles about homelessness can bury you with results. With so many studies to choose from, why select an undergraduate...

Eligible For Affordable Social Housing. Or Not. Who Decides And How?

Couples write to you, qualifications included, requesting that you give them access to scarce social housing. Would you be completely unbiased in your evaluation of their request, choosing one over...

Historic Roots For Homelessness Among Indigenous People

Native Indians are over-represented amongst the people who are homeless in the United States. This is also the case for indigenous people in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Are...

Rights Of People With Disabilities: Canada’s Poor Implementation

In 2007, Canada signed on to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. If you have a disability, or know someone who does, you probably...

New Ways To Question The Very Existence Of Being Homeless

The wait for the US Supreme Court to rule on Grants Pass v Johnson is over. It is not the decision that Gloria Johnson (the Johnson in Grants Pass...

Advice From An Expert On Making Housing Accessible For Canadians

In 2021, Thea Kurdi made a presentation to students at the University of Waterloo’s School of ArchitectureThe presentation was timely then because Canada had passed the Accessible Canada Act...

Advancing, Promoting, Protecting Women’s Strengths In An Aging World

Are you an older woman? If so, this post, as well as the report it unveils, speaks directly to you. The words and experiences are those of our global...

A Tip Of The Hat In The Direction Of Indigenous Thriving

There are two very different articles linked to this post about public support for Indigenous initiatives in the United States. The first article is about projects by American Indians and...

Turning The Tables On Voucher Discrimination

When a real estate agent applied for a job as a housing advocate at Neighbors Together, a community non-profit in Brooklyn, alarm bells went off. Many of the people who...

Canada’s Housing Promises To Indigenous People: Why No Action?

When it launched in 2017, Canada's National Housing Strategy vowed to do right by Indigenous People. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's landing page for the National Housing Strategy...

Tomorrow’s Accessible Housing: Priority Problems We Just Can’t See

Helen CastleCastle is the Director of Publishing and Learning Content at the Royal Institute of British Architects. kicks off an article in RIBAJ, the Royal Institute of British Architects'...

Women Die Young In The Land of Homelessness: Truth Or Fiction?

The health link between housing and the early death of women is a concern worthy of effective communication worldwide. It is not enough, however, to wish its validity without...

Careless, Carefree Politicans Become Grim Reapers For The Unhoused

How much damage can politicians do? Can they kill people, directly or indirectly? Unfortunately, recent research is showing that in California at least that the answer is, intended or...

Not Married But Need To Share A House? Verantwortungsgemeinschaften!

Popular in the news at the moment? A means to afford ever more expensive homes when marriage and sharing doesn't seem the answer to the problem. Here are two...

Fire Danger? Protect The Unhoused By Crushing Their Small Lives

What the headline proposes seems a little harsh, doesn't it? And yet we can find articles about authorities that would seem to be moving tentatively down that road. Here...

Are You Housing-Vulnerable? Who Decides, With What Consequence?

Here's something that may come as a shock to supporters of a universal human right to adequate housing. In a certain large American city, when it comes to to...

Life In Homeless Encampments In Canada Exposed

April 2020 saw the publication of A National Protocol for Homeless Encampments in Canada (the Protocol). It was timely because it appeared at the beginning of COVID when everyone...

Irrational Fears About Homeless Werewolves That Prowl A Nation’s Streets

The unhoused! Would you be more accepting of them if they weren't so horrible? But then, perhaps you should pat yourself on the back. You are already cool, calm...

Is A Constitution-Protected Right To Housing Fundamentally A Women’s Issue?

The world is full of both sane and crackpot human ideals enshrined in national constitutions. Americans, for example have a constitutional right to arm bears. Or have we got...

U.S. Public Housing: A Century of Barren Landscape? Or Rich Culture?

Pardon us if affordablehousingaction.org has displayed a particular fascination with the U.S. National Public Housing Museum. Public Housing in America was born to fail. Not of course in its earliest...

One Strike Evicts You From California Public Housing . . . No Longer!

As of January 1, 2024, local governments in California may no longer pursue crime free neighborhood policies that turn upon laws triggering evictions from public housing. HUD (The U.S. Department...

Report Calls On Canadians To Rethink Housing Need

Canada’s Federal Housing Advocate has just issued a report called A Human Rights-Based Calculation Of Canada’s Housing Supply Shortages. The report: directs attention to the number of people...

BC Gov’t Defined Shelter: To Be Reasonably Available or Unreasonably Unavailable?

A recent post of ours proclaimed: No Shoes, No Shirt, No Home? Still Room For You In West Coast Cities. Our focus was upon the Ninth Judicial Circuit of...

Bulldozer Justice: ‘The Rule BY Law’, Instead of ‘The Rule OF Law’

This post offers a perspective on 'The Right To Adequate Housing' and what it might mean as a legal term when a country accepts it as a right as...

Notes From Ground Zero As Denmark Re-Engineers Its Ethnic Mix

Denmark, once an ethnically homogeneous society (white northern Europeans) is facing the consequences after decades of migrant resettlement in the country. The consequence is 'parallel societies,' within the country....

Speaking Up About How Housing Systems Are Failing Us

Living in Canada's arctic territories is not easy. Housing is scarce, in poor condition and often very crowded. Housing advocates have been speaking to the government, the media and...

Bulldozed Social Housing: Resident Input Under-Appreciated & Over-Ignored

"Sorry folks, you've got to go." "Really? Some of us think not." Recent articles from Australia suggest a more aggressive approach for social housing tenants allegedly 'living in squalor' who currently...

Mining Schools For Adult Gold Needs ‘Company Town’ Housing For Teachers

By and large, children passing from primary to secondary school can go from uncontrollable but cute to controllable (barely) but poisonous. The presence of either category of child can...

New York City Allows Police To Commit People For Psychiatric Care – Six Month Report Card

When New York's Mayor gave police new powers to involuntarily commit people to hospital for psychiatric treatment, advocates were worried. Can a person trained in public safety reasonably assess...

Planning A Welcome For Homeless Clients

In Virginia, a new housing program for young people experiencing homelessness is under development. It is called Marsha and Marian's Neighbors.The program design is based on guidance from a...

An Ethical Inquiry To Improve Research About Indigenous People

Let's be clear up front. This post is not going to be for everyone. It's about a rather boring aspect of research: ethics and research methods. At the same...

The Postwar Baby Boom Is Becoming The Silver Tsunami. Is It Euthanasia Time?

It may seem a little harsh even for a socialist publication — the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) — to point the finger at mainstream health authority plans to...

Will The ‘Poor Door’ Ever Open For American Social Housing Activists?

Over the last couple of years, a new vision of 'European Style' social housing has titillated the imagination of hopeful American affordable housing activists. In with the new, out...

Affordable Housing – Rethinking The Magnet Concept

When new affordable housing is under consideration, community leaders can be apprehensive, fearing that the new housing will be a magnet. They worry that the housing will attract more...

A Promising Case For Tenants With Section 8 Vouchers In Los Angeles

After a long search to rent a home in Los Angeles using a Section 8 VoucherSection 8 refers to a rental subsidy program in the United States, where qualifying...

What Does Child Care Have To Do With Clearing Outstanding Arrest Warrants?

Affordablehousingaction.org has published some encouraging stories about court programs and servicesTry: Homeless <-> Jail <-> Homeless<-> Jail . . . Breaking The Cycle that help people to clear...

Housing Rights Of People With Disabilities – Overlooked And Understudied

Jewelles Smith is based in British Columbia. She has deep knowledge of parenting with a disability, through personal experience, disability advocacy and research. In her doctoral research, Smith compares human...

Poor Canadians Will Wait Longer To Leave Poverty – Statistics Canada

Statistics Canada has just announced 2022 income data. It reports that Canada's poverty rate is lower than pre-pandemic levels and that Canada is on track to reach its 2030...

Getting To The Heart Of Unequal Housing Experiences In The United Kingdom

David Robinson, Jenny Preece and Glyn Robbins set out to study equality in housing in England, Scotland and Wales. They planned to include examples of best practices. The idea...

Housing And Health – The Problem Of Investigating A Cause-Effect Relationship

Do housing conditions cause health conditions? In individual cases, the answer has proven (after many meetings with coroners) to be yes. There is Awaab Ishak, who died from exposure...

Homeless Or Not, Your Belongings Frame Who You Are. Losing Them Can Be Devastating

Not all that long ago, it was against the law to be homeless in Canada. That changed in 1972, when vagrancy laws were repealed. So, imagine a currently homeless...

Loosening The Hold Of Inequality In U.S. Cities

Do you remember the triple bottom line, a term invented to expand the bottom line? The bottom line was about money: the triple bottom line added social and environmental...

Policy, Not Individual Choices, At The The Root Of COVID Inequities In Canada

Statistics Canada reached out to people living in Canada at the start of COVID and asked them to participate in an online survey as the pandemic progressed. Thousands of...

Housing Discrimination And The Difference Between No Change And Slow Change

Sometimes, it seems like things are simply stuck. Take the Fair Housing Act, which was signed in to United States law by President Johnson in 1968. The law officially...

New York City Suburbs To Become A Hotbed Of New Public Housing?

The financialization of housing is raising the cost of human shelter worldwide, leading to similar problems in many countries, with growing populations being priced out of housing altogether and...

Documenting Barriers Between Black People And Adequate Housing In Canada

How do Canada's housing policies affect Black people? The legal framework includes the National Right to Adequate Housing. A variety of provincial human rights legislation prohibits discrimination against specific...

Nevada’s Toothless Tiger? New Laws Granting Human Rights For the Homeless.

Well, the State spirit appears willing, but the local flesh seems to be weak. As far as the facts are concerned, even state legislators in Nevada would appear to...

Public Housing Thwarts, Not Supports, The Human Right To Housing After Incarceration

Encouraging as it might superficially seem, America's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) actually stood up in 2022 to allow Americans with criminal convictions to have access to...

Prying Open The Doors To Housing For Gender-Diverse People

The Women's National Housing and Homelessness Network (WNHHN) is drawing attention to the issue of how gender-diverse peopleThe research discussed in this post uses the term “gender-diverse” as a...

How The Chicago Housing Authority Plays Fast And Loose With Its Land

In 2022, the Better Government Association (BGA) reported on activities of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). The BGA looked at the number of homes that the CHA had demolished,...

Social Housing Naming And Shaming: UK Government Snarls, But Doesn’t Bite

Imagine, say, a dozen policemen hiding behind a bus shelter, just beyond a stop-signed intersection. A car drifts through without stopping. A single policeman, hand held imperiously up in...

Scotland’s Disabled: There Are Lies, Damned Lies, And . . . Shocking Truths!

When it comes to understanding the plight of disabled Scots, how would you like your learning about the deteriorating availability of suitable affordable housing? A buried-in-math abstraction? 150% increase to...

Mental Heath Compulsory Tuneup Program For NY Homeless: Still Waiting

Recently we reported (alongside a good chunk of the world's press) when New York City's Mayor Eric Adams announced his plan to remove homeless people from the streets and...

Coming To Grips With The Financialization Of Housing

Since the 2008 mortgage crisis, more people have become aware of the financialization of housing. Housing has shifted from being a place where you live to become partially or...

Getting Good Data About Housing And The People Who Need It

Everyone is mad keen about data these days. Getting into the data business has told us important stuff already. There's a lot more to learn. The expression "there are lies, damn...

Indigenous Leaders Turned COVID’s Gloomy Prospect Into A Toronto Opportunity

In Canada, witnessing decision after decision to undo measures that were put in place during COVID is cause for head scratching. The country's 2020 Community Emergency Response Benefit (CERB)...

When Realtors Were Forbidden From Showing ‘White Homes’ to Blacks. . .

An fine article in Axios serves to carefully enlighten the history of rules, regulations and restrictive housing practices that have underpinned racism in America. Approaching this short documentary account, try...

New York City Erodes Fragile Human Rights Protection For Mental Health Sufferers

The following Guardian article — a personal diary of one American with mental illness who was incarcerated against her will — is a vision of horror. . .  for...

How NYPD & NYCHA Together Hyper-Police Public Housing Residents Into Jail

Even within the crime levels expected from a poverty-stricken neighbourhood, the incarcerations contributed by a public housing building in that neighbourhood are far greater, creating pipeline from public housing...

Working From Home For Survival? Forbidden In Canada’s Arctic

"You can’t run a business from NWT public housing. Is that fair?" The question is asked in an article featured below about the rights of public housing renters in...

No-Housing Fix In Canada? Easy Peasy. Just Get a Doctor To Kill You

Seems we're not talking much about assisted suicide in Canada. Not as much as we might, given how it's becoming a convenient and very cost-effective cure for homelessness. Britain has...

Human Right To Housing: Four Steps To End A USA Eviction Crisis

In a country that is not yet a signatory to the United Nation's Right to Adequate housing, polls show that it has considerable support from the American population. All very...

The Poor: Thoughtful UK Opinion Roasts Murderous(?) Canadian Policies

We might have found the above headline suitable to describe Canada's relentless lip service without action towards the rights of indigenous people and their housing that Canada has selfishly...

No Camping! How U.S. Human Rights Give Recourse To Pushback From The Punished

In America, if a human right isn't enshrined to the U.S. Constitution, there's a tendency to think it can't possibly exist in any meaningful way. But times change everything....

Spotting Architecture That Encourages Homeless People To ‘Move On’

A recent affordablehousingaction.org post featured a town seemingly hell-bent on destroying its own quality of life — anything to get rid of those drug-crazed, brain-fried homeless folk who just...

Challenging Canada’s Denial Of Health Care: A Path To Housing Rights?

Ontario's Superior Court has issued a decision in a case with significant implications for the right to adequate housing. The case involves Nell Toussaint, who has been challenging the...

Erasmus: Students In Italy Give The Lie To Homeless Stereotypes

It is so convenient to adopt the conventional neighbourhood attitude to the homeless: they are all druggies with mental disorders and criminal habits. Not only that, they poop, too....

Museum Names Artist To Help Elevate Lives Lived In US Public Housing

The National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) has taken on a massive challenge: to interpret the history of life in American public housing. Over decades now, developers hungry for building room...

Challenging Number Crunchers To Say More About The Need For Deeply Affordable Housing

Canada's National Housing Strategy is about "giving more Canadians a place to call home:" "The goal is to ensure Canadians across the country have access to housing that meets their...

Developers + Political Buddies Build A Public Housing Pipeline To Jail

How to justify tearing down aging, but initially well-built, housing? Of course there are economic reasons for doing so. For example, there are developer profits from rebuilding to consider....

Supporting Vulnerable Populations To Thrive By Changing Housing And Health Care Systems

This post starts with an article from New South Wales, Australia, where statistics about levels of domestic violence during COVID have just been published. As the reporter notes, the...

Challenging NIMBY To Create Housing For All

St. John's, the capital city of Newfoundland and Labrador, is Canada's easternmost province. There, The Canadian Homebuilders Association — Newfoundland and Labrador teamed up with the City of St....

Rental Deserts – What Are They And Do They Matter?

Researchers at Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies have picked up the idea of food desertsFood deserts are areas that lack access to affordable and nutritious food. Read more...

US National Public Housing Museum’s Home Finally Ready For Takeoff

Pride is a strong foundation of community. NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) popup defences appear spontaneously in neighbourhoods that have an awareness and belief in their local culture....

Reparations In Evanston, Illinois Start With Housing

For 50 years, from 1919 to 1969, Evanston, Illinois turned its back on its Black residents. It withheld opportunities that were offered white residents. Today, residents living in the...

Tracing The Legacy of South Africa’s Truth And Reconciliation Commission In North America

South Africa has a history of explicit discrimination — Apartheid — which was baked into its culture through laws and regulations. These laws authorized police and the military to use force...

Countering Discrimination In The Property Tax System

If you’ve ever wondered how systems and structures contribute to discrimination, this is a great story to read. It’s about a property tax auction in Baltimore. The City holds...

Indigenous Housing – Doing Better

Housing conditions in remote communities have been a personal issue for this writer, ever since working in Canada's north in the 1970's. At the time, the housing built for...

O Canada! The True North Weak And Diseased . . .

The headline above is a line from Canada's national anthem, unfortunately adjusted to circumstances. The impetus for such an outrageous(?) modification comes from a book review in nature. The review...

A History of Evolving Planning Prejudice in America

Adam Paul Susaneck is an architect. His research and its implications might be mistaken as a focus on 'building design.' But the scope of one of his current projects...

Literature Reviews – Why Do Them? What Do They Have To Offer?

Researchers from the UK Collaborative on Housing Evidence have just published a literature review about public participation in the planning process in the UK. Based on the evidence, the...

Breathing Health: Colorblind For All The Wrong Reasons

"You are what you eat" is a well known phrase that ties human well-being to healthy food. The deterioration of America's public housing in particular has added another important...

Does A Papal Apology Bode Well For Indigenous Housing In Canada?

On April 1, 2022, Pope Francis apologized for the harms caused to children in the residential school system in Canada. The apology came at the end of a week...

Finding Housing Opportunities In Daily Life

Winning a lottery is undeniably an opportunity. The sudden change in circumstances comes with its own consequences, not all of them good. As well, most people don't win lotteries....

North America Fair Housing Redress Is A Worldwide Guide

The histories of many North American cities are marred by institutional acts of unfairness and cruelty towards a catalog of colors, races and religions. In this current world of war...

Learning From A Housing Experiment In Hawaii

Did you know that Hawaii initiated an affirmative action program to protect Native Hawaiians from extinction and promote their culture in 1922? Would this program and the experience of...

Getting The Best From Supportive Housing

Supportive housing has become an essential component in programs to end homelessness. At the same time, it seems that we still have a lot to learn about what supportive...

Homeless Lured From Streets By Universal Bad Habits

What can possibly be positive about cigarettes, alcohol and illegal drugs? For starters, though known to be potentially dangerous to human health, they are undeniably effective pit-props that shore...

A ‘Green’ Opportunity To Make Homes Accessible

Disability rights activists have been pointing out that despite international agreement about accessibility rights, much of the built environment is not accessible. One of those activists, Graham Findlay, sees...

Why Race Matters In Homelessness Programs

When the U.S. Congress passed the McKinney-Vento Act in 1987, Black people were more likely to be homeless than white people. The Act, which was and is the framework...

Historic Housing Practices And Discrimination: The Case For Reflection

It seems that more and more people writing aboutt how housing is woven into racism and discrimination in the United States. Here are two recent examples, one from the...

Wanted: Leadership From Toronto’s Council To Make Thousands Of Homes Legal

This is a story that is more than 20 years in the making, years in which Toronto City Council could have exercised leadership to protect housing for residents with...

Disconnecting Housing Policy From Racism And Discrimination

Sophie House and Krystle Okafor are both based at New York University. Building on the work of contemporary abolitionistsAbolitionism is often understood to be about the abolition of slavery...

Public Housing Heroes From New Orleans

While there are a lot of stories about public housing in New York City and Chicago, those from the US south are much less common. This one comes from...

The Life And Death Cabrini-Green Public Housing Projects, 25 Years On

In the late twentieth century, prior to its demolition, the Cabrini Green public housing buildings in Chicago had become the poster child of all that was supposedly wrong with...
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