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Social housing refers to affordable housing that is: Publicly-owned and funded; or, Publicly-supported non-profit and co-operative
housing
Often known as Affordable housing, its policy tools include: Rent supplements for market rental housing
units The use of rent controls; Regulations that protect the existing rental
housing stock Regulations that encourage or subsidize the
development of new rental housing stock
From 1953 to 1993, government funded social housing
Vancouver has suffered from a housing shortage ever since its inception on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Watuth territory in the mid C19th
Post WW 1 “insufficient and poor housing represents one of the chief causes of industrial unrest across Canada”
1919 Better Housing Act: Better housing would ease social unrest and “help maintain a healthier, more efficient work-force”
During the Depression the city’s relief rolls triple; the homeless and unemployed are routinely arrested and imprisoned
Vancouver housing construction plummets, but population growth continues. Result: another acute housing shortage
1934 Bruce report recognizes “the responsibility of the community to provide satisfactory dwellings for those who are too poor to afford them”
May 11, 1938, sixteen hundred demonstrators occupy the Georgia Hotel, the main post office, and the art gallery
June 19, 1938, “Bloody Sunday”, police beat and tear gas protestors
Premier Duff Patullo refuses to make any concessions to the protestors, but demands the restoration of relief funds
Prime Minister King: relief is a provincial responsibility
Result: no low-income housing constructed
low-income residents endure “slum conditions of the worst kind” right through the Second World War
Housing so scarce that council halts an effort to “clean up” the waterfront by evicting dwellers of waterfront shacks and squats: complete lack of alternative shelter
30s: Clusters of squatters homes in False Creek squat is known as “Bennettville”
1949: 866 shacks along the foreshore
Most ‘shackers’ evicted by the Harbours Board in 1959
90 North Shore shacks, housing Malcolm Lowry and others associated with poets Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesay and Al Purdy
One occupied by artists Al Neil and Carole Itter, evicted Feb. 2015
1958 some shacks burned by the District of North Vancouver
Feb. ‘41 Wartime Housing Limited houses shipyard and Boeing workers: : first rental housing in Greater Vancouver
May 1944 evictions: families living in tents, evictions of war widows. Street rallies and picket lines spring up in protest
July ‘45 evictions suspended, but housing sold off in 194
Jan ’46 Veterans Occupy Hotel Vancouver
Sept. ‘46 Veterans Occupy former army barracks on Little Mountain
1946: “the federal government is morally responsible for helping to rehabilitate demobilized service personnel”; CMHC founded “to house returning war veterans and to lead the nation's housing programs”
1947 veteran’s housing built along 4th and on Broadway
1947 Renfrew Heights
1948 Fraserview Subdivision
1953 Little Mountain: first public housing
1968 : “All Canadians have a right to be adequately housed whether they can afford it or not” (Canadian Welfare Council)
Feb. 1973, minority Trudeau government introduces measures to “stimulate home buying and home and neighbourhood rehabilitation”
Federal assistance provides for 40% of all housing starts in the 1970s
Ron Barford: “good housing at a reasonable cost is a social right of every citizen of this country…that must be our objective, our obligation, our goal”
‘79 – ’85: 40,000 units of co-op housing nation-wide
Support for homeowners and developers = $8 billion; social housing support = $700 million
1983 MacDonald Commission: “greater reliance on ‘market forces’”
1986 CMHC’s start-up funding for low-income housing drops to 8%
1992: federal funding for co-op housing cut: “the government wants to help people buy homes”
1993 all affordable housing funding cut, responsibility for housing downloaded to the provinces
2009 Little Mountain sold
Canada now the only OECD country without a national housing program
‘97 – ‘01, federal spending on housing 10% of GDP, lowest since ‘30s
1990: Frances Street Squat
2002: Woodward’s occupation (Woodsquat)
2004 Science World protest
2011 Occupy
2015 Oppenheimer park protest
incentives for the development of new market rental increasing densityzoning changes (secondary suits and laneway housing)waiving development cost levies on rental units funding for new social housing units, including replacing
SROs
The Affordability gap2006, average renter pays $334/month more than they
can afford = $4,0005/yearAffordability gap $141 million 27.0% of core need renters have affordability problem
“the violation of the right to adequate housing in Canada is clearly the result of explicit legislative choices rather than a lack of resources”