Global warming is sending a deadly message to those responsible for the well-being of public/social housing residents. We’ve had wakeup calls in Europe and America with extraordinary extremes of both heating and cooling. Every year in numerous countries, public housing residents die from temperature extremes
You might assume that governments would take note of particular weather and climate needs for those citizens for whom they are more or less directly responsible (public/social housing being the issue at hand).
But in here in Canada, we have extensive experience of how easily responsible governments can turn a blind eye to their citizens’ climate/weather needs.
Beginning in the 1950’s, Canada started rearranging arctic communities with almost complete abandon. Communities were treated as service agencies supporting such things as Canadian sovereignty, the North American Distant Early Warning (DEW) line of radar stations, and a need for centralized arctic sea/air shipping. For all we know today, it could come down to the whims of bureaucrats operating from a cozy national offices thousands of kilometres to the south. There they decided which families would be uprooted from their homes and lifestyles and plonked in new villages hundreds or thousands of kilometres way.
Of course, since it was the inhospitable arctic, care was taken to provide climate-appropriate accommodations, including very necessary government-funded social/public housing.
Now go for a coffee until we stop laughing.
In fact, Canadian federal government attitude was more akin to: “They lived in tents and igloos didn’t they? Anything we provide is better.” But anything wasn’t better, not then, nor today, when public housing in the north, once merely abysmal, is now abysmal and aging. The government knows it perfectly well, occasionally making promises about how it will fix things, which it doesn’t keep.
So don’t look to Canada for useful information on how public housing will in future be preparing for the climate change (or weather change, if you prefer) — events like the extended high temperature system that sat over the west coast of North America, summer 2021, and killed so many people.
Instead we’ll be grateful for the a University of New South Wales, Australia, study of housing temperatures that has been recently published. We’ll take it as a starting point for considering steps to be taken to mitigate uncontrolled temperatures in public housing in other temperate climates such as ours.
Read more at UNSW SYDNEY Newsroom: Social housing temperatures in NSW exceed health and safety limits: study
