Disability in Housing Need Assessments: The Canadian Landscape


Julia Woodhall-Melnik, University of New Brunswick

Housing needs assessment’ (HNA) is an umbrella term for a set of quantitative and (sometimes) qualitative research tools used to measure and describe housing needs in a given geographic area. The purpose of these assessments, broadly, is to inform planning and housing policy. Amidst Canada’s housing crisis, government and the non-profit sector is becoming increasingly focused on enumeration; enumerating average shelter cost, vacancy rates and the number of people in core housing need. In this context, HNAs have increased in popularity among provincial and municipal governments as well as within the non-profit sector. While HNAs do attend to the priority groups named in the National Housing Strategy (2017), the prevailing treatment of disability within these assessments is often insufficient. Sometimes disability is missing, other times people with disabilities are treated as a monolithic group. Considering the growing role of HNAs for government priority setting in the housing arena, it is necessary to attend to the treatment of disability and propose a HNA framework that would capture the diversity within and among the disability community. This presentation offers a scoping review of HNA methodologies in Canada and offers recommendations for improving the disability lens. Theoretically, this work draws on critical disability studies, specifically work on absenting and essentializing disability.

Non-presenting author: Tobin LeBlanc-Haley, University of New Brunswick

This paper will be presented at the following session: