Health Leadership Central To Ending Homelessness
In London, Ontario, a homeless woman died 10 days before she was due to move into her home. Her death triggered a hunger strike. A short time later, the...
The U.S. Moves On From The Grants Pass Ruling – Part IV
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on the case of Grants Pass v Johnson, what’s next? This post is the final one in a four-part series about...
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...
Now That Homeless Are ‘Unhoused’, A Retrospective On Scientific Study
Before widespread use of the term 'homeless' as a subject for scientific study, there were other names, for example, 'tramp,' 'hobo,' 'vagrant' and many others.
As for the word 'homeless,'...
Hot Or Not? The Importance Of Unhoused Perception In A Heating-Up World
Columbia, the capital city of South Carolina, is in a climate region often visited by temperatures both uncomfortable and potentially dangerous. That is a particular threat to those with...
CMHC Says It’s True – There’s A Mould Issue For People In Core Housing Need
Canada has a standard for adequate housing. It was last revised in 1980! At that time, the focus shifted from whether there was indoor plumbing to structural issues like...
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...
UK Government Committee Speaks Up For The Health Of Private Renters
The UK government's Health and Social Care Committee recommends that the safety standards that apply to social rent housing should also apply in private rental accommodation. The recommendation comes...
Who Are Homelessness Policies Helping – A Toronto Case Study
In 2019, Canada officially embraced the right to adequate housing, following the language of the United Nations. Homelessness is prima facie (obvious) evidence that the right to adequate housing...
UK: Keeping Social Tenants Safe While Building Affordable Homes
Should we pick a fight with Octopus Real Estate, a United Kingdom firm eyeing profit from building much needed social housing, which aims to bring free market partners in...
Improving Tenant Health In Public Housing
Two students who are enrolled at Harvard Medical School have collaborated on an article in which they speak up for the people who live in public housing. The students,...
Why Do UK Housing Associations Hoard Billions While Their Tenants Suffer Poor Housing?
Actually, the devil made them do it. That is, if you are prepared to recognize the UK's national government as the devil in question.
Housing Associations began over the last...
Pardon Us If We Engage in A Little Tweneboa Worship While Social Landlords Quake
Tweneboa who? That would be Kwajo Tweneboa, arguably the United Kingdom's most powerful social housing activist. A year ago, he was 'trending' everywhere. We'd hate to think he might...
A Deep And Wet Dive Into The Strengths of Passivhaus Technology For Building Social Housing
“PassivhausPassivhaus and Passive House refer to a standard for setting levels of energy use in new buildings. EnerPHit does the same for buildings that are being renovated. We're using...
Neglected Social Housing Or Any Other Can Hound Older People Towards Long Term Care
Research has long shown that older people are more vulnerable to changes in their environment. For example, even though it may be more expensive and less efficient to allow...
Study: Kids Roll With Punches Delivered By Bad Housing . . . ...
Some studies produce surprising results that are contrary to expectations. Others add important details to our knowledge of a particular subject.
And then there are studies that unfortunately confirm our...
Can Government Break The Mould In UK Social Housing?
Parents Faisal Abdullah and Aisha Amin repeatedly complained about the mould in their social housing flat. Their landlord, a housing association in Rochdale, a city in Greater Manchester, was...
Social Housing Mould Killed Awaab Ishak. Will Institutional Apathy Kill Others?
In the wake of a two-year-old boy's mould-related death, what most struck the Manchester Evening News and the UK Charity Shelter, which shared a now internationally known investigation, was...
From Carefree Bathing to Accusations of Murder: It Could Happen To You
Are you a carefree, and perhaps careless, bather? Maybe you own a large dog that enjoys mucky walks, but not a washdown in the tub? Hard to imagine that...
Mobile Homes: Nifty, Thrifty & Growing Safer. But Climate-Change Safe?
For decades and decades, the Rolls Royce of trailer park living has been the mobile home. Single-wides and double-wides These designations are based on road widths. A single-wide is...
An Internet Light Illuminates The Dark Art Of Ignoring Public Housing Tenants
Ignoring deplorable conditions in housing for low and no income citizens has become a worldwide technique for trimming local government budgets. In North America, it goes hand in hand...
Moulds Don’t Bother Many But For Some In Social Housing They Are Deadly
Check out the science and you will discover that the renewal of life on earth requires decay. By and large there can be nothing new without the breakdown of...
Help Us Out, Goldilocks! Gov MIA! Public Housing Needs Temperatures ‘Just Right.’
Global warming is sending a deadly message to those responsible for the well-being of public/social housing residents. We've had wakeup calls in Europe and America with extraordinary extremes of...
Bridging The Communication Gap Between Academia And Popular Media
Seventy-two people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. Today, thousands continue to live in buildings with unsafe cladding and substandard fire separations. Jenny Preece, who is based...
Some Compulsory Trivia For New(?) ‘Social Housing’ Activists
America has spent the better part of a century digging public housing into an economic hole from which it will, at least in its present form, never emerge. Parsimony...
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...
I Spy With My Video Eye — Social Landlord Dirty Deeds
Turns out, it's not just the police who get caught out by public exposure. That embarrassment is down to half the population having a video capability in their smart...
UK ‘Small’ Government As A Deliberate Death Machine
15 years before the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire, neoliberalism had firmly gripped the imagination of politicians. The message had not necessarily filtered down to UK bureaucrats who laboured on,...
Is Anyone But Tenants Interested In U.S. Public Housing Fire Safety?
Two fires in public housing in the U.S. have killed 29 and injured more. The largest loss of life occurred in New York's City Bronx boroughRead in the Architectural...
Affordable Housing Action. We Champion It. Does Anybody Do It?
Affordable housing winds of change blow across borders. It's especially true in Canada, with most of its population in a long narrow strip that hugs the U.S. border.
And given...
Scientists Champion Measures To Improve Indoor Air Quality
Thirty-nine scientists contributed to an article about indoor air quality in the May 2021 issue of Science. Their major concern is that indoor air quality is largely unregulated and...
Sacramento Flirts With Notion Of “Mandated” Housing For Homeless
The film Field of Dreams featured a famous prediction: "If you build it, they will come," referring to an unlikely baseball stadium in a rural American cornfield.
The Mayor of...
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...
Los Angeles Tent Encampments Showcase Reasons Why Slums Were Replaced
Los Angles Fire Department has recently reported an annual tally of fires and deaths in that city's plague of tent encampments. It should come as no surprise when we...
Applications Rise For Social Housing By Families Fleeing Violence In Toronto
Victoria Gibson, who reports on affordable housing for the Toronto Star, has been watching the numbers of applications for social housing during 2020. The number of new households that...
Toronto Community Housing Workers Bargain For “Them,” Not Just “Us”
Well, we took out hats off to honour striking Chicago teachers who went to the bargaining wall demanding better conditions, including truly affordable housing, for students and their familiesKudos...
Using Data And Partnerships To Add Housing And Improve Health
From the United States comes an announcement about using data to drive health care planning at a local level. The data holder, UnitedHealthcare, will work with housing authorities and...
UK Child’s Play: Post-Pandemic Back-To-Basics When The Basics Aren’t There
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...
Government Transparency Crisis: Getting The Lead Out
Lead is bad for your health. When young children were discovered to have high levels of lead in their blood, health researchers in the U.S. began looking for sources...
Health Sector As Housing Advocate?
The health care industry in the United States is adding its voice to those calling for affordable and safe housing. Why this is happening?
Health care organizations have been investing...
Hong Kong COVID Crime & Punishment — Life Played Out In A Coffin Home
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...
COVID-19: Improving Housing Conditions To Fight COVID Infection
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...
Updated – Domestic Abuse: Can/Should Social Landlords Handle It Better?
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...
The Consequences Of Stepping Off The Road To Health Equity
Sir Michael Marmot doesn't mince words. As head of the Institute of Health Equity, he is critical of the United Kingdom government's COVID 19 response. His objections are based...
Connecting Housing And Health – COVID Helps Provide Links
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...
“A [COVID] Factor That Came Late To Public Attention: Ventilation.”
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...
Customer Sometimes Right? Social Housing Landlords Might Need To Check
In the United Kingdom, the Grenfell Tower disasterSee: “Nobody Listened to Us!” Grenfell Tower Fire Survivors Demand A Legal Voice For All Social Housing Tenants and its aftermath shows...
Tenants Call For Green Kitchens In NYCHA Buildings
Tenants living in housing owned by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) have come up with a great idea to get the ball rolling on a Green New...
Birmingham Private Housing Authorities Abandon Special Needs Tenants
The U.K. government has over the past few years created loopholes for housing developers normally restricted by numerous by-laws. This extra freedom was created in order to encourage the...
COVID-19 Adds To The Impact Of Historic Discrimination
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...
COVID + Climate Change: Health Vulnerable At Risk Both Hot And Cold
In a recent post, we considered summer heat maps which coincided with U.S. urban discrimination practices, leaving poorer and more vulnerable people at risk in the record-breaking heat waves...
Intimate Partner Violence: New Directions For Programming
Governments looking to ramp up their programming to help people living with intimate partner (aka domestic) violence have a new resource to help with their planning.
Anova and Changing Ways...
Landlords Vs. Tenants: The New Warm Is Cold
The US is suffering the effects of climate change along with many other countries. Like those countries, it has taken literally centuries before both landlords and governments have come...
Bad Housing = Bad Health
i, an on line journal based in the England, has just published an opinion piece that takes aim at health issues in the private rental housing sector in the...
Connecting The Housing And Health Dots
Health researchers Diana Hernandez and Carolyn Swope from Columbia University have recently published two important articles that connect housing with health.
We have much more access to information about health...
Affordable Shipping Container Housing: Comfy Microhomes Or Homeless Prison Cells?
Quirky Architectural Think-Toy For an affordable housing solution? Or barely habitable concentration camp cage for homeless children?
It would seem that shipping container housing can be both.
Just as a pile...
Lifting The Hood On Affordable Housing ‘Red Tape’
Red Tape: Everybody hates it. Nobody needs it.
When it comes to affordable housing, red tape is taking the blame for high costs. It is being disparaged by many actors...
Deregulation Helps Private Housing Developers Build Affordable . . . .OMG!
A constant drumbeat of housing industry advocacy targets over-regulation in the housing industry. Higher density, lower floor space, smaller lots, skip the housing inspectors — all these will allow...
North American Senior’s Housing: Stealing Humanity For Profit, Or By Government Neglect?
Population aging in a number of countries has shone a nasty new light on the limitations of public/private partnerships in fulfilling the promise of affordable housing.
Why? Because the affordable...
Domestic Violence Victims: Out Of The Frying Pan And Into A Bureaucratic Housing Fire
The Guardian has recently explored how domestic violence victims in the UK are assisted in escaping their misery. A somewhat surprising conclusion is that many of them are further...
Ugly Consequences When Housing For Vulnerable Populations Goes Unregulated
Three unrelated stories point to the importance of regulating or monitoring affordable housing for vulnerable populations.
In America, there is a federal requirement that cities and states provide housing and...
Take Two Aspirin And An Affordable Home, Then Call Me In The Morning
Only 10% of people’s health needs are delivered at a medical facility. The recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation: Beyond Health Care: The Role of Social Determinants in Promoting...
