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Publication Date: 2020
Equitable access to adequate housing has increasingly been recognized as a matter of life and death during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, there has been limited gendered analysis of how COVID-19 has shaped girls’ access to housing. In this article we analyze how the socio-economic exclusion of girls who are homeless is likely to increase during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. We suggest that three structural inequities will deepen this exc...
Publication Date: 2020
As states move beyond simply managing their homelessness crises to looking for ways to reduce and ultimately end homelessness, broad-scale efforts to prevent homelessness are lacking. Experiences of homelessness are often harmful, traumatic, and costly, making a compelling case for why homelessness prevention should be prioritized. In recent years, countries such as Australia, Finland, and Wales have shifted their focus to prevention, but there r...
Organization: Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network
Publisher: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness
Publication Date: 2020
In all provinces and territories, women, girls, and gender diverse peoples experience some of the most severe forms of housing need. In order to better understand these challenges, the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network (WNHHN) decided to undertake an extensive scoping review of available evidence on women’s homelessness in Canada. The Canadian Observatory was hired to complete this literature review, guided at each step by the exp...
Publication Date: 2020
While some progress has been made in addressing chronic homelessness through supportive models, a comprehensive solution for housing loss must include prevention. The purpose of this article is twofold: to conduct a review of the literature on the domains of the Framework for Homelessness Prevention; and to use literature on the concept of quaternary prevention, preventing the harms of service provision, to theorise an additional domain. The Fram...
Organization: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness
Publication Date: 2017
Prevention makes sense. To prevent disease, we vaccinate. To prevent traffic deaths, we install seat belts. While we recognize intuitively that preventing homelessness is a good idea, there has been little movement in Canada to make that happen on a national scale. A New Direction: A Framework for Homelessness Prevention sets out to provide the language and clarity to begin that conversation.
Since mass homelessness emerged in the mid-1980s, we...
Organization: The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, A Way Home Canada
Publication Date: 2018
Are we making significant headway on youth homelessness in Canada? Are we stopping young people from becoming homeless? Are we ensuring that young people transition out of homelessness quickly, and that they do not become homeless again?
It is time that we started taking a good, hard look at these questions. In our efforts to end homelessness, we have primarily focused on providing emergency services and supports to young people while they are...
Organization: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness
Publication Date: 2016
Mass homelessness in Canada emerged in the 1980s, following a massive disinvestment in affordable housing, structural shifts in the economy and reduced spending on social supports. Since then, stakeholders across the country have tried and tested solutions to address the issue. These responses, largely based on the provision of emergency services, have prevented meaningful progress. Fortunately, there are many signs that we are entering a new pha...
Organization: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness
Publication Date: 2017
Before us is a significant opportunity to reimagine the federal government’s leadership role in homelessness. After more than 25 years of declining spending on affordable housing, the Government of Canada is launching a National Housing Strategy (NHS) with a 10-year investment in expanding the supply of affordable housing and enhancing sustainable longterm housing outcomes for Canadians. A key pillar of the NHS will be a renewal and redesign of t...
Publication Date: 2012
The authors problematize essentialized notions of motherhood both ideologically and through criminalized women’s accounts of correctional programming discourses that engage these notions as a way to foster “motherhood as praxis.” Using data from interviews conducted with former female prisoners, we analyze how substance using mothers invoke the concept of a “good” mother by negotiating its meaning through techniques of self-surveillance and the s...
Publication Date: 2016
Psychocentrism is a governing neoliberal rationality that pathologizes human problems and frames individuals as responsible for socially structured inequalities. The homeless community provides an important case study to examine the ways psychocentrism manifests among an excluded population. This paper explores the paradox whereby homeless individuals are simultaneously pathologized and responsibilized through psychocentric discourses in which th...