Employment

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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" 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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:...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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....

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...

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...