Connectivity

Issues and events surrounding the importance of the “virtual community” — the internet, to those who wish to live, work, and study in affordable housing

How A Needy Family’s Future May Be Assured By Broadband

"Broadband is no longer a luxury that only a few people need; it is a critical service that supports . . . economic opportunity, health, education, recreation, and well-being." We...

Lisbon, Portugal Searches For Ways To Benefit From 48,000 Empty Homes

One of the most distressing features of the financialization of housing is the disdain that investors hold for housing as anything other than a potential investment bonanza. How do...

Internet Inequality: Ugly Redlining Defines American Have-Nots

In America during the last century, bank lending practices discriminated against poor neighbourhoods, often predominantly black. The process became known as "redlining." The term comes from insurance maps where...

Does “Right To Housing” Also Mean “Right To Internet”?

Slowly but surely, communities are looking towards internet access as a key infrastructure component of housing. Expressed as a part of the United Nations right to adequate housing, infrastructure...

Niagara Region Libraries Bring A Piece Of The Internet Into Low Income Homes

Kindness to strangers has given birth to a means of sharing library internet services for those with low and no incomes in Ontario's Regional Municipality of Niagara. Familiar to most,...

The Human Right to Adequate Housing: A Changing Definition Of “Adequate”

Adequate housing as a basic human right? Many countries have formally accepted this United Nations-promoted vision.Here's a discussion of adequate housing in UN Terms: Fact Sheet No.21, The Human...

Do We Need Smarter Cities? Or Are There More Important Fish To Fry First?

There is all kinds of fuss around Toronto over the idea of having a smart neighbourhood, never mind a smart city. Toronto is only dipping a toe into the...

Poor Pay An Unaffordable Rent. But Is It Any Better Somewhere Else?

For most of U.S. history, opportunity has beckoned from beyond distant horizons. Travel towards a better future, sometimes over great distances, has been a constant national theme. Not so...

High End Techno Gadgets Will Solve World Affordable Housing Crisis. Really?

Have you ever owned an electronic watch with 3 tiny buttons pressed simultaneously or in sequence to produce a hundred functions you can't remember or access? Welcome to Multi-Function...

Unaffordable Housing? Some Other Dude Did It. Guilty Fingerpointing From The Housing Market

Public transit takes the fall in an awkward, defensive article about the housing market in Toronto by one of Canada's top business newspapers. Toronto, for many years overly-conscious of becoming a...

California Transit Hub Neighbourhoods May Soon Be Home to Non-Transit-Using Gentry

California is Ground Zero of America's affordable housing crisis. Never mind just affordable housing, it is estimated to be short approximately a million houses that needed to be built...

California Transit-Linked Affordable Housing Future Muddied By Squabbling Progressives

In California, there is currently a vision of affordable housing hubs linked by transit to urban centres. This interconnected system would providing reasonable rents and ready access to job...

The Repeal Of Net Neutrality: Communications Disaster Or Potential Benefit For Affordable Housing?

America's repeal of net neutrality has been greeted by much handwringing, and the spectre of giant telecom companies upping prices and limiting options for customers. But there is another way...

Web Access: Trivial Pursuits? Or As Essential To Affordable Homes As Running Water?

Two recent stories from Axios neatly frame the issue. For years, housing the needy in ghettos remote from a city has been a non-starter. Without a job, what hope for...
Howdy,