A recent study by UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning has shown that public housing rates in Canada have decreased in the past 20 years, despite an increasing homelessness rate.
Public housing, also known as social housing, is non-market housing where property is managed either by the state or housing societies to address a housing need for a particular population. According to the study, public housing units in Canada have decreased by five percent from 1990 to 2011.
According to Penny Gurstein, director of the SCARP and the leader of the future of public housing project, the lack of public housing in Canada has left much of the population without adequate housing.
Gurstein points to Nunavut and Vancouver’s Downtown East Side as areas with significant homelessness and under-housing.
“There’s this huge homeless population that are in really dismal conditions,” said Gurstein. “If we don’t provide adequate housing, where are these people going to be living?”
According to Gurstein, the decrease in public housing since the 90s has been catalyzed by a shift in the Canadian government’s methods of managing social issues. Although Canada used to have a vast amount of public housing, intervention in social programs became seen as less of a governmental responsibility. As a result, many public-housing units were sold to non-profit organizations.
“This was a way of recognizing the role of government in the provision of housing, that housing was a kind of a societal right and need, and that every citizen should be housed,” said Gurstein. “We don’t have that now. That’s not necessarily occurring, and that’s why you’re seeing homelessness and other things because providing or ensuring citizens adequate shelter isn’t part of the government’s idea about themselves.”
Gurstein stressed the importance of housing for low-income families and students when it comes to being able to afford to live in Vancouver.
“We really need that,” she said. “That’s something very desperate, and what’s happening is that because we have such a low vacancy rate, people are just scrambling to get anything and they’re paying very high rents.”
According to Gurstein, B.C. Housing and the Federal Government are interested in selling their remaining public housing buildings to non-profit organizations, whom she believes may not be as durable as a government organization.
“Many of these non-profit societies are small or they’re trying to survive. I think some of them are gonna have to sell their housing because they won’t be able to make it viable.”
Eleven of the 15 other countries analyzed in the study have seen a similar trend in declining public housing rates.