Is The Social/Public Housing Tide Finally Turning in North America?

two Edmonton police officers riding bicycles
The Edmonton Police Service supports lifting a ban on non-market housing in five neighbourhoods. Claims that the housing is a crime magnet don't stand up.

The stain of gang-controlled, crime-riddled public/social housing1 lingers on in North American public imagination.

“Like Cabrini Green in Chicago,” said Christel Kjenner, referring to an infamous United States public housing project, now demolished.

“Those projects don’t exist anymore,” Kjenner said. “That’s not the way affordable housing’s being done.”

Kjenner is Edmonton’s director of housing and homelessness, a city not even in the same country as Chicago. Yet Canadians, living cheek by jowl with the United States, are unable to avoid being influenced by events and attitudes that receive widespread publicity south of the border.

Edmonton has ended a moratorium on social housing in five city core neighbourhoods that began in 2012. That moratorium was approved in response to claims that a concentration of non-market2 housing makes neighbourhoods a crime magnet.

An Edmonton staff report (linked at the bottom of this article), includes evidence that refutes the “crime magnet” claim, based on the frequency of calls made for police intervention in non-market housing, compared to market housing.

The police officer who spoke to the report decried the use of justice solutions for a social problem. Further, he advocated for Edmonton’s growing need of both supportive housing and affordable housing — an unusual and refreshing perspective from a police department.

Read more about Edmonton’s new, enlightened flirtation with ‘bad, old’ social housing at the CBC: Edmonton Lifts Affordable-Housing Moratorium In Core Neighbourhoods

Footnotes

  1. Social housing has traditionally been government-built rental housing that is intended for households with low incomes. Its rents are not market rate (e.g. whatever the market will bear), but instead geared to the income of each individual/family tenant. In the United States, the term “public” housing is used.
  2. “Market” housing rents are determined by whatever the rental market will bear. “Non-market” housing rents are controlled by some other formula, such as being geared to tenant income in social housing projects.

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