From Justice to Profit
Funding Housing for the good of society
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 lowincome 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 density
zoning changes (secondary suits and laneway housing)
waiving development cost levies on rental units
 funding for new social housing units, including replacing SROs
The Affordability gap
2006, average renter pays $334/month more than they can afford =
$4,0005/year
Affordability 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”