Today is National Housing Day, marking the beginning of a week of action for housing. In communities across Canada, people will take to the streets to demand that the federal government renew subsidies for social housing, increase funding for new affordable housing and homelessness services, and create a national housing strategy grounded in human rights principles.
Housing and homelessness are inextricably linked. Visible homelessness is a temporary state for most people who experience it. Most cycle between visible homelessness and housing that is unsafe, unaffordable, and unhealthy. This is especially true for families, for whom homelessness is much more often hidden than visible.
With shelter use increasing among families in Canadian cities, my colleagues and I wanted to better understand the links between inadequate and unaffordable housing, housing loss, hidden homelessness, and shelter use among families. We asked, how common is inadequate housing and risk of homelessness among low-income families with children? To answer this question, we examined survey data from more than 1500 families living in Toronto’s aging rental apartment buildings.
What we found was striking. Nine out of ten families in these buildings live in severely inadequate housing that fails to meet basic standards of affordability, suitable size, safety, security of tenure, and healthy conditions. More than three in ten have multiple serious housing problems. This is what the Canadian Definition of Homelessness would classify as “At Risk of Homelessness.”
The rise in shelter use among families should be of grave concern to policy-makers at all levels of government. But this statistic is just the tip of the iceberg. It must be seen in its broader context: there is a housing crisis for low-income families across Canada.
The demands of the National Housing Day campaign are of direct relevance here. The aging rental buildings where this survey was conducted house about half of Toronto’s tenant families. They were built decades ago, during a period of strong federal engagement in promoting and funding affordable housing construction – the kind of engagement that is needed today, to end the housing crisis. Some of these buildings form part of Toronto’s social housing stock, inhabited by the very families who stand to lose their homes if the federal government fails to renew its annual operating agreement subsidies.
That’s why I’ll be joining many of the families and service providers who participated in our study at Toronto’s National Housing Day rally, from noon to 1pm at Dundas Square. Find out where the action is in your community, and lend your voice to the demand for federal leadership to end the housing and homelessness crisis in Canada.
Emily Paradis, PhD is Senior Research Associate, Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto. An activist, researcher, advocate, and front-line service provider with women facing homelessness for 25 years, her scholarly work focuses on homelessness among women and families, human rights dimensions of homelessness and housing, community-based research and action with marginalized groups, and participatory interventions to address socio-spatial inequalities between and within urban neighbourhoods. She is Project Manager of the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership (www.NeighbourhoodChange.ca), a seven-year study of neighbourhood inequality, diversity and change in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montréal and Halifax.
This study and its dissemination are supported by grants from the Homelessness Knowledge Development Program, Homeless Partnering Strategy, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, and from theSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada which has funded the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership based at the University of Toronto (J. David Hulchanski, Principal Investigator).