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...
Updated: Crisis Response To Mental Illness And Homelessness Without The Police
Two days ago, affordablehousingaction.org published a post about work by Akwatu Khenti, who teaches and studies at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto....
Crisis Response To Mental Illness And Homelessness Without The Police
Recently, affordablehousingaction.org posted a story about mobile outreach teams, which pair police officers and health professionals. Together they respond to 911 calls where it seems likely that there could...
Phoenix Bike Share: Green And Healthy, Sure. But A Public Service?
Trapped in the public housing heart of a low income community on the wrong side of the tracks? With a little help from the community at large, why not...
Is Land Use Planning Accountable For Decisions That Help Some White People Get Ahead?
During the first months of COVID in England, media attention focused on the high rate of infection among Black and South Asian residents. The homes of Black and South...
On The Logic Of Locating Deeply Affordable Housing Close To Work Opportunities
If public housing is meant to be transitional rather than transformativeTry: Public Housing Futures: Transitional Or Transformative?, it follows that public housing must be located within striking distance of...
Gentrification – What We Know And What We Don’t
AJ Golio, a PhD candidate at Tulane University, has penned a thoughtful article in Shelterforce about gentrificationFor an explanation of gentrification, try: Gentrification: What is it? How Does It...
Embedding Police In Poor Neighbourhoods: Allies Or Spies?
Once upon a time (it can't be all that many years ago) many cities in North America required police officers to live in the community they policed. That was...
American-Style Racism: A Universal Human Condition, Without Boundries?
Not to belittle the microscopic investigations that are currently detailing all the tiniest wrinkles of discrimination which is an enduring shame to America — what was once, and may...
American Horror Story: Public Housing As Black Suffering And Pain
Candyman 1 and 2 are horror movies that fit into university curriculum on the subjects of . . .
American racism
The history of national hatred targeting Public Housing
The...
Helpful Steps To Dismantle Racism In Services For Homeless People
Organizations in the U.S. that provide health care to people who experience homelessness recently issued a report about their work to change their discriminatory practices.
You might think that the...
Growing Non-Market Housing Programs With An Eye On Equity
Advocates and community organizations are calling attention to inequities in the housing market in the United States. The burden of COVID-19 (who gets sick, who has to go to...
Own A Set Of Metric Drill Bits? No? Hang Your Head, Social Housers
At the turn of the 20th century, what sane middle or lower class person would want to own a house? It was a time before Mr. Fixit-ness, before battery...
Housing Equity: The Potential Of Community Land Trusts
Shelterforce, which supports community development initiatives across the United States, is running a series about community land trusts.
The series includes an entry level article that explains what community land...
Affordable Housing Details You Might Not Have Considered: Education Bonds
Affordable housing is not just a collection of construction material and land costs. It’s a purse that must stretch to cover a rental or purchase . . . after...
Internet Inequality: Ugly Redlining Defines American Have-Nots
In America during the last century, bank lending practices discriminated against poor neighbourhoods, often predominantly black. The process became known as "redlining." The term comes from insurance maps where...
200 Car Headlights Shining In Your Bedroom Window: Blessing? Or Curse?
Surveillance is a touchy subject in neighbourhoods where a majority of citizens have good reason to believe they are the victims of prejudice.
On the other hand, home security is...
Understanding Racial and Spatial Inequity In The Housing Market
The Urban Institute has just released Who Owns The Twin Cities, which analyses residential ownership patterns in Minnesota's Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul). These communities have the largest...
County Level Data Available To Help U.S. Decision Makers
Data geeks have something really special to celebrate in the link attached to this post.
Researchers at the Urban Institute in the U.S. have gathered, organized and published a massive...
ITV In UK Catches Too Many Social Housers With Their Pants Down
When it comes to enduring poverty in disgusting, dangerous, unhealthy conditions, grovelling apologies to sufferers don't quite cut it. But at the moment in England, that's what's being served...
Sydney AU Exposes Developers’ “Decayed Public Housing” Lie
Two important lies have been heavily pushed by developers eager for new work over the last decade or two. Lie number one: Public/social housing is a fundamentally flawed social...
Is Institutionalization The Best That Can Be Offered To The Disabled?
While people with disabilitiesWhen speaking about people with disabilities, one wants to give preference to wording used in the disability community. Is it "people with disabilities" or "the disabled?"...
Los Angeles Looks For Middle Between NIMBY And YIMBY
NIMBY — Not In My Back Yard. Keep current by-laws. The neighbourhood is perfect just as it is. No more housing development, even though the city needs houses.
YIMBY — Yes...
Can Biden Resurrect the Undead Section 8 Housing Voucher?
On the face of it, President Biden's new plans to help low and no income citizens in America seems reasonable: more Housing Choice (Section 8) housing vouchers.
Unfortunately, housing vouchers...
Wanted: Friendly Robot Surveillance Dog To Invade Public Housing
Does a robodog need a loveable lolling tongue, a welcoming wagging tail?
Maybe.
Scientific American thinks the New York Police Department got it all wrong with its recent pretenda-puppy parade in the...
A Vancouver Housing Example: How Government “Hands Off” Doesn’t Work
There is persistent advocacy in many countries that is fuelled by housing development interests. It can be summed up by the idea of "just build more."
In The U.S. there...
In Modern Society, Must Some Dance To Will Of “The Chosen?”
There was an uproar recently when Trumpian provocateurs in the U. S. House of Representatives proposed an American First caucus in order to (among other things) protect the country's...
One Bright Idea To Clamp Down On Public Housing Lawbreakers
Policing in poor neighbourhoods of cities, no matter how large or small, is contentious. Public Housing neighbourhoods are no exception. And public housing tenants, particularly in Black dominated American public...
How Middle Class Miami Ran Over Public Housing On The Way Out Of Town
It was an unfortunate traffic accident. The American dream lay affordable and enticing in the suburbs. Middle America could afford cars to pursue it. Nobody gave thought to the...
Robots In NYC Public Housing: “Big Brother Dog Is Watching You”
The use of a robot surveillance 'dog' during a police intervention in New York Public Housing seems to have a human 'creepy' value of 100% with complaints flying thick...
Cabrini-Green: The Frankenstein Monster of American Public Housing . . .Revisited
Ten years ago, the last building of Chicago's Cabrini-Green public housing project was torn down.
During its lifetime, the 23 buildings housing more than 15,000 mostly black residents became a...