Employment

Employment needs that inform access to, and retention of affordable housing

Employer-Provided Housing Sustains Elder Care Homes

The issue of workforce housing has been getting more attention. When local public servants (fire fighters, paramedics and police officers) can't afford housing, governments pay attention. The same is...

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...

Why Do Employees Leave Front Line Homelessness Work Behind?

Media coverage about workers who provide services to homeless people often mention high levels of staff turnover. This is sometimes coupled with observations that pay levels are low. One...

Homeless Drug Addict Self-Harm? Mobility May Help Clean Up That Septic Habit

Mobility seems all the rage at the moment. We posted about an aborted attempt to provide mobile off-street sleeping for the people who are homeless in Rhode IslandTry: Mobile...

Get A Job, Ya Bum! But An Entire Industry Has Jobs. It’s Not Enough To Prevent Homelessness

The ultimate small-c, lift-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps conservative has a supposedly bullet-proof sneer at those unfortunates sleeping on the sidewalk. "Don't ask me to solve their problems if they don't have jobs." But...

America And Other Countries Are Treating The Tip Of The Homeless Iceberg

Isabel McDevitt kicks off her article for The Hill, with the following headline: The typical homeless person in America might surprise you. As she explains it, only one in five people who...

How Canada’s Housing Crisis Affects Newcomers

Canada made a big deal of welcoming refugees from Syria in 2015. Settlement services and communities geared up as the country prepared for a host of new children in...

From Free And Safe Transit To Jobs For Public Housing Tenants

Hop on, hop off. Free transit may well be a social leveller whose time has come. What has it got to do with public housing? 'Location, location, location' is...

Harris County Tries Something Different To End Homelessness

Harris County, Texas has had a Housing First program since 2011For more information about Housing First, try: What Is Housing First? Why Is It So Popular? and A Handbook...

What’s In An Irish Name? Living Wage Goes Toe To Toe With Minimum Wage

Once upon a time in Ireland, the minimum wage that employers were required to pay employees happened to be about 60% of the national medianThe median is the middle...

What’s It Like To Provide Homelessness Services? Ask Front Line Workers

Who are the frontline workers in the COVID emergency? Hospital workers? Yes. Paramedics? Sure. The staff who work at emergency shelters and drop-in centres? Really? We know it is difficult...

“Social Enterprises” Interlock To Build New Winnipeg Social Housing

A message of advice caught our attention in a report of new social housing under construction in Winnipeg, Manitoba. As a framework for the enterprises that have combined to finance...

UK Work Support Can Cut Homeless Costs, Deliver Free Market Housing Security

A UK charity-based work support program Freedom2Work (F2W) has now been tested for five years. With striking success, it has shown it can lift people who experience homelessness off...

Home Based Public Housing Job Training By Torch Light

Hard to imagine benefits from a pandemic. But in the field of education, the reality of structured formal training at home have suggested new horizons for educational opportunity. Home schooling...

Do Public Housing Tenants Really Need Continuous Ass-Kicking On Their Way Out The Door?

Just recently, we published a post questioning the (very old) wisdom of "up and out" policies, which impose work requirements on people who are living in public housing, with...

The Hollywood Star Who Was A One-Man Employment Agency For The Homeless

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And Cain said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? Many don't realize that one famous Hollywood...

Updated – Minimum Wage Hikes Can’t Touch Affordable Housing Crises

Recently, we described an initiative in New York state to assess the impact of raising the minimum wage. The people who crunched the numbers reported that adding $2.00 or...

Unexpected COVID “Gap” Year Threatens Employment Future For Aussie Youth

In the uncertain future of every youth, the only true constant appears to be the increasing cost of housing. It suggests that tomorrow's adults will be shivering little match...

Support For A Struggling Single Person? Don’t Hold Your Breath

Bella DePaulo, writing in Psychology Today, is calling attention to a group of people who are largely excluded from social assistance programs in Canada and the United States: single...

Minimum Wage . . . Living Wage. Will Ever The Twain Meet?

"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...

Employing Public Housing Tenants – Another Myth Bites The Dust

Here is groundbreaking research about tenants who live in social housing that deserves more attention. It challenges the notion that people who live in social housing are less motivated...

Post COVID, The Wired & The Wireless: New Neighbourhoods & Locations

As the old real estate saying goes, "The three most important considerations when choosing a home are location, location, and location." The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly turned that saying on...

Greet Once-Employed, Now Homeless Hoards: No Salary, Not Even Tips

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...

Housing Authorities See Benefit In The Education/Training Biz

Crises of affordable housing in many countries are bringing a new appreciation of the importance of government-financed social housing for low and no-income citizens. Where countries such as the United...

I’m Here. Job’s There. Personal And Planning Views Of Public Housing Spatial Dislocation

Two stories provide different perspectives on the handicap of spatial dislocation for tenants of American public housing. Decisions made to site public housing projects were and still often are...

In A City Wilderness, Can A Business Build An Oasis For Its Employees?

After studying a problem, most governments attempt an organized response that includes a timetable for implementing different phases of the solution. All very well, but where does that leave a...

Boston: New Affordable Housing Funding . . Or Very Old?

Riffing off the widely publicized 'gifts' from California tech companies, Boston's Mayor Walsh is calling for a new affordable funding stream from local businesses. Read more in the Boston...

Minimum Wage Hikes Can’t Touch Affordable Housing Crises

These days, a class of experts we'd like to call "People With Another Great Idea" have been pleased to point out that while housing costs are largely fixed, incomes...

Charlotte, NC Explores The Other Side Of The Affordable Housing Coin

In a free market, affordability is transactional. It makes sense only if there are two sides to the transaction. A seller's price (fixed) is only affordable if a purchaser's...

An Affordable Pox On All Your Tech Industry Charitable Housing

The headline seems a little churlish, doesn't it? Sneering at charitable contributions? We thought so. And yet it forms the core of a similar headline from the electronic publication:...

U.S. Unemployment At 50-Yr Low: Good News For Affordable Housing

To make sense of this story's headline, you have to be prepared to accept that housing can be made more affordable by raising the income of anyone trying to...

Teachers: Who Can Afford To Battle The Modern SchoolChild?

Two kinds of affordability afflict the modern teacher. Can teachers afford the school lifestyle? That's life in an ongoing social experiment where, learning aside, students blunder about to hone their...

Outside the Box: Humboldt County, CA Thinks The Unthinkable

Has Humboldt County California gone commie? Or maybe just half as sinful — socialist? The major purpose of government at all levels is to collect individual problems into solutions for...

Supercharged By Boondoggle? Affordable Housing Via The Green New Deal

America faces a bugle call to arms on many fronts such as immigration and terrorism. The call for affordable housing, for all that it is a matter of pressing...

The Cost Burden Of Pursuing Distant Opportunity: Unaffordable Housing

Getting on the success bandwagon by upping stakes and moving to a new location has always been pricy. Whether it's anecdotal history from the gold rush, or more recent...

Public Investment In Australian Affordable Housing Pays Off

It's an old story which still holds. You have to spend money to make money. A consortium of non-profit, government and industry groups found this out after they commissioned study...

SF Success Requires Gentrification Plan To Include Existing Neighbours

Even California's legendary neighbourhood NIMBYNot In My Back Yard activists have had difficulty withstanding the relentless pressure for gentrification in downtown neighbourhoods. In 2015, San Francisco took steps to...

The Middle Class Unaffordable House: Are There Middle Class Income Solutions?

Most explorations about the affordability crisis in a nation seem to turn on the cost of housing. Ever more expensive building materials are assembled by ever more expensive labour...

Right End Of The Stick? Buckhead Thinks Affordable Housing Solves Traffic, Not Causes It

In the gentrified Atlanta, Georgia neighbourhood of Buckhead, intrepid urban voyageurs are proposing to paddle upstream against conventional traffic attitudes. For most neighbourhoods suspiciously eyeing housing development projects, traffic congestion...

Collingwood Plans Dorms For The Bums In The New Wilderness: Unaffordability

Industry operating in remote communities inevitably take responsibility for providing employee accommodation. But in tourist towns of Southern Georgian Bay? Really? The sad truth is that affordable housing is in...

With A Steeper Road To Climb, Africa Wants And Needs Affordable Housing, Too.

We'll get to this story by way of an apology. Affordablehousingaction.org is a western society-based blog. It posts contributions to solving the affordable housing crisis from around the world,...

Iowa Considers Prisoner Training To Support Affordable Rural House-Building

Rural municipalities in Iowa are talking with prison officials about building low cost housing. With profitable higher densities and numbers, housing projects in cities attract most or all of...

Wealthy, Isolated Whistler, BC Implements PLIMBY (Please, In My Back Yard)

Someone wants to build affordable housing in Whistler? There will be no NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) here. NIMBY doesn't work when there is only your back yard....

A Tip From The Beach For Employers Needing Workers: Build Up!

Affordable housing for seasonal workers is often scarce in resort towns. Its not uncommon for unscrupulous landlords to charge extortionate prices while cramming migrant workers and students into the...

When Lack of Affordable Housing For Others Becomes A Health Problem For You

In charming holidayland, a perfect storm of vacation homes, tourist rentals and every other kind of housing demand pushes house prices through the roof. So now coffee shop baristas...
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