Community Resilience

Leaders in Canada and the United States are working on strategies to add to their country's supply of affordable housing. This post is about two of those strategies. These leaders...

Recently, Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, invited Ontario's mayors to request that he invoke the Notwithstanding ClauseThe Notwithstanding Clause refers to a provision in Canada's constitution, which allows...

Imagine working in a shelter for homeless people. The shelter's clients are living through a very difficult time: they have no housing. And no matter how motivated they are,...

Arlene Hache been homeless in the Northwest Territories in Canada. She has also led an urban support centre for families with low incomes for 30 years. For these and...

This is a story about a change in regulations that hasn't got a lot of attention in the mainstream media. The change should make a big difference for people...

Canada has a long history of public support for housing. A lot of that support has gone to the private sector for housing that people own and for housing...

People in Toronto are struggling to put food on the table. The annual report of food bank activity, called Who's Hungry 2024, has some very large numbers. There were...

An article in Axios informs its readers about a 'pure' form of homeownership in the United States. How is it pure? The owner can't obtain mortgage insurance. The reporter,...

Getting on for a hundred years ago, America made a tragic mistake when designing a housing program to help out citizens who were suffering during the Great Depression. The original...

Kristen Hackett is someone you may identify with. Looking around the United States, she sees systems that systematically support segregation, even though it's officially illegal. She doesn't want to...

One of the principals of Affordablehousingaction.org owned a house in a leafy university neighbourhood of Hamilton, Ontario. The property came with an ownership agreement which dated to the 1920's....

It began as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). Actually, that's not quite correct. In 1990 it began as an organization called the Local Governments for Sustainability, a...

America, like many other countries around the world, is slowly waking up to a reality that many of its population can no longer afford housing. As a result, those...

Do you recognize housing as a system that delivers justice to those living in a local community? Here's a viewpoint from the home essential to the survival of Affordablehousingaction.org. As...

Fernanda Canales is an internationally celebrated architect from Mexico. In an interview with Erin Tallman of Archiexpo, Canales describes the effect of achieving international recognition, including gaining status as an...

These days, if ‘unknown caller’ appears on your phone, no amount of curiousity is likely to overcome the risks of answering. It’s bound to be a scam of some...

Namibia in Africa has a surplus of invasive plants (also known as 'encroacher bush'). There is also a serious housing shortage. A group of people in Namibia see a...

Be honest, now. Is affordablehousingaction.org exhibiting housing snobbery by using cheeky references to some of our local neighbourhood rebuilds? We confess that we have been known to describe this...

The story linked to this post is about the art of the possible. A lot of the earth is covered with roofs, especially in urban areas. There are multiple roof...

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

As the 10th most expensive city in the world to live in, Toronto has been trapped in a no-win nightmare of rental housing unaffordability. The price is being paid...

In 2023, Canada's National Housing Council convened a Review Panel to investigate the financialization in purpose-built rental housingFor more about the Review Panel try: The Right To Adequate Housing...

So how does a local government become an expert in managing homelessness, a problem that has been ignored for too long? Invest in salesmanship that something is being done when...

The Guardian published an article by author David Van Reybrouk in 2016, not long after the United Kingdom had voted by the slimmest of margins to leave the European...

It's gardening season in the northern hemisphere. In Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Mosaic Community Land Trust is hosting community garden plots on four lots in the city. Here are a few features...

The architecture magazine dezeen has a bee in its bonnet about social housing, to the point of proposing a world-wide Social Housing Revival. The foundations of dezeen's interest and...

When it comes to building affordable housing, People at New Jersey's Fair Share Housing Center (the Center) are feeling fairly confident that New Jersey is a state to emulate. The...

At affordablehousingaction.org, we often read that experience of homelessness should guide policy and program design. The article linked to this post delivers advice for the UK's refugee system, based...

Amsterdam's current housing plan literally gives residents a hands-on role in solving the city's crisis of housing affordability. Literally. While most cities are consulting with residents, 13 sites in...

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

There are two very different articles linked to this post about public support for Indigenous initiatives in the United States. The first article is about projects by American Indians and...

No, 'Flail' isn't misspelled. Admittedly 'Fail' might do the job, too. But we had in mind a post we wrote three years ago that described a New York City...

A quagmire is the word one authority uses to describe the process to access publicly funded supports that are due to Indigenous people with diverse abilities. Failing to navigate...

When it launched in 2017, Canada's National Housing Strategy vowed to do right by Indigenous People. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's landing page for the National Housing Strategy...

Public power utilities are not a new idea, but the one described in this article is a little different. It started as a discussion about reducing flooding in the community...

Hospitals have discovered that there is more to the cost of demolishing houses than the demolition and disposal feeTry: Urban Redevelopment: A Case Of Failing To See Who’s There...

The Housing Diversity Network was founded in 2002 with a mission of supporting racial diversity. The Network supports organizations in England that want their board and staff teams to...

Here's a story that begins in Santa Monica, California. It could possibly end closer to where you live . . . just about anywhere in the world. It's titled...

Consider everyone who comes in contact with emergency shelters, whether staff, residents or volunteers. They all experience grief and loss. Shelter residents often arrive at shelters with multiple losses. A...

The Fair Housing Alliance (the Alliance) recently published a statement that identifies holes in the housing supply in Ontario, Canada. In round numbers, 640,000 homes are missing in the...

Alex Beggs is a writer and housing activist who lives in England. He praises London’s Mayor for starting up a Right to Buy Back programThe London program's name references...

If you kinda squint in the shaded canyons of downtown high rise commercial buildings, you can easily see how much, on the outside, they can resemble high rise HOUSING...

In Chicago, property owners are responsible to maintain their properties in liveable condition. When a building develops a leaky roof or its foundation is damaged, or the plumbing backs...

Wales is in the middle of a pilot project that aims to help young adults who have been wards of the crown to avoid homelessness. Guaranteeing a basic income...

'Food is a tool for change': that is an opinion, as well as a concept that frames the life experience of Turkish chef Ebru Baybara Demir. Demir grew up in...

Works for everybody? How on earth can social housing, which doesn't directly benefit you personally, be touted nevertheless as a personal benefit to you? It may well be impossible to...

To hear America talk about it, that nation is in a contest for top dog of the world. Maintaining its influence, it remains firmly committed to a capitalist, free-enterprise...

There seems to be a universal sneaking feeling about architecture that it is a frill. If taxpayers are footing the bill, they may well be even more prone to...

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...

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...

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...

How do you get people on board with a program to build more housing for people who aren’t being well served by the private market? This question led the...

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: ...

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...

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,...

We recently published a post about L&Q Housing, a large social housing landlord in the UK, which manages some 105,000 homes. It seems they have lost the plot, thrown...

A group of 40 people in Ohio are all fired up about worker co-operatives. Why? They travelled to the Basque region of Spain to learn about these businesses, which...

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...

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...

When Affordablehousingaction.org started exploring affordable housing six years ago, the general feeling was that public housing in the United States was a dead duck. Due to the outsized influence...

When new affordable housing is under consideration, community leaders can be apprehensive, fearing that the new housing will be a magnet. They worry that the housing will attract more...

Okay, So what has admirable Vienna, Austria done now to earn our applause? Only got itself accolades for being the most livable city in the world, from a list...

In the gloom-occluded world of social housing in the United Kingdom, there are occasional tiny flashes of sunlight. Literally. But first, let's get the bad news out of the way. UK...

This is a post about food. It is a basic necessity, but frequently sacrificed in the face of paying for housing. Welfare cuts in 1995 drew attention to a...

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....

In case you hadn't noticed that your own national housing emergency looks a lot like Australia's, an InSight article by Caitlin Wright describes some conditions that you will probably...

An eviction can change your life. It certainly changed Matt Desmond's. He witnessed sheriffs evicting a group of siblings who had been orphaned when their mother died unexpectedly. Desmond...

Some people who are living in social housingThis is housing where rent is geared to income. in the Toronto area feel they should move out in order to...

Pipelines are a popular image these days where people get directed to a specific outcome, regardless of what they might want. There's the public-housing-to-prison pipeline and the prison-to-homelessness pipeline....

Do you remember the triple bottom line, a term invented to expand the bottom line? The bottom line was about money: the triple bottom line added social and environmental...

Time was, if you were short on a household item, you'd ask a neighbour to help you out. In today's world, the idea might seem laughable. Would your neighbour...

When this writer was growing up, there was a ridiculous ad for packaged mints. It featured two people arguing about whether the mint was a breath freshener or a...

With the waning of the COVID pandemic, what's happened to the United Kingdom's famous 'Everybody In' treatment of the homeless? The scramble to move the unhoused under hard roofs...

Today's first postTry: Ontario's Government: Fix Supply To End The Housing Crisis. Have They Backed The Winning Horse? talked about plans to unlock housing supply in Ontario. It explores...

The Canadian province of Ontario is in the midst of a housing crisis. The number of people who are homeless is growing. A large number of people who have...

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...

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...

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,...

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...