Tent Encampments: Invaluable Survival For Those Who Have Nothing

It's amazing how much society knows about tent encampments occupied by the unhoused, (or homeless, if you prefer). It seems we apparently know that: most are drug addicts...

There’s A Worldwide Unhoused Crisis: Can Europe Help North America?

Are you North American and worried about the seemingly unmanageable growth of homelessness in your state or province? Are you thinking perhaps of moving to a kindler, gentler world,...

Cops + Homeless = Poor Bedmates. Yet There They Are Anyway.

Let's set aside convenient fallacies that all cops are sadistic brutes. And that all the unhoused are crazoid drug fiends. Let's take a much broader view of the participants in...

Is The End Of United Kingdom No-Fault Evictions In Sight?

The National government in the United Kingdom has introduced legislation to re-balance the relationship between private sector landlords and their tenants. Here are a few of the changes that...

Researchers Study Changes In US Homebuying During COVID

There has been lots of media coverage about the rise in housing prices across the United States starting in 2020 and continuing through 2022, when COVID restrictions were widespread....

Small Gift, Big Heart: A Home Community Where The Sneaker Fits

Folklore makes 'sneakers' into American running shoes. It can take considerably more than a few steps in a pair to make an immigrant into an American citizen. Part of that...

San Jose, CA Scrambles To Escape Self-Inflicted Water Damage

One of the most powerful images expressed by a newpaper cartoon came in the 1950's from Pogo, a socially aware cartoon opossum. He reported on impending warfare with a...

Down By The Riverside: Unhoused Burdens Lifted . . . For The Moment

There are idylic properties, both realized and imagined, to be found beside rivers and lakes. As featured in the famous song written and sung by Otis Redding: "I'm sittin' on...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Humans Are Animals, Too. So, Let’s Have The SPCA Take Over Homeless Crisis

It seems that if you're a tent-living cat, you can sneak off, dial the Kootenay Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) and get yourself housed. So how...

The Potential Charm Of a Portland, Oregon Homeless Campus

Seniors, wearing scarfs in campus colours, stroll across the front lawn of one of Portland's giant homeless campuses. They have spent their undergraduate years waiting for a minuscule new...

Can Americans With Disabilities Navigate Sidewalks With Homeless Tents?

People who are homeless as a class may well be the most disadvantaged Americans of all. But alas, there are contenders for this status. Equally disadvantaged, if not more...

Outreach Police Officer Stabbed To Death In Homeless Encampment

Tent encampments are little islands of anarchy, with inhabitants attempting to survive in opposition to, or at best outside of, society's rules. Encampments of people experiencing homelessness in North...

Potato, Potahto, Tomato, Tomahto, Let’s Not Call Public Housing Off

Is it a name game or a blame game or a mixture of both? Let's look at the words. Developers as well as affordable housing activists from both ends of...

A History of Evolving Planning Prejudice in America

Adam Paul Susaneck is an architect. His research and its implications might be mistaken as a focus on 'building design.' But the scope of one of his current projects...

Homeless RV Problems Reveal The Limits of Soft-Hearted Shrug

Recreational Vehicles (RVs) are a subclass of generalized homeless problems and growing as all homelessness is in North America. An international view of officialdom seems to be that tents are...

Homelessness Officialdom. All Dressed Up, But . . . Places To Go?

A homelessness story out of Deschutes County points to a dilemma that local authorities are wrestling this these days as they receive funding from higher levels of government. As in...

Bleeding-Heart Seattle Finds A Homeless Gun to Its Head

A Seattle City Councilmember tasked with leading up a homelessness committee, discovered that readily available police statistics on crime and violence were simply not part of homelessness decision making...

Gentrification – What We Know And What We Don’t

AJ Golio, a PhD candidate at Tulane University, has penned a thoughtful article in Shelterforce about gentrificationFor an explanation of gentrification, try: Gentrification: What is it? How Does It...

A Tour Of Social Housing Revival In North America

The demolitions of Cabrini Green in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, two very large public housing projects, reflect decisions made by people who had never lived there. Some...

Sacramento’s Clever Plan To Control Homeless Tent Camps: Own Them

One unexpected benefit that all-too-briefly appeared during the COVID pandemic was the level of concern from national governments down to local ones for the plight of people who experience...

Mi Barrio! How To Exercise The Reverse NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard)

New home builders are extraordinarily powerful. It is not uncommon to hear the industry described as the engine that drives the city, state, even country. That's certainly the case...

Hospitals As Developers – Angels Or Something Else?

Why would anybody be afraid of a lifesaving institution such as a large hospital that shares their very own neighbourhood? One possible answer is tied to affordable housing. In America,...

Gary, Indiana Turns Out Public Housing Lights, Prays For Landlord Candles

U.S. President George H.W. Bush's description of charities as "a thousand tiny points of light" has taken a rightful place in history and literature as a truly hopeful and...

Evicted Oakland Squatter-Moms Buy That Vacant House

Fabulous news for the evicted moms. A totally meaningless victory in a war that desperately needs to be fought against house flipping?

Little To Ask: The Simple Pleasure of Affording To Return Home

Two recent in-depth articles in Shelterforce provide a snapshot of an unexpected argument that has come up, thanks to gentrification. Gentrification displaces long time inhabitants of a neighbourhood, particularly the people...

Freer Housing Is ‘Fairer Housing.’ Yowza!

It's not often that we copy exact chunks of headline from an article we'd like you to explore. (Not the Yowza! That's all our own work.) But otherwise, the...

Harvesting Humans For Profit In The UK

One of the currently most successful human harvesting activities in free enterprise societies can be found in the United States — private jailing. Because the collection and control of humans...

Three Takes On California’s Housing Crisis: Part 1

Part One considers the current clash of legal responsibilities between the two levels of government actively involved — state and local — focusing on Pasadena.

Your Affordable Home Is Falling Down. Sorry, It Can’t Be Fixed. You Have To Move. Not.

"But where will we go?" Scanning affordable housing stories worldwide, an article reports some unfortunate locale were residents are being evicted from social or public housing practically every day. Four constant...

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...

Just Build More Housing? These Days, The Idea Rules, But Without Clothes

As a child, I attended a live production of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The Emperor met up with weavers who promised cloth of the finest quality and lightest weight....

New Jersey Aims To Buy Up Foreclosures, Taking Banker Thumbs Off Housing Market Scales

Even Adam Smith, who proposed the free market theories of supply and demand some two and a half centuries ago, didn't believe the theories worked in situations influenced by...

California Dreaming? Europe’s Mature Rail Networks Spread Unaffordability, Not Affordability.

In California, 2018 has seen the rise and fall of an affordable housing initiative located next to transit nodes where higher density affordable housing could be enshrined. Lower wage...

New American Tax Law: Helping Poor Communities? Or Helping Gentrify Poor Communities?

It's a little unnerving to hear that investors are absolutely racing to capitalize on a new tax law billed as a benefit for poor communities in the United States....

As American Poor Are Pushed Out To Suburbs, Mumbai Commits To Affordable City Core

The flight of poverty in American cities has been towards the suburbs. Downtown affordable housing has evaporated in the face in urban renewal and gentrification. This has largely been...

Cincinnati ‘Progress’: A New Football Home, Or A Crime Against Affordable Housing?

No, 'Cincinnati Progress' is not the name of a new city soccer team. 'Progress' is a world of flying cars, robot servants and wrist-watch computers, a future dream-state wrapped...
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