Hasty and Hopeless

Camp Resolution, a homeless encampment in Sacramento, was closed on August 27, 2024. About 50 people were living there when trespassing notices were issued. Residents were offered space in...

This post is inspired by the Mayor of Aurora, Colorado, who undoubtedly sacrificed some comfort to experience Housing First. According to the Mayor, Housing First is a loser. It plain...

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on the case of Grants Pass v Johnson, what’s next? This post is the first in a four-part series about post-decision...

For those unfamiliar with Kwajo Tweneboa, (likely because you reside outside the United Kingdom), this young man has committed another act of social heroism, relating once again a story...

So how does a local government become an expert in managing homelessness, a problem that has been ignored for too long? Invest in salesmanship that something is being done when...

At affordablehousingaction.org, we often read that experience of homelessness should guide policy and program design. The article linked to this post delivers advice for the UK's refugee system, based...

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation reckons that 3.8 million people in the United Kingdom face destitution. Universal Credit, the country's social safety net, doesn't provide enough to cover basic needs....

What the headline proposes seems a little harsh, doesn't it? And yet we can find articles about authorities that would seem to be moving tentatively down that road. Here...

Yes, it gets cold in the Mile-High-City, Denver Colorado. And yes, in Denver, like many American cities, the number of people who have no home is growing. It's not...

Hey homies! How come your schemes to solve the growing community homeless problems keep falling flat? It may well be because you won’t stop listening to yourselves, even though you...

Hong Kong is encouraging women to have babies. How? Once they become moms, they can advance their position on the waiting list for public housing. Why? The government is faced...

The rest of the world slowly adapts to the idea that homeless people are not all depraved junkies, but mostly people who can't afford homes. Not in Missouri, however,...

Some believe that tents are a last resort for those trying to survive inclement weather in the flimsiest possible form of shelter from the elements — all they can...

"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...

Of late, affordablehousingaction.org has been making the case that homelessness merely lives in communities. It is born, however, as a national disease that infects entire nations in all its...

With nearly a third of America's homeless crowded into the state, California's major league homeless problems are more likely to receive experimentation than any other region on the continent....

L&Q Housing is a social housing landlord that rents out some 105,000 homes in Britain. The United Kingdom's Housing Ombudsman, newly armed with the recently passed Social Housing Act, slapped...

Affordablehousingaction.org recently highlighted two articles about homeless outreach teams operated by local governments in North America. One was based on a research from the United States, which found that...

It was in a Toronto Fitness Centre locker room that a local University prof spilled the ugly beans to Affordablehousingaction.org about citizen self-protective(?) behaviour. "Immigrants are only pro-immigration until they...

Housing ultimately solves homelessness. Outreach doesn't. Particularly when the outreach is accidentally or deliberately punitive. Next City has published an article that explores cities where the official intention is...

In an era of housing affordability crises, a variety of broken solutions have been adopted by a number of countries. The advertised success and persistent failure the solutions is...

So, are government politicians and bureaucrats invariably duplicitous (as in: I say this all the time but I never really mean it)? Or is government work a wonderful career opportunity...

When affordablehousingaction.org was just starting to blog, we began searching (as we still are) for ideas that seemed to promise easing national homelessness crises. Five years ago there was...

Four researchers from Trent University in Peterborough Ontario, kick off a report on the benefits of technology with a warning published a century ago. Even that far back, some...

When it comes to getting real action on building much needed affordable housing, momentary activist victories are no match for relentless pressure from financialization obsessed homeowners guarding their investments....

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...

Neoliberal politicans took the trouble to convince their constituents that governments (all good politicians, bureaucrats and assorted fellow-travellers) were utterly hopeless at just about anything. But the private sector,...

Toronto columnist Lorrie Goldstein works up a heart-felt sneer at a recent declaration by the City of Toronto of a 'Homelessness Emergency.' She points out that such a declaration...

There may be an intersection between, on one hand, a 'just passing through the neigbourhood', non-polluting, sleep refuge for a handful of homeless people. On the other hand it...

As the bloom comes off the COVID 'Everybody In!' rose, a nation's most vulnerable have largely returned from their moments of motel and hotel room pandemic safety to life...

During its short life, affordablehousingaction.org has published 2,700 posts. The purpose of reporting this is not to puff out our chests, but to highlight a gap in our content....

With the waning of the COVID pandemic, what's happened to the United Kingdom's famous 'Everybody In' treatment of the homeless? The scramble to move the unhoused under hard roofs...

Many are concerned about the impact on human lives of scarce truly affordable housing. Those same folks are well aware that in the face of growing affordable housing crises, neoliberal...

One advantage of reading an unabashedly lefty publication such as Jacobin is its relentless weeding of high-bush vegetation thrown up by earnest-sounding politicians that hint at meaningful policy flowerings...

Currently around the world, country after country allows and/or actively encourages a gambler's haven — the use of housing ownership, not (or only incidentally) as shelter, but as chips...

The problem is obvious. The tentacles of profit-earning capitalism are enmeshed in the buying and selling of homes. These days, everyone wants to buy and sell housing. That includes...

This is a two-for-one story, based on a two-for-one political initiative. 'Green New Deals' are becoming a very sensible initiative in America, and one of the articles in this post...

Halfway up the Province of British Columbia from the U.S. border, a little north of the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle but many kilometres east of it, the...

With the world's oldest and most successful political party now a sinking ship, the United Kingdom's Conservative Party members are in 'every person for themselves' mode as they race...

What's to know about unaffordable housing, homelessness, and the link between the two? A great deal, as we've been discovering ourselves at affordablehousingaction.org. With the cost of living soaring along...

A national Brainfart Ombudsman might only need to be a part-time job. The title-holder would toil in the fields of bureaucracy. Authority would trigger automatically upon evidence of particularly...

Worldwide, the endless stories of failed anti-homeless initiatives make us wonder at affordablehousingaction.org. Just what does it take to make self-righteous citizens and their accommodating city councils realize what a...

Sacramento, the State Capital of California, first appeared on our news radar in 2021. The city was promising a departure from standards of international tent encampment brutality towards the...

Liz Truss is one of the candidates to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She really doesn't like housing targetsAs posted on Twitter: Liz Truss: ‘I’ll...

Neoliberalism? After 45 years, political parties of all stripes are still influenced by the heady siren call of 'small government' and 'private enterprise can do it better.' As a result,...

Pity the poor upper classes. The merchant classes (which run government) scurry to clear parade routes in all directions, hounding the serfs from pillar to post. But when royalty...

Hey, North American! How would you like to take a tour of a public housing building, get to view the playgrounds, the corridors, and even take a peek inside...

Once upon a time, the utopian dream of a 'garden city' was held up as the pinnacle of human community. Homes with pocket-sized personal green space were idealized as...

Let's be clear off the top. This a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Affordablehousingaction.org's home town, Toronto, Canada has getting on for more than three times...

The U.S. Biden Administration has floated a Housing Supply Action Plan  designed to create some 800,000 'affordable' homes. It dips into an existing (and now profoundly out-of-date) toolbox that...

Fine to suggest killing it, but both left-wing leaning and right-wing leaning political parties in westernized nations have been enamoured with neoliberalism for the past thirty or forty years. Is...

The City of Vancouver, BC has, as a responsible landlord, found itself going head to head with the authority tasked with extracting the most profitable solutions for the development...

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...

When compared with Canada as a whole, people in the Territory of Nunavut are four times more likely to live in a home in need of major repairs. Homes...

New Zealand's housing crisis received some mixed attention a couple of years ago, with the announcement of a national scheme to address the issue with the catchy title of...

The American public is generally far more receptive to the idea of new public housing than either the politicians they elect, or the lumbering behemoth that is the Department...

What's to be said about "temporarily permanent" measures such as the "people bins" being deployed in the German city of Ulm? Unlike trash, the bin occupants will be able...

The United Kingdom is providing its citizens with an object lesson about the power of populist advocacy compared to traditional party politics much practiced in fudging any crisis towards...

Genital Mutilation? It used to happen. Still does. Sterilization? It used to happen. Still does. Deliberate infection by disease? It used to happen. Still does. Slavery? It used to happen. Still does. Child...

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...

Prior to and during the pandemic, United Kingdom builders have had the same attitude as North American Builders — "Build, Build, Build!" That attitude in the United States has...

A 'housing crisis' implies that some kind of problem exists. Exactly what is that problem? The answer to this fundamental question shapes how people think about it, how politicians...

Too rich to be poor? Now that's a concept that's easy to understand. Too poor to be poor? In all the world, it's apparently only possible in Jersey City, New...

Free market devotees are getting rather boxed into a corner these days when it comes to proposing solutions for affordable housing crises. There are still hopeful cries everywhere from the...

You gets what you pays for, we guess. The Canadian province of Manitoba has apparently been snoozing through three decades of feeble Thatcherite Public Private Partnership (PPP) experiments in...

Thanks to a FOXBusiness report, the world is aware that Secretary Ben Carson of HUDHUD — the US Department of Housing and Urban Development has recently 'called out' the...

In a time of growing housing crises, what possesses a state legislature to use its housing trust fund as a reserve to tackle other urgent matters, not once but...

2008 US/World Housing Crisis and beyond. What? Us Canucks Worry? No need. We were proud of our doughty bank system that rode out the storm without risky mortgage investment holdings...

In April 2019 we wondered, is it some kind of pointed April Fool's Joke highlighting the plight of homeless people forced to shelter under bridges? We'd already seen and...

UK politicians are distracted. An opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph, inadvertently tells us just how distracted they are. The article itself is behind a paywall, but the headline and...

"Lucy, I'm home!" No, it's not a classic line from the historic "I Love Lucy" television show delivered in a Cuban accent by Band Leader Ricky Ricardo. What is it? It's a...

It seems that UK citizens are more worried about the nation's housing crisis than they are about Brexit. Parliament, meanwhile, has moved beyond obsession to a state of flat-out...

Bernie Sanders, the renowned Independent senator who turns Democratic when it suits him, has been a darling of American progressives since the runup to the 2016 presidential election, where...

Recently, America has produced a couple of entertaining "There Is No Housing Crisis" stories, one from the left and one from the right. On the left, a Mother Jones article...

Two financial and housing industry giants, the federal government-created mortgage guarantors, Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac,The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), aka Fannie Mae and the Federal Home Loan...

The Irish are quick to anger when the border with Northern Ireland is involved. Just recently, someone advised a Belgian bank to hire Unionist security people from the Republic...

What do you say to a Howard University student who feels she is facing a choice between homelessness or heading elsewhere to school? If you're speaking from the lofty heights...