Public Policy

The article linked to this post is a good example of bringing the voice of lived experience to research. The research subjects in the study are young people who...

Morning constitutionals at affordablehousingaction.org occur often and usually take place among houses in a leafy neighbourhood. A fair number of churches dapple this leafy neighbourhood, and many have not...

Research in the United States has been connecting safe, stable affordable housing with health care. This post is the final in a short series about how the research is...

The mayor of São Paulo, Brazil, says the city needs 400,000 additional rental homes. Faced with such a large shortage, residents have taken housing matters into their own hands....

Are you an older woman? If so, this post, as well as the report it unveils, speaks directly to you. The words and experiences are those of our global...

The second in three-post series explores how we as humans come to grips with social issues. The series starts in Australia, where cost-benefit analysis has been applied to two...

Welcome to the Brave New World of a "Green New Deal' for housing. Over the last thirty-odd years two major English language nations have demonstrated effective ways to slowly squeeze...

Why go to Australia via Canada in order to understand the USA's RAD (Rental Assistance Demonstration program) — the social housing rescue initiative of Department of Housing and Urban...

Many countries in Far East are in a tizzy. The cause: their citizens are reluctant to have children. Public health incentives are being deployed everywhereAs one example, try: Waiting...

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...

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...

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?...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

Civil society groupsRead more about Civil Society in the World Economic Forum: Who and what is 'civil society?'  in the United Kingdom feel they have their finger on...

Putting 'celebrating' and 'stalling housing prices' in the same phrase will probably ensure that people read at least a few pages of Generation Squeeze's new report: Celebrating Stalling Prices...

David Park's book "The Fire In the Eye: A Historical Essay On The Nature and Meaning of Light" reviews the history of ideas, debates and thinking about what light...

What's the point-in-time count in your particular district? Conveniently, whatever it suits you to say it is. That's one possible answer to a necessarily haphazard, volunteer-rich process of lifting...

Bankers in the Boonies? This writer first encountered it as a marry-in to the poor relations of a cottage-owning family. We got a snippet of holiday this year in...

Where does the gravy go that the scammers skim off the top of United Kingdom services to the poor? As a matter of fact, it can go to you,...

A good way to think of property porn . . . property porn? Yes, property porn, known more formally as property pornography . . . is not to imagine...

Does living near affordable housing boost property values or lower them? Christina Stacy and Christopher Davis, who are based at the Urban Institute in the United States, reviewed existing...

You are a young person who has done all the right things. You've got a good education and a job that pays well. You're living with your parents to...

Affordablehousingaction.org is featuring two posts about housing for renters in Canada. The first post is about is a remarkable production by students from Ryerson University. This one is remarkable in...

Housing prices are going up. Housing prices are going up. Housing prices are going up. Not very catchy, but certainly a consistent reprise in the media. Many of these...

The UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence has just published a report about rent control. The report reviews evidence published in academic journals and grey literatureFor a good discussion...

Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), like all census organizations, is a passionate advocate for the importance of counting its citizens in as many ways possible. In the words of...

Researchers at the Boston University Initiative on Cities have been interviewing U.S. mayors annually since 2014. This isn't your standard on-line survey. The team actually speaks to mayors. Although...

Current housing policy frameworks in many westernized countries resemble hospitals stocked exclusively with multi-coloured bandaids. Last week's solution is now this week's problem? Rip off the old plaster. Stick...

London's Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 was a tragedy not only for the residents, but also for a much larger portion of the population. An ongoing inquiry after the...

Complimenting some recent posts about the housing crisis in AustraliaTry: Praiseworthy Australian COVID Response A Blip In Housing Financialization Focus and Domestic Violence Costs Australia: Social Housing Can Help...

A recent study has been released by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS). It's the work of their Poverty and Inequality...

Bruce Porter, Executive Director of the Social Rights Advocacy Centre, works to improve the housing situation of people in Canada who live in poor conditions. Some of his work...

Miriam Maina is a researcher at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She previously worked at the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa and is interested...

Virtually all nations are still struggling with attempting to chart the rise and fall of the COVID-19 pandemic. It has produced an unprecedented display of graphic peaks and valleys....

Infrastructure? The notion was born out of not-to-be-ignored community health needs such as clean water to prevent epidemics. It expanded to include business needs (safe highways to transport goods...

Why is California's lackadaisical approach to homelessness worth a worry to other jurisdictions as well as its own? Many other cities in North American and elsewhere have bumbled into the...

How did homelessness sprout and then grow and grow? Why are tenants living in substandard housing, or paying unaffordable rents, or both? Why does a commitment to adequate housing...

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has played havoc with that nation's housing, as it has in most, if not all, other countries in the world. This is...

For the past few decades in America, "small government" policies have been supported by both Democrats and Republicans. In particular, the name of the game has been to shrink...

London, Ontario currently licenses student accommodation and smaller private rental buildings. The City's Council recently debated whether to expand its licensing system to include rental apartments and townhouses. The...

If to no one else in the world, Australia's struggle with the notion of a Human Right To Housing should be of interest to Americans. Alas, the well-housed authors...

Ken Gibb and Alex Marsh are investigating the academic literature about rent controls. It seems there hasn't been a comprehensive review for 20 years. The final report will be...

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...

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has just issued a policy brief about affordable housing. It begins with an 20 year overview of trends in housing affordability....

An international group of researchers has pulled together a list of the actions that have been taken to help protect people from being infected by COVID-19. All of the...

For young progressives in America expecting great change from the replacement of a Republican President by a Democratic one, don't hold your breath while counting on the arrival of...

A new book, "Housing Policy In Australia" calls for a national housing program and building more social housing. This is a direction the current government has stubbornly resisted. The authors...

A constant theme of pandemic reporting worldwide has been the greater number of COVID-19 cases in poorer neighbourhoods, compared to those which may be close by, but at least...

The necessities of life come in silos.  A buyer of accommodation cannot expect to find a juicy bargain in the auto parts market. Even the poorest must compete for...

What exactly is "rentierization" (aside from being this year's Grand Loser in the catchy word creation contest)? An newly-published study by the University of Sydney and the University College London...

You're not by any chance associated with a city council currently vulnerable to seduction by a housing industry solution to end all housing crises? Surely you've heard the battle cry:...

The following article provides readers with an insight into the current state of national housing crises across Europe. For largely unilingual North Americans, the article is a window into a lot...

Some governments are introducing rent controls as a response to the housing crisis. This is a hotly contested measure. Landlords and developers say rent controls discourage adding stock to...

Useful articles on the subject of public housing have been a rarity in mainstream American publications. "Not in our lifetime," has been a characterization of a date when the...

The following article begins with a personal adventure in attempting to utilize a Housing Choice (Section 8) voucher in order to rent an apartment. These vouchers were created in...

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...

"I'm sorry, Mr. Brewster Twillingate-Smithers III, but I will not rent one of my apartments to you because your income is zero, not withstanding your weekly million-dollar subsidy from the family trust."

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...

Too much to expect, we assume, for Canada to announce the arrival of a huge burst of actual housing on National Housing Day. Maybe some kind of national surprise...

Faced with country-wide housing crises like much of the world, two years ago Canada claimed it was at last standing up to be counted, after decades of little or...

Leaf-shaded walks, flower beds in profusion, well stocked duck ponds: how does such an admirably eco-minded beautification plan get affordable housing activists calling 'fowl?' The answer lies in a proposed...

Housing investors in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who've been taking the slow boat to free market profits may soon find themselves diverted onto an unwanted around-the-world cruise by city council. The slow...

From the Right: eliminate onerous government regulations and the free market will build us all out of affordable housing crises, providing the necessary housing for ownership by the "workforce,"...

Governments are vital agents of social and economic change, not foot-dragging deep state bureaucracies committed to interfering with visionary private enterprise. Really? Mariana Mazzucato, an American economist, has earned growing international...

Chicago teachers settled their recent strike in part by ignoring their legal requirement to bargain only for wages and hours and other strictly technical issues related to their employment...

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...

In order to discourage the banking practice of redliningTry: Redlining: What Was It? And We Should Be Asking ‘What Is It?’ Because It’s Still With Us, And It’s Bad,...

Outdated Construction, Design and Management (CDM) Regulations have been identified as the culprit in the widespread corner-cutting of high rise construction that led to the tragic Grenfell Tower FireTry:...

Cities in more advanced countries have made do for decades with handfuls of emergency shelters for the homeless, their number expanding in the winters of harsher climates. In many...

Only a month or so away from the 100th anniversary of the journal edition pictured above, it's worth scanning the column of articles featured within it. The final one?...

The Canadian Housing and Renewal Association (CHRA) has just released a report about non-profit affordable housing that is provided and operated by indigenous organizations. The housing is spread across...

In 2017, the Liberal Government in Canada announced a comprehensive new Canadian Housing Strategy, designed apparently to bring the Canadian government back into the housing game after years of...

Let's take the following media declaration at face value: "4 Out Of 5 Americans say there is a housing affordability crisis." Based on a sample of 20,000 people that's...

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...

During the 2016 American pre-election campaigns we noted that affordable housing was an 'elephant in the room' — something that politicians were presumably aware of, but nobody was discussing.See:...

City states have a unique advantage over cities that exist within a hierarchy of governments, where they seem to inevitably occupy a position of authority towards the bottom. City states...

In terms of birth rate, the world's population may already be falling. Declining world population statistics are to some degree masked by the ongoing increase in longevity of those...

The CBC recently reported that the high cost of living will be biggest issue for Canadians leading up to the federal election which is scheduled for later this year....

We've seen several articles recently that address a conspiracy-theory notion of an affordable housing 'crisis'. Note in the previous sentence how the quote marks around affordable housing 'crisis' tend...

People with very low incomes face big hurdles when it comes to affording housing. With minimal resources, they have limited housing options and little control over their housing in...

On one hand "Make India Great" is coming close to providing true housing for an entire population of one and a third billion over a span of 7 years.Try:...

Let's take a most 'Christian' (supposedly charitable) interpretation of a certainly-Christian teaching: 'Ye shall know them by their deeds.' (Mathew 7:16). Use it as a lens with which to...

Finally! Over the past few decades it has seemed that when it comes to housing, the Canadian federal government was hiding in bed with the covers over their head. Then...

From Self-aggrandizement via Red Herrings To Fake News, a Forbes commentator solves our unaffordable housing crisis by snorting his way through a Niagara Falls of information to discover that...

What Are Housing Co-operatives? When you start to look into housing co-operatives, you might be struck more by their diversity than what they share. Their contribution to a country's housing...

Earlier this week, Sidewalk Labs released its long awaited proposal to develop a site on Toronto's Waterfront. It's called Toronto Tomorrow. There are proposals in for affordable housing, so...

Very happy to report that Canadians now do enjoy a human right to adequate housing. The campaign, which affordablehousingaction.org has been faithfully covering, ended when the National Housing Strategy Act received Royal assent.

So we're shining the sweat-inducing perp spotlight on some badly behaving city council. Which one, in which country? Consider this a blanket indictment of too many municipal councils facing affordable...

Red Tape: Everybody hates it. Nobody needs it. When it comes to affordable housing, red tape is taking the blame for high costs. It is being disparaged by many actors...

New businesses often require new business buildings. New business buildings become populated with new business workers. New business workers create a demand for new housing. The logic that tracks from new business...

Affordable housing? It's déja vu all over again in Kingston, Ontario, as the local paper compares the current affordable housing crisis to the one the city was suffering in...

Conservatives in power? Recent history in the Province of Ontario suggests that 'small government' will be the order of the day. Divest, download, promote private initiatives, anything to shrink...

Back in the day, there was the plain not-so-old Opportunity Zone (OZ), which has now become a Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ) . . . doing so apparently 'just beQOZ.' Not long...