Resilience

Portugal shares the Iberian Peninsula with Spain, which is currently in the affordable housing news for its 'Right to Housing' law. Spain's new law includes regulatory solutions for renters,...

Like so many cities around the world, Amsterdam has been gambling on shelter as a means to generating wealth for all. And like many other communities, it is discovering...

Affordablehousingaction.org frequently identifies the need for national leadership to end homelessness. The first article linked to this post, Few Mayors Connect the Dots Between Zoning and Homelessness (Few Mayors),...

There's a kind of deliberate blindness when it comes to understanding the meaning of "living in comfort — poor," versus "living in comfort — middle class and up." Accommodation may...

How did the reputation of public servants gurgle down the drain? In America today, teachers are included in this question. "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." Clever little...

Those of us who are immersed in Western society may well consider ourselves as comfortable frogs immersed in slowly heating water, unlikely even to notice being slowly cooked to...

As things now stand, public housing in America is being hung by the neck until dead. Some last minute reprieves are being granted to Housing Authorities prepared to sell their...

The human right to adequate housing is a noble aspiration. And if communism and socialism have contributed nothing else to humanity, they have at least proven that determined governments...

For the past two or three years there have been activist rumblings in America about the possibility of successfully creating world class social housingTry: West Coast U.S. Activists Struggle...

In a democracy, elected representatives are supposed to reflect the interests of their constituents. That mission doesn't always match up with reality, partly because voters don't all hold the...

Perhaps you've heard of the Homeless Industrial Complex? At the very least it seems to be a phenomenon on North America's west coast. It's hardly as financially fattening as...

Modernizing cities! Out with the obviously dirty, depressingly ugly, cough-inducing, environmentally-damaging old. In with the sylvan new: vegetative proliferation, babbling brooks, micro-forest canopies, peddle-mobility, awardable aesthetic standards, puffed and...

Ho Hum, Another Day, Another City Emergency. That's what London, Ontario might be trying to sell in order the access federal and provincial funds available to cities that are...

ShelterforceShelterforce is a U.S. based non-profit dedicated to community development, affordable housing, and neighbourhood stabilization. recently convened a discussion about corporate investment in rental housing and tenant protections in...

If you haven't been following the rental housing fight in Berlin, Germany, it's time to catch up. Berlin is a city/state where renters far outnumber homeowners. A considerable majority...

Waiting lists exist worldwide for those who need affordable housing but don't have it. Ultimately, do these lists represent a positive movement towards a human right to adequate housing...

So, what does a green bank do, anyway? According to the article linked below, green banks help make investments in climate change by facilitating loans to customers that banks...

In 2021, the United Kingdom government published The Social Housing White Paper serving notice that tenants deserved to be on the same page as their landlords. While not expecting...

In the United States, there are homeowners with very low incomes. Their housing costs are high when compared with those incomes. Even for someone who owns their home without...

The Human Right to Housing commitment of the United Nations has evolved to include the addition of an all-important word: 'adequate.' The Human Right to Adequate Housing is a...

Since starting affordablehousingaction.org, we've been watching and reporting on the relationship between housing and health. We're aware that in the 1980's, when health research began noticing that additional $$...

Does this survey from a California city reflect the future of your urban region? Human behaviour can be described by patterns. Opinion surveys are useful form of collecting patterns. So...

The cop who arrested Norma Thornton knew perfectly well it was a public relations nightmare. Given the comments in media outlets all over North America, thousands, maybe even hundreds of...

A small, but significant piece of good news from the United States: a crack has opened in the zero-tolerance wall that continues to seal off public housing from those...

Businesses that charge more than 60% interest on money they lends to customers are committing a criminal offence in Canada. Sounds pretty high, doesn't it? It turns out that...

We know there are overwhelming problems where people who are homeless gather together in unofficial tent camps. Celebrity Dr. Drew Pinsky warns us of "tent encampments with 'multiple rodent-borne,...

Potty: United Kingdom slang for someone who is a little bit daft. (Daft, in turn, is slang for someone who is somewhat potty) Its origins are not generally agreed...

Some people may dread reaching the age of 65, but it's a good news day for others. Why good? People who receive social assistance in Canada can look forward...

Recently we featured a post on a Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiment in Spain. We raised a question: why do Universal Basic Income plans seem to always be the...

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...

Wales, which is part of the United Kingdom, is currently experiencing a 'right to adequate housing' crisis — one that is frequently ignored by countries that have signed the...

What is the potential for limited equity housing co-operatives to add to the supply of the non-market housing stock? The two kinds of housing co-operatives that get aired in...

Middle class and up? You can afford to be wasteful. There's at least a little bit of money to burn. Very low — even no — income? Every penny has...

When will America climb out of its 2001 foxhole? Not since the British burned the White House down in 1812 has the country collectively faced such a threat. Was...

Emergency planners, the people we task with preparing us for emergencies, often say, "the current plan is only as good as the last emergency." In other words, we're good...

Canada made a big deal of welcoming refugees from Syria in 2015. Settlement services and communities geared up as the country prepared for a host of new children in...

The Spanish region of Catalonia will soon be taking a kick at the Universal Basic Income (UBI) can. UBI is invariably of interest to idealists, not to mention individuals...

A study by the Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies of Barcelona has identified some 355,000 citizens who spend at least a portion of their time caring for the...

Have you ever been in the situation where someone told you with great authority that you had to do some particular thing? Whatever it was, you didn't want to...

2022 marks the halfway point in Canada’s 10 year National Housing Strategy. It’s an occasion for reviewing and renewing the Strategy. Housing is something we all need, but despite being...

When this writer moved to Toronto, he rented an apartment in a building with 150 units because he knew one person who lived there. When he moved out two...

America is facing an extraordinary debt crisis. Before the COVID pandemic, it was already a new 'normal'. Overwhelming debt creeps up on people in differing ways. Where housing rental is...

Jacob Beaton and Jessica Ouellette were rookie gardeners when they bought a property near Kitwanga in a rural part of British Columbia. In the first year, the garden produced...

How to best rehabilitate people who are chronically homelessThe folks who sleep rough for lengthy and/or repeated periods of time are considered to be chronically homeless. into functioning citizens...

Poorer citizens in New York City have suffered a form of whiplash with the election of their new Mayor, Eric Adams. Adams is both Black (hopeful hoorays) and a former...

The Welsh Government is giving local governments more the power to control the use of homesLocal residents are having more and more trouble finding homes they can afford. Tempers...

The Canada Mortgage And Housing Corporation (CMHC) is the country's federal housing agency. In the roughest sense it is the equivalent of the US Department of Housing and Urban...

Brownsville, Texas borders on Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico. It sits in the delta of the Rio Grande River. It is low and flat, floods regularly and "gets...

The Church of England's R number is too low. That suggests its long term survival is in question. Could a social program, such as providing housing for the poor,...

As the public inquiry about the Grenfell Tower fire grinds onFor example, read this account in The Guardian: ‘A merry-go-round of buck-passing’: inside the four-year Grenfell inquiry , it...

The headline above is a line from Canada's national anthem, unfortunately adjusted to circumstances. The impetus for such an outrageous(?) modification comes from a book review in nature. The review...

Climate change is a compelling argument for doing things differently. In northern climates at least, our homes contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and rising global temperatures. Researchers have...

When it comes to finding scapegoats for rising crime, America is hardly alone in demonizing the poor and vulnerable. Still, it's success over decades in pointing the finger towards...

The Resilient Cities Network assists cities that are looking for assurances that they will continue to prosper in the future. The Network's assessment tools requires cities to evaluate shocks...

Some libraries in the United States are adding a new lending feature: seeds. Bridget Shirvell, writing in Civil Eats, shares stories from public libraries in Mystic Connecticut, from Oakland...

Best public stories about Cabrini-Green? Of course there can't be any, can there? That grotesque citadel of crime, depravity and lost souls — a Chicago public housing complex better...

To mark Earth Day this year, the National Housing Federation (NHF) summarized developments in energy saving activities among social housing providers. We've chosen to pair the first subject covered: "Electric...

The world is scheduling the abandonment of gas and petroleum power. So bring on electricity! That demand is being energized by activists and, increasingly, by government. And when governments...

In North America, when someone is diagnosed with dementia, people often think in terms of care facilities with locked doors. In the Netherlands, it's another story. Some of the elderly...

Social housing landlords are often well-placed to help stretch the food budget of their tenants by providing/allowing space for tenants to 'grow their own.' Tips abound for community gardens...

Government-Planned Starvation of youth? Well, not technically, but let's detour on the subject via an oldster . . . me. Really, it's three months since my last small Canada Pension...

This post celebrates the advent of the U.S. National Public Housing Museum (NPHM). Physically, it is still a bright and glossy figment of the imagination. A visit to the...

As we are learning in Canada, adopting the Human Right to Adequate Housing marked an ending and a beginning. It's an ending because after decades of work, Canada's government...

Boondocking? What is it? Who does it? What has it got to do with homelessness? Some might argue that boondocking is homelessness, or at the very least, rootlessness. In America,...

Are there reasons to be cheerful about heat pumps? That's the story from Norway. Being apartment renters all, the staff of affordablehousingaction.org's own cheeriness about heat pumps is entirely...

Much of the world is mightily taken with Singapore's victory in creating a workable social housing scheme with home ownership as its objective. It has been so fulfilling that...

Who are the frontline workers in the COVID emergency? Hospital workers? Yes. Paramedics? Sure. The staff who work at emergency shelters and drop-in centres? Really? We know it is difficult...

Post-world war II, there was an explosion of home building. The destruction of war necessitated the replacement of destroyed housing in countries that were active theatres of hostilities. The...

While there are a lot of stories about public housing in New York City and Chicago, those from the US south are much less common. This one comes from...

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...

Bailey Hu reports that older households in the US have experienced rising financial stress between October 2020 and September 2021. Being behind on housing payments is one way the...

There is a longstanding international interest in Universal Basic Income which can be traced back as far as the year 1516Try: Universal Basic Income Part 1: Applying A Justice...

When schools closed at the start of COVID, community organizations jumped in to make sure that students in Baltimore's Cherry Hill neighbourhood had food to eat. One of the...

Rwanda has a dark period in its history, when the Tutsi minority population was targetted and killed and large numbers. Is it possible for such a rift to be...

The Ventura County Housing Authority in California is starting to redevelop its oldest public housing site, with support made available through the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program. Amid a slew...

Michael Gove is The United Kingdom's Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. This is a new role for Mr. Gove as well as for the UK...

Recently, we published a post that featured an idea worthy of attention founded on a somewhat histrionic presumption that American democracy is in danger of going belly upTry: Mandatory...

Martine August teaches in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo. Some of her early research drew attention to the redevelopment of public housing projects and how...

At Affordablehousingaction.org, we are often given to pauses and head scratching about stories we'd like to present, often because we're uncertain as to whether they really have anything to...

One of America's two predominant political parties has recently been cherishing the big government activism that carried President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal from the depression era 1930's into...

For those of us who are on the lower end of the income scale, it's critical that we extract the best value for the money we spend. This principle...

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...

Fiercely Dependent? Well, it certainly makes a change from the more usual journalistic pronouncement: "Fiercely Independent: Reporting the news the way WE see it." The Halifax Examiner is looking for a little...

A modern, successful community? It is one led by a glossy, stylish eye-twinkler, sometimes with pouty lips, sometimes without. The community numbers in the thousands, tens of thousands, or...

This is part of a series about community. Growing and sustaining a community brings benefits to the participants, provides a means of personal development and builds hope and resilience....

The Scottish Government has issued a 20 year housing policy. This time frame, which extends well beyond typical election cycles, is unusual in itself. The document states unequivocally that...

Energy efficiency is not the only important green future for us all. We should also look to health benefits of biophillia. Biophillia is a fancy word to describe the positive...

What do you think of the changes that will need to happen to your apartment by 2030, whether social housing or free market housing? If you are roughly 79,999th on...

This is part of a series about community. Growing and sustaining a community brings benefits to the participants, provides a means of personal development and builds hope and resilience....

Shelterforce, which supports community development initiatives across the United States, is running a series about community land trusts. The series includes an entry level article that explains what community land...

Housing Co-ops are a tried and true means of creating affordable housing and shielding that affordability by keeping the enterprise away from the free market. Co-ops can protect both...

Sprinkled across the western world there are housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and other forms of collective ownership and decision making. Elsewhere, we've discussed some of the benefits of...

If you're not American, the country's social insurance complex of programs will most likely not touch you at all. But this post, and the following article/report from the Brookings Institute,...

This is part of a series about community. Growing and sustaining a community brings benefits to the participants, provides a means of personal development and builds hope and resilience....

This is part of a series about community. Growing and sustaining a community brings benefits to the participants, provides a means of personal development and builds hope and resilience....

Los Angles Fire Department has recently reported an annual tally of fires and deaths in that city's plague of tent encampments. It should come as no surprise when we...

This is part of a series about community. Growing and sustaining a community brings benefits to the participants, provides a means of personal development and builds hope and resilience....

This is part of a series about community. Growing and sustaining a community brings benefits to the participants, provides a means of personal development and builds hope and resilience....

This is part of a series about community. Growing and sustaining a community brings benefits to the participants, provides a means of personal development and builds hope and resilience....

While people with disabilitiesWhen speaking about people with disabilities, one wants to give preference to wording used in the disability community. Is it "people with disabilities" or "the disabled?"...