Charting An End To Eviction Law In The U.S.
"Civil government . . . is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have...
A Lyrical Housing Protest In Ireland
Standing in front of parliament buildings and singing is not usual response to an eviction notice. But that's what Martin Leahy did.
Leahy plays guitar, sings and composes. When he...
Tenants In Ontario Find An Ally In The Green Party
With two sitting members, the Green Party is not a big presence in Ontario's Legislative Assembly. When it comes to tenants, though, Green Party Members are definitely tuned in.
The...
Here Today Gone Tomorrow – Housing Solutions That Don’t Satisfy ‘Adequate’ Right To Housing
There's something useful to be learned about housing in general by considering the health benefits of stable housing for older people. We may not be as adaptable as we'd...
Evictions In Public Housing: No Good Guy Landlord Here
We'll take a running jump at a predominantly American post, beginning on the east side of the Atlantic. Over the last few years, social housing tenants in the British...
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...
Canadian Housing Survey Sheds Light On High Eviction Rates In British Columbia
The Canadian Housing Survey was launched in 2018 as part of Canada's National Housing Strategy. It gives researchers and the public new insights into Canada's housing market.
It is thanks...
Los Angeles Tenants Speak Up For A Carbon Neutral Future
Tenants in Los Angeles want to reduce emissions and energy consumption. That wish is clouded by two concerns:
their rents will go up a lot and/or
they will be...
Eviction And The Rights Of Renters In The United States
Homelessness happens for a number of reasons. Eviction is one. This post is about three different ways that people in the United States have been working to help people...
Human Right To Housing: Four Steps To End A USA Eviction Crisis
In a country that is not yet a signatory to the United Nation's Right to Adequate housing, polls show that it has considerable support from the American population.
All very...
Can Eviction Prevention Programs Succeed By Paying Arrears?
If a tenant is behind in their rent, how important is financial assistance in preventing an eviction? It might seem that the answer is obvious, but as six researchers...
Pandemic Evictions In America – Some Good News
It is important to begin by saying that eviction is not a good situation under any circumstances. An eviction during COVID made a bad situation worse. For this reason,...
Challenges In Building An Eviction Prevention Program – Data
The entire housing advocacy community in North America is holding its breath as we wait to see what will happen with evictions in the days, months and years following...
Evictions The Consequence As Critical Info Fails Rural America
“We’ve developed a culture where people don’t tend to avail themselves of protections afforded to them.” The comment comes from Brent Thompson, executive director for East River Legal Services, representing...
Evictions: An Unavoidable Cost Of Landlord Business? Or Not
If you are the slightest bit business-minded, you might well imagine that in the housing rental business, evictions are nothing but a particular kind of business expense — those...
Building A Comprehensive Picture Of Evictions In Canada
Here is a new report that adds another piece to an understanding of evictions in Canada. The data for this study comes from a national survey, which is carried out...
Evicted In The U.S.? Ways To End This Life Sentence
The Center For American Progress has just published a report which comprehensively discusses the impact of evictions. It also considers legal remedies to limit their cascading effects.
The report lays...
It’s Time to Let Central Park, N.Y. Be Built Over With High Rise Housing
Should such a headline as the one above reflect some radical New York City makeover policy, the outcry would be truly global, given the mythical status in world imagination...
Mobile Unhoused: A Roof Overhead But No Fixed Address
Mobile Homes, from bus-sized RVs to the back seat of a car, offer another vision of homelessness, one which can be useful to both the homeless themselves and well...
Updated – Faults In Canada’s Housing System: Renovictions
Researchers at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba undertook a comprehensive review of evictions in Canada. The final report was published in 2020, but the news it has to...
Updated – Signs That COVID Sustains Historic Discrimination
Elijah de la Campa, a senior research associate in Economics and Urban Analytics at the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, has teamed up with others to expand on earlier...
Arizona Constables Reduce Evictions By Making Courtesy Calls
Pima County, Arizona elects its constables. Constables have different responsibilities in different American states. In Arizona, they are officers of the county justice courts. One of the jobs of...
Affordable Housing Details You Might Not Have Considered: Thieving
Affordable housing is not just a collection of construction material and land costs. It’s a purse that must stretch to cover a rental or purchase . . . after...
In An Eviction Swamp, Right To Counsel An Elusive Life Saver For US Poor
Facing a criminal charge? Theft perhaps? In the U.S., the Constitution protects your right to counsel. Completely broke and can't afford a lawyer? The court appoints one for free....
Faults In Canada’s Housing System: Renovictions
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has just published research about renovictions in TorontoRenovictions refer to evictions that are initiated because extensive renovations are planned or a building is...
Grand Theft Auto: Authorities Steal Mobile Shelter & Job Access
It is disheartening to watch local governments warily circling an imagined threat like a dog sizing up an opponent, then pounce suddenly and brutally. This is particularly true when...
Pressing On With An Eviction Diversion Program That Works
Matthew Desmond came to our attention when "Evicted" — his book on the subject — was published in 2016. He's an expert on eviction as well as the destructive...
To Be, Or Not To Be Housed. A Soliloquy On Eviction And Death
What makes a human being healthy, with a long life expectancy? There are as many answers as there are proponents of important influences. Modern medicine (including vaccination) has the...
Didn’t Want To Be Evicted? (So Many Do.) Why Didn’t You Submit A Form?
A "shake of the head" series of posts entitled "who dreams up these crazy rules anyway?"
The CDC eviction ban (challenged in the courts) will end July 31, and the...
Evictions? Glory Be Not! COVID Punctures Federal State Self-Congratulation
How Do I Love Myself? Let Me Count the Ways . . .
In Canada, some 13-ish. America goes a full 50-ish. In the United Kingdom, having their cake and...
Eviction Bans Help The Whole Community To Control COVID Infection
A Federal Court judge has ruled against landlords who fought an eviction ban in Philadelphia. The landlords maintained that the ban was unconstitutional because it conferred a benefit only...
Signs That COVID Sustains Historic Discrimination
Elijah de la Campa has done some interesting research about rental arrears among small landlords during COVID. He used racial characteristics of neighbourhoods to make comparisons about the extent...
Housing Loss: What Governments Can Do Now & The Challenge They Face In The Future
Give.
Keep it simple.
Keep it coming.
Keep your data.
These simple rules, together with explanations, lay out how jurisdictions that wish to provide housing security can help their...
Investor Defence In A Pandemic Battle: Preserving The Thin Red Bottom Line
In the arena of housing, the pandemic has in spectacular fashion pitted two classes of people against each other: Shelterers, and Investors.
Who comes out on top? Employing the classic...
Charity Can Stave Off Evictions, Except Where Governments Have Created “Walking Dead”
With the good news of increasing numbers of vaccinated citizens in many countries, there are hints of life possibly returning to normal in the not-too-distant future. This news, however...
What To Do About Evictions: An American Perspective On A Worldwide Pandemic Problem
In the U.S. during the pandemic, Wake Forest University Law Professor Emily Benfer has become an expert much in demand to help make sense of a tangled thicket of national...
Protecting Tenants From Evictions: A Human Rights Issue
A report has just been issued that calls on the Canadian government to assist tenants who are behind on their rents. A Rights-Based Proposal To Address The Arrears And...
COVID-19: Improving Housing Conditions To Fight COVID Infection
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...
Electronic Canadian Eviction Adjudication A Sausage Factory For Homelessness
Canadians have a reputation of being bland and cautious, but you can be sure that we look for reasons to counter with smugness. Unfortunately, on the lookout to recast...
Rent Banks: One Solution To Public Housing Circular Firing Squads?
In order to fix a public housing problem, it seems that we need to identify a culprit. Classically, tenants point the finger of blame at management. Management returns the...
Preventing Evictions As Part Of The Right To Housing
As part of a commitment to its residents, Toronto's City Council has confirmed housing as a human right and implemented programs support that commitment. With COVID-19 arriving on the...
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...
U.S. Evictions Tsunami? Still Looming As Some Hope To Cancel Rents
The U.S., like many countries staggering under the impact of COVID-19, is facing a hopefully-temporary crisis of individual and family poverty. One consequence has been an inability of a...
Tough Times For Landlords: The Shoe Remains Stuck On The Other Foot
In Ontario, Canada, a landlord can't even book a hearing for a juicy above-guideline rent increase, such is the demanding backlog facing the Landlord Tenant Board as it begins...
Silver Tsunami Greets Affordable Senior’s Housing That Isn’t There
Do you know that the writer of this article is a senior? You may not, but Google does. I read articles from around the world daily in publications from...
COVID-19 & The Full Granular Horror of Public Private Housing Partnerships
Years of public housing destruction in the U.S. have been justified by a faith-based principle: that private enterprise can spend public money more efficiently and effectively than governments to...
Musical Chairs: When The Chairs Are Homes, No Fun When The Music Stops
How close is your bum to a seat when the music stops? Musical chairs is all about a lack of choice — shared by all the contestants in the...
The Ownership Housing Ladder: For Growing Numbers, A Stairway To Nowhere Desirable
Two important factors are gradually swinging the attention of house builders in a number of countries away from the 'National Dream' of home ownership — a mantra that has...
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?
Occupier California Moms Evicted Quietly, Peacefully. (They Must Be Canadians!)
A far cry from the raucous civil disobedience housing occupations more than a year ago in Berlin, California's 2 moms + kids illegal occupation of an empty housing investment...
How Canadian Landlords Skate Around Renoviction Laws
There are legal renovictions and illegal renovictions. Many countries allow renovictions — a term that describes landlords throwing out renters in order to renovate rental housing.For more on renovictions,...
California Eviction Fight: Is The Housing Owner Blameless — Not A Villain?
We recently posted an article about two women and their children who were squatting in an empty house in Oakland, California, in defiance of the building's owners. The women...
Affordable Housing: A Rose-Coloured Glasses Moment To Wrap Up 2019
It's a world in which a great many nations pay lip service to the human right to adequate shelter. There are some, including the United States, that don't acknowledge...
Could Guaranteed Income End Accidental Evictions From Affordable Housing?
My decidedly middle class in-laws recently received a small windfall inheritance. Their action? To splurge on a bucket list trip for Mom, Dad, and two kids to celebrate the...
Critics Slam All Affordable Housing Solutions. Time For Critics-Be-Damned Experiments?
This article does not reflect upon many interesting facets of London's newly proposed rent controls for the UK's largest city.
Instead, we'd like to comment on the meat of a...
Will Democratic Control of State Government Help New York Renters?
For many years, Republican majorities in the New York State Legislature have blocked efforts to provide better protections for the state's housing renters, particularly those suffering from predatory landlord...
Rent Banks — What Are They? How Can They Help Tenants Stay In Affordable Housing?
Rent Banks are funds that help rent burdened tenants keep their housing and avoid eviction.
Here's a current example of a proposed rent bank (along with nine other ideas) to...
Faint New Hope For Fighting A New York Rental Racket
Chalk one up for Don Quixote — the little guy! A 'tilting at windmills' type lawsuit has recently won an unlikely victory in New York City.
Don Quixote's opponent: the...
UK Private Landlords De-Sanctified: Eviction Without Cause Will Die
Part of the enduring myth of neo-conservatism is the idea that private enterprise has been given short shrift, thanks to decades and decades of unfair left-wing vilification. "Give private...
Are Big Landlords Bad For Affordable Renting? Berlin Thinks They Might Be
In Germany's largest city, unaffordable rents made an appearance on the international affordable housing stage in 2018, thanks to activists who were arrested for occupying a Berlin building to...
“There’s A Hole In My Flooring, Dear Landlord, Dear Landlord . . .
In many jurisdictions, there is at least a grudging recognition that governments must ensure that tenants can remain sheltered in privately-owned housing.This includes small government that favours the private...
Rent Suddenly Doubled? Under Oregon’s New Rent Controls, ‘Suddenly’ Means More Like Ten Years
Proposition 10 was a much watched California referendum in the 2018 U.S. elections. Its purpose: to reintroduce of rent controls in a state where the affordable housing crisis is...
For Rent: The American Dream
No surprise, really, that the American Dream of single family home ownership in a nice neighbourhood has always been for rent (minus the ownership portion, of course).
Homeowners can carelessly...
Forced Evictions? They Don’t Happen In A Prosperous, Civilized Country Like Ours!
Oh yes they do happen! But before facing up to the problem in our own country let's have a look at the bad news about another country's inhumanity somewhere else....
Renovictions: What Are They? What Can A Tenant Do To Combat Them?
Renoviction is coined from 'Renovate' and 'Eviction'. Strictly speaking, it refers to landlords who claim some form of work is needed for a period of time that makes it...
Ottawa Evictions: Who Is Right? Humans Knock Heads With Corporations.
There is a large scale eviction (105 units) scheduled for September 30, 2018 in Ottawa. The UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing and foreign media have taken an interest....
Who Gets Evicted And Why? Louisville Studies Its Ugly Housing Entrails.
Evictions are a useful 'miner's canary' for the health of a city's rental housing. Instead of falling off the perch dead in a pocket of dangerous gas, the eviction...
How To Stop Evictions That Inflame The Affordable Housing Crisis
I bumped into my super the other day. He was in a bit of a state because a tenant in my building was being evicted and the super was...
