Homeless Musical Chairs Where The Music Never Stops?
"So . . . let's run these homeless leeches out of town. Surely it can't cost more than following them from park to park, sidewalk to sidewalk, in order...
Missouri “Too Many Targets” Save The State’s Homeless From Jail
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,...
Will American Social Housing Die A Neoliberal Death Of A Thousand Cuts?
Neoliberal thought has changed the world for several decades of application by governments and industries. That change has ultimately not fulfilled its dreams, although many still continue to adhere...
Where Canada Needs To Go Next On Its Journey To The Right To Adequate Housing
Last month, we shared the work of FRAPRU, a organization made up of 80+ national, regional and local organizations active in the Province of QuebecFRAPRU aligns with the organization's...
Tomorrow’s Heating Energy To Save The World? Hot Rocks. . . Sort Of, Maybe?
It's hard to pick a winner in tomorrow's great affordable energy race to avoid overheating the planet.
Scotland is sure that the future belongs to Heat Pumps. They are already...
What Does Poking In Bushes Tell Us About The Number Of Unhoused People In The US?
In answer to the question posed in the headline — 'point in time' counts tell us not a lot about absolute numbers of people experiencing homelessness. That's because unleashing...
Report: How Non-Market Housing Contributes To Economic Growth
If you accept that non-profit and co-operative housing are a drag on your country’s economy, the following report is here to make you think again. It tackles the question:...
Australia’s Housing Crisis: How It Happened And A Path Forward
Reading the news these days informs us that we are facing multiple crises: climate change, housing and political discord are three examples. The level of political discord makes it...
Who’s Standing Up As UN Right To Adequate Housing Falls Flat In Canada?
North America's growing rental housing housing crisis can be found expressed in its three major languages, English, Spanish and French. The third language, French, is prevalent in the province...
World Hunt For Effective Affordable Housing Strategies, Canada Edition
NIMBY? YIMBY? Affordablehousingaction.org is based in Canada. We have taken the attitude that, where it comes to affordable housing, it is possible to learn from what's going on in...
Vancouver, BC’s LGBTQ Community Scores Major Affordable Housing And Social Support
Like everyone else, those from social and cultural minorities can be attracted to both the anonymity and opportunity of large cities. A voyage of discovery to such a place...
Australian Human Right To Adequate Housing? Been There, Done That
A pressing question for Australia comes from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): "if housing was considered a human right, would it fix our housing crisis?"
One disturbing possible answer may...
We Have Seen The Worst Landlord, And It Is Us!
It takes a certain amount of courage, or perhaps more accurately, desperation, to call yourself the 'Worst Landlord' in the state. This is particularly true if you are a...
Geese Dragged Into Homeless Fight In Sacramento, California
Consider Sacramento County. It is bound together unto eternity with the City of Sacramento, thanks to the territory they share, along with physical and social interests. Might we expect,...
Shoplifting ‘Crisis’ Tied To Housing Prices, Poverty? Depends On Who You Ask
Creeping poverty that leaves people unhoused: does it contribute to a so-called shoplifting 'crisis' afflicting a number of countries? Or are we primarily looking at crime on the rise?...
How Many Renters Can Dance on A Housing Pinhead? In The UK, Not Enough
Renter-capabilities for an Oxbridge U. graduate with a plummy accent and impeccable manners? A breeze.
Renter-capabilities for an average UK young adult of average colour (beige?), unimposing academic credentials (GCE),...
Report Calls On Canadians To Rethink Housing Need
Canada’s Federal Housing Advocate has just issued a report called A Human Rights-Based Calculation Of Canada’s Housing Supply Shortages. The report:
directs attention to the number of people...
EU Local Communities Can’t Manage Unhoused Youth. Can Any Community?
Affordablehousingaction.org has been advocating that homelessness must be treated as a national war, not a penny ante local squabble to be solved by local activists and learner politicians knocking...
Looking To The Past In Order To Guide Action In Today’s Housing Market
Can history help guide actions in the housing market today? A 2023 report by Thomas Shay Hill gives us a fine opportunity to find out. Hill’s report is called...
Notes From Ground Zero As Denmark Re-Engineers Its Ethnic Mix
Denmark, once an ethnically homogeneous society (white northern Europeans) is facing the consequences after decades of migrant resettlement in the country. The consequence is 'parallel societies,' within the country....
United Kingdom Drug Fiends Rave In Lifestyle Tents: Real Homes Are For Sissies!
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...
Wanted: A U.S. War To Support A Drug Too Valuable to Smoke: Affordable Housing!
It still remains (barely) possible that smaller communities suffering from a gradually increasing homelessness crisis can solve their problems at the local municipality level.
Wanted: resources to quickly satisfy basic...
Emergency Responses Miss Opportunities To Build Up Communities
This is part of a series that looks at housing and homelessness in South Africa and Canada. It might be a source of inspiration/direction for housing efforts in either...
UK City To Developer Delivering Flawed New Housing: No Thanks. Knock It Down!
So you want to build an apartment tower and you've borrowed the bucks to cover construction . . . you think. Of course you've been hopeful in your budgeting,...
UK Research Investigates The Ethics Of Tax Scrapping
Governments in the United Kingdom have been changing policies that affect the cost of housing for its residents. Changes of this kind always garner notice and opposition in the...
Housing Costs For Citizens In Spain Dragged Through The Roof By Tourists
In 2017, the Spanish anarchist group, Arran, undertook a series of actions against tourists. These added up to some frightening encounters in which international visitors imagined themselves on the...
Lessons From An Ambitious Retrofit In A Glasgow Tenement
This writer has never been to Scotland, but 107 Niddrie Road in Glasgow has become a familiar address. The building is over 100 years old and belongs to the...
Another Good Result For Housing First, This Time In England
Manchester's Mayor Andy Burnham has good news for the people in his city, where the number of homeless families in temporary accommodation is going down. The city is also...
World Petrolheads Forever Impoverished By ‘Greening’? Can Luxembourg Help?
At the price of considerable criticism, United Kingdom Prime Minister Sunak has delayed the end of purchaseable new petrol power as a means of transport. It will be delayed...
US Architect Stepping Up To Build Deeply Affordable Housing
We recently reported an interview with UK architect Peter Barber. In it, Barber speaks directly about the need for much more housing for people with very low incomes. Try:...
Borrowed UK Perspectives: Helpful In Redefining New World Affordable Housing?
Here's a post based on material originally aimed at a United Kingdom market, but with most certainly a relevance elsewhere, particularly struggling North America.
A winner of the UK's Neave...
Success Of Affordable Housing Initiatives Must Be Tackled At Least 3 Ways At Once
In this day and age, there are three important 'flavours' of affordable housing, all of which need to be considered and addressed in order to tackle national housing crises:
...
UK Social Housing, Not Ownership, Can End Private Rental Profiteering
Not all that long ago, renting a home on the free market was the essential penny-saving survival means in the UK. It was once cheaper and more readily available...
UK Social Housing & Communities: Time Again For All Hands On Deck?
There is currently some discussion of the idea — nay, even importance — of the value of 'community' within UK housing. This post ultimately targets a discussion about the...
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,...
Gentrification In Roxbury, Boston: If You Can’t Join Them, Beat Them
Six years ago Roxbury a neighbourhood in Boston, Massachusetts, was being eaten alive by the local tech industry. Roxbury residents were losing housing to well-paid tech employees who moved...
Basic Income And Public Opinions About Homelessness
A small project in Vancouver, BC, which gave a lump sum of $7,500 to people who were homeless, has caught the attention of The Guardian. The Guardian does not...
Questioning The Strategy Of Closing Shelters To End Homelessness
Affordablehousingaction.org clings to an underlying notion that financialization, no matter how honourable the motives that can be assigned to those who practice it, nonetheless impacts a country's population with...
In A Land Of Accused Bad Tenants, Police To Finger Landlords To Take The Fall
Do we dare wish for global acceptance of a recent directive to the London, England police? It highlights landlords as the probable culprits in landlord/tenant disputes over evictions. Rather...
Social Housing: We Know What It Means. Is It Time To Understand Social Energy?
A considerable number of folks in the United Kingdom, as well as other European countries, have been inclined to think of the human right to adequate housing as an...
Bulldozed Social Housing: Resident Input Under-Appreciated & Over-Ignored
"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...
Affordable Housing: Whodunnit Differently? Singapore. Here’s How
When Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965 it had aspirations to become a regional and world-beating economy. In 50-odd years it has achieved that goal.
From the word go, Singapore...
Local Homelessness Is A National Problem. Making Civic Duty A Crime Is No Answer
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...
Yes, Internet Is Essential For All Citizens: World Leader Proves It Out. Unh . . . Who?
What do you call the realization that your supposedly advanced country lags behind an imagined global backwater?
Humiliating?
It's the kind of reaction that can happen when you holiday in a...
A Precise Prescription For Ending Homelessness — And It’s Not Clearing Encampments
Here is a report about fixing the homelessness crisis. Unlike many articles, this one does not recommend clearing encampments and moving people onIf you haven't come across this sordid...
Non-Equity Rental Cooperatives … And A Whole Lot More
In Australia, Skynews recently interviewed Melina Morrison, the CEO of the Business Council of Cooperatives and Mutuals. Morrison was up to bat in order to speak about housing cooperatives,...
Unhoused? Welcome To The Lemming-Land Of California.
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....
Highest Ever Fine Handed Out To Big UK Social Landlord. What’s Going On Here?
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...
Why Efforts To Fix Canada’s Housing Crisis Aren’t Working
Ricardo Tranjan works at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. He's spent quite a bit of time there focussing on employment and poverty, but at the beginning of COVID,...
NYC Mayor’s Message To The Unhoused: Don’t Come Here, We’re Full up.
A combination of events makes New York City an excellent example of why every mayor and council of every town and city in every world democracy should think seriously...
Merry Xmas For All? Hardly. 40% Believe The Poor Should Not Have Holidays
There are apparently significant consequences for those trapped by economic circumstances away from human pleasures we all might cherish — such as Christmas, or Hanukkah, or a well balanced...
Introducing Affraudable Housing — Affordability Based On At Least One Piggy Bank
Affraudable housing is becoming more common these days. All that is needed is a bad attitude, some small math skill, and a willingness to pull the wool over hopeful...
Housing – A Wicked Problem
Duncan Maclennan is an economist who has studied housing in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. He says that housing is a 'wicked' problemFor more on the definition of...
An Action Plan To Achieve The Right To Adequate Housing
Mariana Mazzucato and Leilani Farha have collaborated on a roadmap to achieve the right to adequate housing. The roadmap starts with a mission.
Mazzucato and Farha argue that having a...
UK Keeps The Flame Of Refugee Hope Alive . . . In All The Wrong Ways?
The United Kingdom's vulnerability to unwanted migrants has coughed up a range of solutions to an invasion of refugees — real as well as allegedly fake — who have...
‘Homeless’ . . . Bad? ‘Unhoused’ . . . Good? What’s In A Name? More Than You Might Think
At affordablehousingaction.org we consider The Guardian one of the world's great papers, with well-written world-wide in-depth stories about social housing and homelessness. When The Guardian picks up a story, we...
Does The Fear Of Being Duped Strangle Efforts To End Homelessness?
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan studies the psychology of legal decision-making at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work contributes to our understanding of our fear of being a taken for a fool....
In Search Of The Incredible Hulk
No, not the Jolly(?) Green Giant of comic book fame, but the floating military motel with roots in the Napoleonic Wars. And in Portland Harbour, United Kingdom, the Incredible...
YIMBY Is Dead. Long Live YIMBY (The Good Kind)!
More than one kind of YIMBY? Why, yes, of course. There is the rare and honorable "Yes In My Back Yard." It happens hen people live in a neighbourhood...
Exploring The Temporary Potential Of The Drive In Live-In
The mere existence of live-in vehicles has meant they've been quietly used as houses for 'homeless' people for decades. In America, there are still huge expanses of wilderness in...
Bye Bye ‘COVID Safety’ For All. Hello ‘Pay As You Can’ From Parking To Electric Power
How does the current economic climate affect housing and homelessness?
One direct effect is the wind-down of COVID emergency measures that saw "everybody indoors" safety measures which provided temporary housing...
How Portland Got Its New Zoning Code
Like many cities in the United States, the vast majority of its residential land was zoned for single family homes. In 2020, Portland City Council approved the Residential Infill...
Can’t Do The Time? Then Don’t Do The Crime – Really Bad Advice And Treatment For The Homeless
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...
Do Governments Mistakenly Support A Fantasy: That Voters Believe All Should Own Housing?
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...
Police Are Trained To Get Stuff Done. Should That Include Finding Housing For Homeless People?
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...
Privatization Of Illegal Homeless Encampments: A City-Provoked Trend?
City authorities across North America and elsewhere tend to bow down to their democratic masters: at least some portion of the general public, as well as lobbyists for business...
United Kingdom: The Fatal Weakness Of Housing Allowance, Unmasked Yet Again
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...
Seattle Neighbourhood Densification: Bring On the Mid-Rises! . . . Hunh?
Here's a meander towards an unexpected quirk in the news. In some countries, the local press tends to be infected by NIMBYNIMBY = Not In My Back Yard hostility....
Newfangled Universal Credit In The UK Currently Unhelpful In Protecting The Poor
Many countries have benefit payment schemes that help those with low or no income to survive. One might prefer to say 'survive and prosper,' but that seldom if ever...
UK Outdoor Homeless Won’t Be Missing Because Their Shelter Promise Will Be Missed
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...
Housing Rights Of People With Disabilities – Overlooked And Understudied
Jewelles Smith is based in British Columbia. She has deep knowledge of parenting with a disability, through personal experience, disability advocacy and research.
In her doctoral research, Smith compares human...
Tiny Home Retrospective: When Portland Enticed Landowners To Welcome Aboard The Homeless
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...
Technology Stirs The Homeless/Child Welfare Soup Pot. Too Bad It’s Just Full of Water
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...
Film Celebrates How Determined Housing Activists Triumphed Against New York City
Would you take on one of the world's most powerful mayors of one of the world's most powerful city councils, while it played ball with powerful building developers dead...
City Of Featherweight Affordable Housing Action Fumbles Coins Back Into Profiteering Pockets
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....
Social Housing: What’s Happening in A Brave New USA of Truly Affordable Housing?
Social Housing, newly minted for America! What is it? How does it offer to mitigate and, hopefully one day, end a current national housing crisis? This post introduces an...
California Rich & Poor: If We All Live In A Yellow Submarine, Will We Despise Each Other Less?
Affordablehousingaction.org has been following one of the few currently active 'social housing' projects in the USA. With a touch of good old American self-interest, activists have decided that a...
Rebuilt Shipping Containers Stacked On A Barge: A Temporary Home For Homeless People?
The United Kingdom is currently preoccupied with asylum-seekers. Thousands of them arrive yearly, crossing the channel from Europe to instantly swell the UK's homeless population, already of crisis proportions.
The...
Standing Up To Common, Semi-Fraudulent, Public Housing Promises — All Spelled ‘Eviction’
Faced with a conspiracy to cheat you out of your home, what can one individual do? For example, consider an impoverished resident of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project in...
Poor Canadians Will Wait Longer To Leave Poverty – Statistics Canada
Statistics Canada has just announced 2022 income data. It reports that Canada's poverty rate is lower than pre-pandemic levels and that Canada is on track to reach its 2030...
New Zealand Housing Adventures: From Kiwibuild Disaster To De-Zoning Heaven?
At the height of New Zealand's 2017 fever dream of 100,000 new housing units, we were perplexed. Us Canadians had duly noted that New Zealand lacked the resources to...
U.S. Federal Department of Justice OKs Compassion For The Hungry — If It Is A Religious Practice
Perhaps you believe that demonstrations of human compassion are always worthy of social acceptance, permission, even praise. Not, however, in California, where feeding the hungry has arguably no merit...
Getting To The Heart Of Unequal Housing Experiences In The United Kingdom
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...
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...
Best Foot Forward: Public/Social Housing In The 15-Minute City
The concept of a '15-minute city' is having a long moment of world-wide appreciation If you haven't yet focused upon 15-minute cities, here's an easy-reading description of how walking...
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...
Up Against The Wiles of Free Enterprise: Who Suffers? The Vulnerable, Along With Everybody Else
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,...
Transportation And Deeply Affordable Housing — An Ongoing Tension In Urban Life
Our lives depend on transportation. Stuff needs to get shipped into and through the communities where people live. People need transport to get to work, shop for essentials and...
GOVT Emergency Code: ‘DO NOTHING’ . . . or, Declare ‘Homelessness Emergency’ (Same Thing)
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...
Mobile Homeless Sleeper? Religious Billboard? Can A ‘Dignity’ Bus Safely Help Your Town?
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...
A Prescription For Heat Pump Programs In The United Kingdom
It's no wonder that uptake on heat pumps in the United Kingdom has been so much lower than its close neighbours.
In northern climates, houses need to be adequately insulated...
NIMBY! A Cry From The Heart That Things Are “Just Not The American Way”
NIMBY: Not in My Back Yard. Part of an ongoing collection of articles exploring some of the many ways that a worldwide affordable housing crisis is opposed.
"It’s been more...
Heat Pump Heaven? Much Of The United Kingdom Shivers At the Thought
The use of the word 'admits' in a newspaper headline rather suggests that the confessor has hitherto engaged in some kind of coverup. That's an unfortunate meta-message in this...
Is Singapore’s Wildly Successful Public Housing Gradually Becoming Outdated/Unaffordable?
If you've been following our posts, you'll know that we've behaved a little like breathless enthusiasts about an emerging activist housing philosophy. North America is seeing currently fashionable proposals...
Refurbish Social Housing? How To Find Out If It Is Dollar-Cheap But Carbon-Expensive?
Aging Social Housing: Pull it down and build something better? Or refurbish it?
Over the past few decades, some countries influenced by neoliberal political thought have dodged the practicalities of...
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass Tells A Whopper. It Helps Price The Cost of Solving Homelessness
The whopper: 1.3 billion dollars. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appears to be committed to telling homelessness like it is.
For example, in a recent speech aimed partly at the...
Perspectives On Housing Rights In Canada – Experts Weigh In
Today's post is about housing rights in Canada, where the United Nations' right to adequate housing was affirmed in law in 2019Going forward, this means that Canada's definition of...
Can’t Run The Homeless Out Of Town? Why Not Go After Their Enablers?
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...
Spain Tackles Affordable Housing Crisis With 50,000 Foreclosed Homes And Properties
The average age of young people leaving home in Spain? Nearing 30. Many, if not most, simply cannot afford to leave home, given the impossibly high cost of both...
Thinking The Unthinkable: Truly Affordable Housing Rescued By Commercial Building Meltdown
COVID has created an unexpected crisis facing the commercial real estate market. Worker flight to the relative safety of the home office has hollowed out the insides of shiny...