COVID-19

"Adequate" can be a vague term when not supported by a more detailed explanation of what what it actually means. 'Has a roof?' Well of course, in that particular...

Have you ever had a day when you just needed to rest? There could be any number of reasons why you don't actually do it. But at least there...

People who are homeless as a class may well be the most disadvantaged Americans of all. But alas, there are contenders for this status. Equally disadvantaged, if not more...

The connection between housing and health came late to the table when researchers began studying the social determinants of healthTry: Connecting The Housing And Health Dots . Researchers have...

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...

'Me Too, Me Too!' Canada has a tendency to behave like the annoying little kid on the block who hero-worships the Big Kid who lives one block south. For...

When will America climb out of its 2001 foxhole? Not since the British burned the White House down in 1812 has the country collectively faced such a threat. Was...

Emergency planners, the people we task with preparing us for emergencies, often say, "the current plan is only as good as the last emergency." In other words, we're good...

Jamille Whitlow is a journalism intern at NC Healthnews. She's winkled out this story about Samaritan House in Charlotte, North Carolina, an idea that is the brainchild of two...

The cost of housing is so high these days that ownership is prohibitive to many, if not most in the next generation. Meanwhile, rental housing costs can drive you...

From abundance fifty years ago, the Christmas Island Forest Skink is now extinct. Gump died. She was the last of her kindTry:Extinction obituary: the sudden, sad disappearance of the...

The Terner Center For Housing InnovationThe Terner Center For Housing Innovation is based at the University of California Berkeley. It has a long history of studying housing and homelessness...

Louis XV of France is credited with the flood warning in the title above. Today the saying is interpreted as a giant shrug. "After me comes the flood. But who...

It is important to begin by saying that eviction is not a good situation under any circumstances. An eviction during COVID made a bad situation worse. For this reason,...

Like the opportunistic grass that grows up through the cracks in a concrete sidewalk, the homeless prevail in their daily struggle to survive. That they are bound to do so...

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...

By now, most are aware that the unknown dangers of a COVID pandemic swept many, many people living rough off the streets and into the comparative luxury of hotel...

Here's a sour-hearted Texas situation that could change at any moment. Nobody has yet been arrested for camping in that state! When we first heard the news in May...

OK, we're running the risk of damning with faint praise California's "everyone in"Everyone In" was the name given to the United Kingdom's national directive to provide shelter for people...

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a scramble to protect both communities and residents who were homeless. Some of the actions have been shown to be well-intentioned but wrong-headedTry: Shelter “Option”...

It's hard not wonder about those poor souls locked in the illicit drug trade. If we are to take the City of Boston's word on things, we can imagine the...

Cities across North America greeted 2021 with a sense that the pandemic was waning. Too bad it wasn't. Assuming that expensive "everybody in" sheltering of the homeless would no longer...

Haligonian? Noun — a common name for residents of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It's a city like many in North America that has heeded the call of NIMBY (Not In...

Well, to be honest, the blood started to boil several months ago and it's been quietly simmering until this latest eruption. The initial cause was the news that U.S. private...

Visible homelessness is undeniably on the increase. Failing truly practical solutions, municipalities and regions are engaging in futile pop-up plow-down pop-up plow-down harassment of homeless tenters, excusing the necessity...

Demonstrable compassion for people who are experiencing homelessness and trapped outdoors has in North America lasted only about a year, if that, in many cities and regions. As it...

“We just moved 18 people off the side of the road . . . I don’t think we moved anybody into something that’s better.” This recent statement was made by...

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...

Is there an important lesson for all to be learned from precipitously "evicting" a homeless encampment? For Kansas City Council, together with its citizenry, it might be: slightly more...

As California's Homekey program is well aware, fighting homelessness is a three-pronged battle. Like an iceberg, the bulk of homelessness lies beneath the surface, invisible to the public. Addressing homelessness...

Not all that long ago, a school teacher could assign research projects to students based only upon books and resources available in the school library. Those days vanished in...

The burden of COVID-19 illness has fallen particularly hard on people with very low incomes and on visible minorities. Now, research from Toronto suggests that spiralling housing costs could...

The COVID-19 pandemic provides some unexpected examples of the importance of "lived experience" to the practical knowledge that legislators need to craft focused, practical, compassionate rules and legislation to...

London, Ontario is one of the first communities to join Built For Zero Canada, a campaign that aims to end chronic and veteran homelessness. Built For Zero follows a prescribed set...

At affordablehousingaction.org we were quite taken with Toronto's Khaleel Seivwright when he hammered his way onto the local homelessness scene. So much so in fact that some might consider...

A Federal Court judge has ruled against landlords who fought an eviction ban in Philadelphia. The landlords maintained that the ban was unconstitutional because it conferred a benefit only...

Across Canada, we're somewhat envious of the Maritime provinces, which have managed to keep their COVID infection numbers to a minimum. However, COVID's economic effects are definitely being felt...

The budget fallout from the extraordinary costs of the COVID-19 pandemic are already being felt in the United Kingdom. Restrictions of the pandemic have fallen heavily on everyone, particularly those...

Lurking in the depths of conservative thought, the idea of a meritocracy is never far from the surface, at the very least as a convenient excuse for inaction. Merit-based...

In the United States, local community development agencies and large health care organizations have been teaming up to improve health outcomes for people living in disadvantaged communities. COVID has...

Vicky Spratt, writing in i, argues hotels were a missed opportunity to prevent the spread of COVID in England. She draws on research by Rebecca Tunstall at York University...

In England this past pandemic year, there was for a time an extraordinary reluctance by the government to extend traditional school meal service during closures. This in spite of...

Hotels and motels have always been dear to the emergency management heart. While some communities have other opportunities nearby (e.g. underused military barracks, student housing out of term-time), the...

What's in a name? Unofficial collection of tents together with a ragtag of people pick up tags such as  "A Crime-Ridden Blight," or a "Danger to the Community." Here's...

Give. Keep it simple. Keep it coming. Keep your data. These simple rules, together with explanations, lay out how jurisdictions that wish to provide housing security can help their...

With the good news of increasing numbers of vaccinated citizens in many countries, there are hints of life possibly returning to normal in the not-too-distant future. This news, however...

Aging Americans without a great deal of money might be curious to know whether Canada's medicare-for-all system helps out those whose futures include nursing home care. Canada's nursing home system is...

In an age where social media allows everyone to preach the gospel of certainty for every possible lifestyle, social behaviour and religious belief under the sun, we wondered how...

In a topsy turvey pandemic world, many commercial office workers have seen their places of employment fragment and scatter backwards along commuter routes, down familiar residential streets, and in...

With COVID-19 exacerbating housing crises worldwide, it's hard to avoid being awestruck with Singapore's dramatic public housing successes.Try: How Singapore Got Public Housing Right That city-state has planned thoughtfully...

The harsh realities of COVID-19 have besmirched a number of nations that have followed "small-government" policies to either starve essential social programs to death, or to pass them off...

Homewise, how small is too small? This is a societal issue that must ultimately be faced. We already have one kind purely practical answer: when it comes to basic shelter...

Everywhere, one of the biggest non-human victims of the pandemic — second only to national health care systems — has been the central business district (CBD), together with transit...

An international group of researchers has pulled together a list of the actions that have been taken to help protect people from being infected by COVID-19. All of the...

Infrastructure? Two Internets? This post is premised on the idea that the events of the current pandemic have decisively demonstrated the internet as basic infrastructure for housing, as defined in...

During the fall of 2019, people across England hit the streets to count the number of people who were homeless. The results were announced in November: 4,266 people. At...

Contact tracing systems to reduce COVID-19 spread have led to frustration and mixed results world-wide. One public housing project in the United States, however, can be proud of their...

Canadians have a reputation of being bland and cautious, but you can be sure that we look for reasons to counter with smugness. Unfortunately, on the lookout to recast...

Leilani Farha may no longer be the UN's Special Rapporteur on Housing,To check out the Special Rapporteur's mandate, see the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights: Special...

In the early days of COVID-19 we described temporary measures in Scotland to assist people experiencing domestic violence. Two groups led the design and the implementation of the temporary...

"Minimum wage" is a common name governments use in their quest for wage "fairness." It is the lowest wage legally permissible to pay a regular employee.Some categories of employment...

Just over two years ago, we reported on tiny home communities that were being built in Seattle and other cities across the United States. Today, we're checking in again,...

There is a significant range of views about social assistance, which provides emergency financial support. For some, the assistance is considered to act as a deterrent to getting a...

Viewed by outsiders, Singapore has been remarkably successful in harnessing a social housing engine to pull its citizens to become world #1 in home ownership. Success has come about...

Cynthia Puddu, who teaches at MacEwen University in Edmonton, Alberta, is calling for short and long term changes to housing and homelessness programs across North America. Before COVID-19, housing for...

The globally respected and successful Housing First program to help end homelessness could only be partially implemented in the UK's hurried Everybody In initiative over a period of two...

Poverty comes in many shades, from careful spending, through struggles to stretch limited income, serious belt-tightening and deeper into financial desperation. All the way to destitution. Destitution has been defined as...

Everybody knows that the older little piggies get, the more small-c conservative they become. Older piggies drift away from a youthful idealism and the need for change towards the...

Chelsea, Massachusetts is a neighbour to Boston. Its level of COVID infections is 918/10,000, the highest in the state. Like other communities with high infection rates, Chelsea residents are...

Free market democracies offer little natural protection to their citizens when it comes to the "inalienable right" of gamblers to speculate for profit in life's essentials, such as food...

Ventilation came late to COVID 19 public attention? Really? Not in this writer's Canadian household, where stories out of East Asia early last spring described in diagrammatic detail how...

If noise in the press is any indication of public concern, then Australia's press over the last six months has resonated with cries from all quarters for the construction...

Good Value = Popular = Crowding = Exuberant Conversation = Infected Spittle-Spatter blown away in a patio wind, but sucked into deadly circulation when trapped indoors. The future of...

The U.S., like many countries staggering under the impact of COVID-19, is facing a hopefully-temporary crisis of individual and family poverty. One consequence has been an inability of a...

In Ontario, Canada, a landlord can't even book a hearing for a juicy above-guideline rent increase, such is the demanding backlog facing the Landlord Tenant Board as it begins...

Patrick Raue is using his research to help seniors to stay connected. It is proving helpful to tenants living in public housing. At any time, it's important to keep connections...

Years of public housing destruction in the U.S. have been justified by a faith-based principle: that private enterprise can spend public money more efficiently and effectively than governments to...

New housing salesperson to prospective buyer, "Wait a minute! Now you say you want electricity brought right into your home! That will be special order, and cost extra." Not a...

A recent report for the Australian Homeless Monitor attempts to find a prescription for future action by making sense of Australia's homelessness problem as it has evolved over the...

The face of a Second Coming in today's modern world might be that of a man more effectively able to preach by what he practices, rather then practice his...

In the early days of COVID-19, Guardian reporter Laura Spinney asked if COVID was a consequence of the economy, and not the other way round.Try: COVID-19: Brought To You...

This summer, Ontario approached a limited control of the spread of COVID-19 and began to consider phased modification of its largely voluntary lockdown. But part of the population of...

America's widest circulation newspaper, USA Today, has used its resources to find out who is being hit hardest by COVID-19 in the US. Picking six areas where there was...

The BBC has uncovered a remarkable piece of news that has yet to be widely covered in the Canadian media: there have been zero cases of COVID-19 in Canada's...

Worldwide, prompt government pandemic action has swept people experiencing homelessness into shelter. The effectiveness of these actions has been greeted with both praise, but also surprise. After years of...

Perhaps you're a go-along-to-get-along free market apologist for the poor treatment that your nation metes out to the elderly, the poor and the unwell. Possibly you've drunk the koolaid about...

People have been collecting census data for at least 2000 years. What began as simple head count has become quite sophisticated today. Why should we be counted? What good...

Roughly 2% of the Canadian population has tested positive for the COVID-19 virus to date. But in La Loche, Saskatchewan, an outbreak attacked more than 7% of the village,...

In a classless society, presumably all are equal and deserve to be treated that way. Exceptions are presumably allowed when some disadvantaged group needs extra care and attention. This...

Coronavirus Futures: COVID-SARS-2 virus, first wave...second wave...third wave...nth wave. Will we still call the pandemic COVID-19, years after its year of appearance? Or will we declare successive waves as...

Will the tourist industry rebound? Sooner or later, COVID-19 will degenerate into one more everyday menace to be avoided (e.g. everything from catching the flu to falling overboard from...

Because we're not so much commenting on 'fed up' New Yorkers suddenly rediscovering the joys of suburbia. More, we're wringing our hands over the disruption COVID-19 is causing to...

In Australia, COVID-19 has dealt a double blow to people who experience domestic violence. The lockdowns have made it much more difficult to leave and/or avoid violent partners. At...

Imagine that a member of your family has a contagious disease, and your home is too small to protect other family members from the risk of infection. No problem!...

In Western Australia, officials reacted with dismay and annoyance when a number of people who were experiencing homelessness "looked the hotel room gift horse in the mouth" and abandoned...

Vancouver B.C. neighbours have recently invented a compassionate new way of saying NIMBY to the homeless. Forget the old, "I hate you. I don't care where you live as long...

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (the Foundation) recently shared stories about COVID-19 responses in nine locations across the US.They include: Tacoma, Washington; San Juan County, New Mexico; Finney County,...

The foremost affordable housing charity in the world proved the method: unskilled volunteers can be enticed to pay to travel to another continent, make a cash donation, then contribute...

Infectious disease specialists know that poverty and overcrowding as well as chronic health conditions are likely to produce increased numbers of infections in a epidemic or pandemic. In the case...

A recent pandemic-centred article from Australia paints a lurid vision of a not-so-brave new world in which downtown high-rise tenants and owners retreat to the suburbs where they 'feel...