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Helen Looker is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s master’s program in planning and a successful contributor to the joint SHSC/CPRN internship and scholar program. Her main research interest is exurban housing in small town Ontario and senior’s issues in segregated retirement communities. Helen recently took time to answer some questions about her paper The Homeownership Component of the Canada-Ontario Affordable Housing Program: Critical Analysis of Program Objectives.

Research Questions:

Q. Why do you think it is important that research be focused on the effectiveness of the homeownership component of the Canada-Ontario Affordable Housing Program?

A. It is important to critically examine the political reasons for increasing homeownership to low and moderate income households. The implications of the financial burden to such households could result in impaired health, financial instability, and increased homelessness.

Q. Could you elaborate on the impact that increased rates of home ownership has had on waiting lists for affordable housing in Ontario?

A. Market renters represent the majority of the applicants for supported home ownership programs. While their movement out of social housing frees up spaces, it increases the concentration of low-income households in the sector.

Q. Based on your research, how do you foresee the homeownership component Canada-Ontario Affordable Housing Program evolving?

A. As policies to support home ownership have become the preferred housing option of many North American housing strategies, the program will continue to be a government tool to promote homeownership. This is why efforts must be made to craft policies to help low-to-moderate income households sustain their place on the real estate ladder.

Q. What needs to happen to make the transition from affordable housing to homeownership a more feasible option for lower income tenants?

A. What is needed is a system that provides the financial and educational support needed to promote the transition to a higher income level.
The move from affordable housing to home ownership could be made more accessible by equipping low income individuals with financial literacy, household management skills, employment and educational upgrading opportunities.

Click here to checkout Helen Looker’s paper!
The Homeownership Component of the Canada-Ontario Affordable Housing Program: Critical Analysis of Program Objectives

Arif Jinha is one of the most recent interns to complete the joint SHSC/CPRN internship and scholar program. His paper, takes a first look at the effects of stimulus spending on affordable housing in Ontario. He recently took some time to answer a few questions about himself and his research.

Q. Where did you go to school for your bachelors and masters degrees?
A. University of Ottawa

Q. What did you take in your undergrad and your masters?
A. My undergrad was in Psychology, my MA is in Globalization and International Development.

Q. What is your thesis on?
A. My thesis is about the global move towards open access to journal research, and what that could mean to research and education in Africa in the context of information and communication technologies (ICT) development.

Q. Why do you think it’s important to provide an early look at the significance of the recession and stimulus spending to affordable housing in Ontario?
A. As quickly as the shovels are going in, we need to track all of the practical, political and philosophical opportunities for change. Ontario’s unemployment rate hit 11.7% at one point in 2008, and Ontario is a province that truly faces the need to change or face greater decline with the next decade being crucial. To me, that makes the current situation for affordable housing in Ontario both critical and fascinating.

Q. What are your future plans education or career-wise?
A. Writing, music, PhD, working less and having more free and creative time.

Q. What got you interested in social housing research?
A. Working in the three downtown shelters in Ottawa.

Q. Where did you grow up?
A. In Guelph, Brampton and Orleans (suburb of Ottawa).

Q. Any other jeopardy-type tidbits that might be of interest to readers?
A. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” L. Cohen. I am a huge fan of Leonard Cohen and this quote is great for policy research I think.

Click here to read the full text of Arif Jinha’s paper, Recession and Stimulus Spending: A preliminary Examination of Stimulus spending on Affordable Housing in Ontario

Here’s a concept: sponsor Master’s and PhD level students to write housing-related papers, connect them with mentors in the field, and give them the opportunity to present their findings at high-profile housing events.

This is exactly what SHSC has done over the past 3 ½ years. SHSC, with the help of the now defunct Canadian Policy and Research Networks (CPRN), worked to put in place the top housing research internship program in Canada! The program was led by housing scholar Dr. Mike Buzzelli, of the University of Western Ontario, and issued 20 publications during that time.

Paper downloads have numbered in the tens of thousands and many interns have gone on to meaningful and relevant employment in the housing sector. The program has seen wave after wave of students write on topics that delve into the diversity of challenges faced by the housing sector.

Putting humility aside for a second, the results have been incredible. Our most recent round of interns have produced work that offers significant contributions to our collective housing knowledge and have helped to build policy capacity in Canada.

Here are brief summaries of their papers:

Recession and Stimulus Spending: A Preliminary Examination of Stimulus Spending on Affordable Housing in Ontario by Arif Jinha

The federal budget of January 2009 allocated almost $2 billion toward social housing, reversing a trend of funding cuts to social housing policies and programs. What will happen once the one-time stimulus spending is complete?

Jinha argues that the crisis creates opportunities to think in a longer-term way about social housing in Canada. As he puts it: “The recession has created an opportunity to give voice to progressive policies in order to make the argument that the government does have a role in the economy…. whether this situation provokes change for the better is up to the public. Past recessions have brought either more of the same or forks in the road.”

Read more of what Jinha has to say about stimulus spending so far.

Is home ownership really the answer for low- and middle-income Canadian households? In April 2005, the federal and provincial governments jointly invested $734 million in the Canada-Ontario Affordable Housing Program (COAHP), committing $28.37 million to the Homeownership Component. The goal of the Homeownership Component was to help 20,000 low- to moderate-income households transition from renting to ownership through assisted down payments.

Homeownership has been actively promoted politically in many countries; however, the evidence of its sustainability in low-income households is discouraging and the social benefits are unproven. Given the lack of evidence, is homeownership too much of a risk for low-income households? Since social housing tenants are targeted, could such programs concentrate poverty, and is the program goal of reducing waiting lists for social housing realistic?

Click here to read Helen Looker’s findings.

Social housing in Canada has gone through substantial changes over the past two decades; in the early 1990s, administration (and most financing as well) devolved completely from federal to provincial governments and, in Ontario, to the municipal level.How have social housing administrators adapted their practices within these models? And what are the strengths and weaknesses experienced in each of them? Are there certain aspects of social housing that would be best dealt with at a provincially centralized level and others that would benefit from aspects of decentralization?

Click here to read Schuk’s findings.

Visit SHSC website for full text of these and other Social Housing Research Internship and Scholar Program papers.

Speaking at the Canadian Urban Institute’s breakfast seminar on January 13, Dr. J. David Hulchanski, one of Toronto Neighbourhoods Research Network’s conveners and professor in the Faculty of Social Work, spoke on the issue of Toronto’s growing income gap.

Hulchanski’s research, posits three “cities” that make up Toronto based on income level. The middle income “city” is getting smaller with every census count, the top is predominantly “white” as self-identified in the census, and the low income “city” comprises 40 per cent of the city’s population and is composed of:

• 34 per cent self-identifying as “white”
• 12 per cent “black”
• 15 per cent “Chinese”
• 20 per cent “Asian”
• And 19 per cent “other”

Hulchanski noted that these figures continue to point towards growing inequality by geography and he recommends all levels of government should continue to emphasize the importance of putting neightbourhoods on the public policy agenda. His specific recommendations included inclusionary zoning, rental housing rehabilitation, and redirecting the provincial share of land transfer tax to municipalities.

There are other reports that support Hulchanski’s findings as well, including Poverty By Postal Code, a report prepared jointly by United Way of Greater Toronto and the Canadian Council on Social Development. This report also illustrates the income gap is widening in Toronto and neighbourhood poverty has intensified. Their recommendations include creating employment and retraining opportunities and making housing affordable in all areas of the city.

You can download more detailed information about Hulchanski’s research from the Centre for Urban & Community Studies website.

First off, let me say that I’m a blogging novice, so hopefully I won’t violate too many rules of social networking here! But when Graham Watts (who is Director of Resource & Exchange (REX), Training & Development) asked me to get involved in our team’s contribution to the new blog for our colleagues in the social housing sector, I couldn’t turn him down… turns out Graham is quite persuasive.

Before I go any further, I want to introduce myself to you. I’m Tim Leung, Research Analyst in REX from SHSC. I’ve been in this role for about six months, and prior to that, was a research assistant at the University of Toronto. Before joining SHSC, I held a role in statistical analysis in Charter Cases, and also picked up some interesting knowledge in shelter development in the Third World.

But enough about me… the real reason I’m blogging is to talk about my attendance at the XXV International Methodology Symposium in Gatineau, Quebec from October 26-30, organized by Statistics Canada. To be sure, I am no survey methodologist in the strictest sense (my statistical training was at the analytical end), but I am currently working on satisfaction surveys to evaluate services for the social housing sector (stay tuned).

One way we evaluate our services is through longitudinal data analysis. Why do we care so much about this kind of analysis even if the surveys we conduct do not involve the general public?

The answer?

It matters to us because social housing, as with all sectors, can suffer from “survey overload” and response rates can decline over time (this even happens with big-time statistical agencies like Statistics Canada). For instance, when people feel that their response to a survey produces no value, they are less likely to respond the next time. There are many problems associated with a decline in response rates. Perhaps, the most crucial problem, from an organizational view, is that a decrease in participation can actually increase the costs of the operating cost of conducting a survey (e.g. how many times do we have to call back respondents who did not respond initially or who left out key information?).

When response rates decline in longitudinal surveys about household spending, for instance, one strategy can entail selecting other respondents to be part of the sampling frame. It is harder for us to do this in the social housing sector because we have a smaller pool of respondents – when our “sector” respondents stop responding to surveys, we have nowhere else to go! Moreover, our respondents are pre-determined—they include housing providers and property managers in Ontario—and if we survey the entire group at once and receive a low response rate, there is no replacement!

There are, obviously, possible implications to how we approach surveys and the potential burden it has on busy respondents (e.g. housing providers, property managers). Many social housing providers can recall responding to lengthy surveys over the years as either government or others try to identify issues in the social housing sector and apply common solutions. We acknowledge the importance and the sincerity of these approaches, but at the same time we have to learn from past mistakes and try to create a system of information-gathering that builds on current systems and data to create an ongoing and manageable way of measuring the “state” of social housing. Stay tuned for more as SHSC moves forward with a data collection and inventory plan and evaluates the social housing sector in a “longitudinal” way!

I was fortunate to be able to chair a session at the ONPHA conference on Sunday entitled Recruitment and Retention: Changing the “Image” of Social Housing. Our presenters for this session were excellent, but the real stars of the show were the conference participants that asked some great questions and offered insightful feedback.

Presenters from left: Neville McGuire, Michael Buzzelli, Merv Huges and Dave Colangelo

One of the best ideas was to establish an undergraduate housing essay competition. Not only would this motivate students at the undergraduate level to think and write about housing, it would also be an excellent public relations opportunity for a sector that could use a bit of good press. A bursary for students in financial need studying housing could also work in the same way. For the past three years SHSC has helped to fund and manage a research internship program for MA and PhD level students. You can see their work here.

A number of participants also mentioned the importance of involving tenants in the operation of their own housing. Who better to manage housing than someone who knows the place from the inside? This is a model that has quite a bit of traction in the UK (eg. Tenant Participation Advisory Service, Tenant Services Authority) and something that we could definitely use more of in Canada.

Fittingly, the conference wrapped up with awards for a group of tenants that had made outstanding contributions where they live. One of GLOBE’s Community Champions, Lynn Wood from Richview Residence, received an award.

If you have some examples of how tenants have made where they live a great place to live, or if you have ideas on how we can further engage tenants in the provision of housing, post a comment!

Well, it’s budget time again! Just got back from a breakfast forum put on by Global Public Affairs at the National Club entitled “Toronto’s Budget: Priorities for 2010” – it was covering the city of Toronto capital budget (the 10-year capital plan totals over $16 billion – http://www.toronto.ca/budget2010/index.htm). Councillor and Budget Chair Shelley Carroll described the budget process and the public consultations that are now underway to get input. They call this “the easy budget” – the operating budget will be the hard one (February, 2010).

A Markham Municipal staff described their zero tax policy – but that it may change in the coming years. The Markham staff person described the Toronto budget as a bellwether for most Municipalities. Bill Davis reminded everyone that wherever the $ seem to come from, they in fact all originate with the same tax payer. I found the debate interesting, and the challenges from Board of Trade on the flaws of the budget process and consultation, as well as the challenges and thoughts on how to raise funds (Peter Kuitenbrouwer of the National Post suggested some ways of raising funds – like selling Metro Hall). It made me think about how reactive budgets can be – Carroll wants to tie the city’s funds to the economy more closely so that as the economy grows, so do the funds. Others commented that this can be flawed in tough times. Either way, this budget is going forward and really is only representative of what is actually done with the money to make a sustainable and prosperous city.

And as I go into my own departmental budgeting process, I gain a new insight into the context in which I work. Social housing budgets are notoriously tight and constrained. To help with managing these dollars, SHSC has tried to provide insight into specific ways in which social housing as a sector can become more efficient and effective. Affordable Housing in Perilous Times is concerned with the framework of spending decisions, regulatory requirements, and housing programs which shape the production of new affordable housing and which protect the existing housing stock, both private and social. Check it out on our website under the SHSC Research section. Stay tuned for more thoughts on budgeting and how and what we do with the funds that fuel our communities.