Discrimination

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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....

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...

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....

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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?"...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...