Session 7: Canada's Incomplete Housing System: What should be done?

PDF of PowerPoint for Session 7

Nick Falvo's summary: Ten things to know from this three country discussion of policy options for housing and homelessness. PDF WebLink

----------------------------------------------

What should be done now and in the short term (3 to 5 years) to progressively realize a more inclusive housing system? COVID-19 may provide an opportunity for housing system innovation, defined as significant positive change.

What would constitute “positive change”? An inclusive housing system needs to:

stimulate adequate housing production;
help produce (and maintain/rehab) a mix of housing choice (tenure, location, size, and quality); and
assist those who cannot afford adequate, appropriate housing.

Under the theme of “recovery for all,” several civil society organizations in Canada have outlined the following six-point plan aimed at ending homelessness and severe housing distress. See: WebLink

Expanded federal role in homelessness prevention and elimination. A Federal commitment (with timelines and targets) for the prevention and elimination of homelessness with expanded federal investment in community-based homelessness responses (building on the current very modest federal ‘Reaching Home’ program).
Alleviating poverty. A national guaranteed minimum income (or equivalent measures) will ensure those in greatest need have minimum financial resources to help them meet their basic needs and prevent homelessness.
More permanently affordable and supportive housing. 300,000 new non-market social rental and supportive housing units, and enhanced rent-geared-to-income and/or housing benefit for low-income Canadians.
Progressively realize the right to adequate housing. Meaningful implementation of the right to housing by acknowledging and addressing inequities and systemic/structural exclusion of many from adequate and affordable housing appropriate to household size and needs. This includes significant reform and effective enforcement of provincial tenant protections including specific eviction prevention strategies.
Address housing financialization. Implement measures to curtail the impacts of financialization of housing by, e.g., limiting the ability of large capital funds to purchase ‘distressed’ housing assets, use of taxes and regulations that effectively curtail the financialization of housing, and so forth.
Aggressively support the needs of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples are dramatically over-represented among people experiencing homelessness and severely inadequate housing in Canada. An adequately resourced, distinctions based, Urban and Rural Indigenous Housing and Homelessness Strategy is needed, developed and implemented by urban, rural and Northern Indigenous peoples and housing and service providers.

The challenge is where to begin.

What specific actions – policies and programs – such as changes in existing or the creation of new taxes, regulations, and program spending, will produce significant positive change in the housing system?
Who (population groups) and what sectors within the housing system should be targeted?

To help us out, we will have a series of brief discussions (30 minutes) with housing experts in the UK, Australia, and Canada. They have been asked to: (1) briefly comment on the six-point plan (what is missing; what might be better defined/communicated); and (2) to mainly describe some of the specific policies or programs that either are being or that they feel should be introduced in their city and/or nation. We will have a brief opportunity for Q&A with each.

AGENDA

6:00pm Kath Scanlon, London, UK

Distinguished Policy Fellow, London School of Economics. Kath is an expert on local and national housing policies and their effects on housing markets. WebLink

6:30pm Wendy Hayhurst, Canberra, AU

CEO, Community Housing Industry Association, Canberra, Australia. CHIA is a national registered charity that represents community housing providers in Australia. CHIA proposes that Australia develop 30,000 new social housing units over the next four years, to stimulate the economy following the impacts of COVID-19. WebLink

Recorded discussion with Wendy Hayhurst

7:00pm break

7:15pm Andy Yan, Vancouver, BC

Director, The City Program, Simon Fraser University. Andy’s housing research and community engagement is focused on what the City of Vancouver and the BC provincial government are doing (and not doing) to improve the local/provincial housing system. WebLink See also: Glavin, T. (2018) “Andy Yan, the analyst who exposed Vancouver's real estate disaster: Hated by politicians, speculators and money-launderers,” Maclean’s, Feb. 14. WebLink

Recorded discussion with Andy Yan

7:45pm Carolyn Whitzman, Ottawa, ON

Professor, University of Ottawa (formerly professor of urban planning, University of Melbourne). Carolyn’s recent research is focused on the municipal role in housing affordability (comparative studies of city housing initiatives, including case studies of Vancouver, Portland, Toronto, and Melbourne. PDF Housing Need & Gender in Canada

8:15pm break

8:25pm Sharon Chisholm, Ottawa/Halifax

Research co-ordinator and co-author of Shaping Futures: Changing the Housing Story, Australia, Britain, Canada, WebLink and former executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, the national organization representing Canada’s social housing sector.

Recorded discussion with Sharon Chisholm

Readings

Pawson, H. & Gibb, K. (2019) The Australian and the UK Housing Story, Chapter 2 and 3 of Shaping Futures: Changing the Housing Story. PDF
Scanlon, K. & Whitehead, C. (2019) The Cost of Homelessness Services in London, London School of Economics. PDF
Community Housing Industry Association (CHIA) (2018) National Plan for Affordable Housing for Australia PDF
CHIA (2020) Australia Federal Pre-Budget Submission PDF
Whitzman, C. (2018) Tap Turners and Game Changers: Lessons for Melbourne, Victoria and Australia from Affordable Housing Partnerships in Vancouver, Portland and Toronto. Melbourne: Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. PDF
Canadian Housing and Renewal Association (2020) Recommendations for the Federal Government to assist housing providers during the COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath. May 13. PDF

The Discussants

Kath Scanlon is Distinguished Policy Fellow at LSE London. She has a wide range of research interests including comparative housing policy (across all tenures–social and private rented housing as well as owner-occupation), comparative mortgage finance, and migration. She is an expert on local and national housing policies and their effects on housing markets. Her research is grounded in economics but also draws on techniques and perspectives from other disciplines including geography and sociology, and aims at improving the evidence base for policy decisions at national or local level.

Wendy Hayhurst was appointed in March 2019 as CEO at the Community Housing Industry Association (CHIA) the peak body representing not for profit community housing organisations across Australia. Previously she led CHIA NSW for four years. Wendy has spent most of her career in social and affordable housing, working her way from the front line to senior managerial roles in a wide range of housing provider organisations, regulatory bodies, specialist consultancies, and performance benchmarking organisations. Wendy has an Executive Masters in Public Administration taught through the Australian and New Zealand School of Government. She also has a Postgraduate Diploma in Housing awarded by the Chartered Institute of Housing in the UK.

Andy Yan is the director of The City Program at Simon Fraser University. Born and raised in Vancouver, Andy has extensively worked in the non-profit and private urban planning sectors with projects in the metropolitan regions of Vancouver, San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles and New Orleans. He specializes in the fields of urban regeneration, applied demographics, Geographic Information Systems, neighborhood development, public outreach, social media and quantitative research. His work has been featured in a number of local, national and international publications, both in print and online, as well as academic venues. Andy holds a Master of Urban Planning from the University of California – Los Angeles and is a registered professional planner with the Canadian Institute of Planners. Andy is a recipient of the Planning Institute of British Columbia’s award for Leadership in Advocacy and Innovation, and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Advocate for Architecture award.

Carolyn Whitzman, University of Ottawa, whose research is focused on transnational action research on affordable housing partnerships, was until recently Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne for 16 years. She is the author, co-author or editor of five books related to ‘the right to the city’ in both a contemporary and historical perspective. She frequently provides policy advice to local, state and national government and to the UN, including addressing the plenary at the Habitat III Conference in Quito, Ecuador in September 2016. At the University of Ottawa, she is undertaking Canadian-based research on scaling up women’s housing, and is working with the nascent Canadian Housing Research Centre hub.

Sharon Chisholm has been the Knowledge Exchange Specialist and an Honourary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews since 2009. She works to build and enhance a culture of dialogue among academics, practitioners and policy makers thereby increasing the impact of the university. She is the project lead for Shaping Futures, a collaborative international research, knowledge exchange and knowledge building housing initiative. From 1994 to 2008 Sharon was Executive Director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association (CHRA) Canada’s national housing association where she oversaw its affairs including advocacy, communications, research and capacity building. Prior to that she was Housing Development Manager for the City of Ottawa.

Supplemental Readings

Campsie, P. (2018) What We Talk About When We Talk About Rooming Houses: Regulation in Canada, 2000–2018. Toronto: Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership & Cities Centre. PDF
Chisholm, S. (2003). Affordable housing in Canada's urban communities: A literature review. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
Clapham, D. (2018). Remaking housing policy: An international study. Routledge. PDF-Introduction PDF-Chapter 8
Ellen, I. et al. (2020) Strategies for increasing affordable housing amid the COVID-19 economic crisis, Brookings Institution. PDF
Gordon, J. (2016). Vancouver's housing affordability crisis: Causes, Consequences and Solutions. Simon Fraser University.
Schwan, K. et al. (2020). The State of Women’s Housing Need & Homelessness in Canada. Toronto: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness Press. PDF
Gurstein, P., & Yan, A. (2019). “Beyond the Dreams of Avarice?” Chapter 9, Planning on the Edge: Vancouver and the Challenges of Reconciliation, Social Justice, and Sustainable Development, 215-246. PDF
Habitat International Coalition (2020) Manifesto - Habitat voices, through this COVID pandemic, the future is today. PDF
Jacobs, K. (2019). Neoliberal housing policy: An international perspective. Routledge. PDF-Introduction
Kettunen, H., & Ruonavaara, H. (2020). Rent regulation in 21st century Europe. Comparative perspectives. Housing Studies, 1-23.
Maclennan, D., Pawson, H., Gibb, K., Chisholm, S., & Hulchanski, D. (2019). Shaping Futures: Changing the Housing Story. PDF
Martel, A., Whitzman, C., & Sheko, A. (2019) Private Developers and the Public Good: Can a Socially Constructed Market Deliver Quality Affordable Housing for Australian Cities? Urban Policy and Research,37(2), 170-184.
Morris, A. (2019). An impossible task? Neoliberalism, the financialisation of housing and the City of Sydney’s endeavours to address its housing affordability crisis. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1-25.

Nelson, G., & Aubry, T. (2017) A portable housing benefit as an indispensable component of ending homelessness in Canada. Toronto: EENet, Ontario Housing First Regional Community of Interest. PDF
OECD (2020) Housing Policies for Sustainable and Inclusive Cities: How National Governments Can Deliver Affordable Housing and Compact Urban Development, Paris: OECD Regional Development Working Papers. PDF

Paris, C., Beer, A., Martin, J., Morris, A., Budge, T., & Horne, S. (2020). International Perspectives on Local Government and Housing: The Australian Case in Context. Urban Policy and Research, 1-12. PDF
Pawson, H., Milligan, V., & Yates, J. (2020) "The Indigenous Housing Policy Challenge.," Chapter 7 in Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 217-257. PDF
Peck, J., Siemiatycki, E., & Wyly, E. (2014). Vancouver's suburban involution. City, 18(4-5), 386-415. PDF
Pomeroy, S. (2020) Why Canada needs a non-market rental acquisition strategy, Ottawa: Focus Consulting. PDF
Raynor, K., & Whitzman, C. (2020) How intersectoral policy networks shape affordable housing outcomes. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1-22. PDF

Scanlon, K. (2017) Social housing in England: Affordable vs ''affordable.'' Critical Housing Analysis, 4(1), 21. PDF
Scanlon, K., Whitehead, C., & Arrigoitia, M.F. Eds. (2014)Social housing in Europe. John Wiley & Sons. PDF
SGS Economics and Planning (2020) Economic Impacts of Social Housing, Canberra: Community Housing Industry Association. PDF
SPR Associates (2017) Review of Policies for Homeownership and Rental in Canada, Ottawa: CMHC. PDF
Stein, S. (2019) The Housing Crisis and the Rise of the Real Estate State. In New Labor Forum, Vol. 28, No. 3, September, pp. 52-60). Sage Publications. PDF
Suttor, G. (2016) Taking Stock of Supportive Housing for Mental Health and Addictions in Ontario, Toronto: Wellesley Institute. WebLink
Wellesley Institute (2017) Supportive Housing Strategy (summary), Toronto. Weblink

Whitzman, C. & Desroches, M. (2020) Women’s Housing: Balancing ‘scaling-up’ and ‘caring’ in Montreal, Gatineau and Ottawa, Ottawa: U of Ottawa, Institute of Feminest and Gender Studies. PDF
Whitzman, C., Raynor, K., & Palm, M. (2018) “Ten lessons from cities that have risen to the affordable housing challenge,” The Conversation, Sept. 27. PDF
Whitzman, C. (2018) Tap Turners and Game Changers: Lessons for Melbourne, Victoria and Australia from Affordable Housing Partnerships in Vancouver, Portland and Toronto. Melbourne: Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. PDF