(URS6) Housing Governance

This session broadly explores home and housing with research on insecurities, meanings, economic and environmental considerations. Tags: Accueil Et Logement, Communautés, Rural Et Urbain

Organizers: Andrew Crosby, Carleton University, Natasha Martino, McMaster University; Chair: Andrew Crosby, Carleton University

Presentations

Sophie O'Manique, The Canadian Centre for Housing Rights, and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York; Jeremy Wildeman, Canadian Centre for Housing Rights; Jon Paul Mathias, Canadian Centre for Housing Rights

Nowhere to Go: Examining the Relationship Between Evictions and Homelessness in Toronto

The government of Canada has recognized that adequate housing is a fundamental human right and is essential to living a life with dignity. However, the universal realization of this right in Canada is increasingly elusive, as housing costs across the country skyrocket and become wildly out of step with wages. For low-income people, a housing crisis persisted long before it was acknowledged by politicians and the media. Currently, however, an increasing number of people are forced to live in highly precarious and life-threatening conditions, including a professional, middle class of workers once unaffected by the crisis, and with many more people now experiencing persistent homelessness. As larger and more affluent swathes of the population are affected by Canada’s housing affordability crisis, concern among policy makers and middle-income people has grown. Despite this growing concern, Canadian cities continue to evict tenants at shockingly high rates, with 12% of Canadian tenants having reported facing eviction in the past (Statistics Canada, 2021). This paper demonstrates that homelessness in Toronto, and Canada more broadly, is not a failure of governance, but is rather a policy choice pursued by different levels of government. In research conducted at the Canadian Centre for Housing Rights (CCHR), and in CCHR’s provision of services to tenants, our researchers have observed how eviction courts and informal eviction proceedings render people homeless every day. Citing examples from several research studies conducted by CCHR in 2022-24, this paper examines how formal eviction filings and informal eviction processes in Toronto are producing favourable outcomes for private housing providers while actively producing homelessness amidst an already profound housing crisis. This paper understands these dynamics as part of a mode of neoliberal urban governance that converts spaces of social production and reproduction into spaces of profit through displacement and resettlement (Chatterjee 2014, p. 6). This paper argues that rental housing regulations and eviction procedures in Toronto act as a state-sanctioned mode of spatial governance that makes housing more profitable for private housing providers while rendering tenants terminally precariously housed or homeless. This paper draws on an analysis of formal eviction filings; on interviews with service providers working in emergency shelters and eviction prevention programming in Toronto; and on surveys of Toronto tenants. This paper uses a social reproduction framework to consider how certain groups in Toronto are disproportionately relegated to precarious tenancies and are excluded from both the home ownership market and adequate and affordable housing in the private rental market. Social reproduction theory works to understand the relationship between production and the life-making processes that enable production. Social reproduction theorists contend that differences along the lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, family structure, immigration status and disability are produced and reproduced to be taken advantage of by capitalist forces - as capitalism requires the stratification of working people for its survival (Bhattacharya 2017, Arruzza 2016, Katz 2001). In examining marginalized groups are uniquely vulnerable to formal and informal evictions, this paper argues that formal and informal eviction processes work to reproduce differences along the line of race, gender, sexuality, family structure, immigration status and disability, to maintain a class of people who are relegated to long term housing insecurity and homelessness.

Lisa Kowalchuk, University of Guelph

At the crossroads of environmental and housing justice: options, opportunities, and challenges for household waste diversion in a diverse community

Since participation tracking began for household recycling and waste reduction programs, multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs) were seen to lag far behind single-family dwellings in their waste diversion rates. This paper identifies and investigates the challenges faced by residents of high-rise buildings in their efforts to increase rates of waste source streaming and waste reduction, and to improve overall recycling practices. Our focus is on renters in a diverse, densely populated, high-rise based community in the downtown east of Toronto, where the proportion of racialized immigrants and newcomers is high, and where most buildings date back to the 1970s. We also explore whether the barriers and opportunities differ between privately owned and rent-subsidized city-owned properties. Our study is framed by literature pertaining to class and environmentalism, the political economy of housing conditions, and environmental justice. Within the scholarship on household waste in MURBs, some analysts observe a popular assumption that renters, especially those in subsidized housing, are unconcerned with recycling and waste diversion. Such thinking finds a parallel in a contested but still extant theory in international development studies that low income correlates with environmentally destructive behaviour; the poor are said to be compelled by everyday survival needs and subsistence crises to consume in an extractive and polluting way. Further, in affluent country urban contexts, environmental and climate activism remains largely a white and bourgeois phenomenon, with little presence of newcomer, immigrant, racialized, and low-income groups. Martins (2016) challenges classist assumptions about renters and environmental values, arguing that for all high-rise dwellers, not just those of low income, the decisive factors for waste reduction are those under the control of building management, particularly infrastructural accessibility, informational clarity, and convenience of segregated waste disposal. To this we would add the policy context: governments play a role in incentivizing private landlords to shape the ease of waste sorting, and in funding robust and ongoing education of tenants. If renter-predominant communities cannot avail themselves of the means for diverting recyclables, organics, bulky and hazardous waste as easily as residents of condos and single-family dwellings, this is an aspect of environmental justice. This dimension of the issue is all the more pronounced for rentals where many live with disabilities and mental health struggles as is the case with subsidized housing. In collaboration with a community hub organization called the St. James Town Community Corner, we collected data through two main methods. One, a mixed modal survey of residents in two rental high-rises (n=103) and secondly, observations and insights from lived experience shared by teams of resident participant-collaborators. Resident collaborator teams will use study results to develop action plans for improving waste practises in their buildings. A key finding is that while many residents understand household waste as an environmental issue for the society and planet, they also experience mismanaged and poorly maintained disposal as a dimension of the aesthetics, health, hygiene and safety of their immediate surroundings. In other words, it becomes part of the housing conditions and quality of life, making waste a housing justice issue. We also find that waste diversion and reduction are a high-priority concern among study participants, but that they are constrained by inconvenient, unsafe, unwieldy or entirely absent infrastructure, and an informational void about what goes where. Underlying this are landlords’ under-investment in supporting better practises, and an unhelpful provincial policy regime governing the waste practises of MURB owners. For example, landlords that use private waste haulers are not compelled to collect organics separately. We suggest that the values and insights found in this dense community of renters are an untapped opportunity for provincial and municipal governments to reach the ambitious goals they have set for greenhouse gas reduction through waste diversion.

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Non-presenting authors: Trisha Einmann, University of Guelph; Aravind Joseph, St. James Town Community Corner; Alaa Mohamed, St. James Town Community Corner

Kathleen Piovesan, Employment and Social Development Canada; Ivana Previsic, Employment and Social Development Canada

Meanings of Homeownership: Exploring the Nexus of Culture, Finance, and Policy

Two recent large-scale qualitative research projects on the relationships between homeownership, housing debt, and retirement have demonstrated that housing, in the form of homeownership, is a key cultural structure and individual experience that both embeds meaning from and produces meaning in policy and finance. Using a life history approach alongside in-depth qualitative interviewing, this project draws on literature in the areas of neoliberalization, housing policy, and financialization to examine how a diminished social safety net has invested homeownership with intense emotional, cultural, and financial meanings. These meanings, as argued by Smith (2008) are producing new subject positions vis-a-vis the home, which are increasingly enmeshed with financialized versions of owned housing as a vehicle not only for shelter and the emotional-cultural attachments associated with this use, but with credit, debt, and wealth accumulation and the emotional-cultural attachments associated with these uses. For unattached women homeowners, in particular, greater difficulty achieving other forms of financial security (e.g. savings and pensions through waged work) combined with a more limited safety net and extant inequalities (gender wage gap, care gap, and pension gap) led them to rely on their homes, and particularly the prices that can be “fixed” through mortgaged housing purchase, “added” through additional housing debt, “earned” through housing price increase, and “saved” through debt repayment. Housing policy in Canada combined with financial markets, especially in a low interest rate environment, have directly contributed to this contradictory yet deep meaning making. By withdrawing from housing production to satisfy neoliberal policy mandates, governments pushed lower income households into the market for housing, both rented and owned, contributing to a rise in pressure in both markets. Combining this pressure with existing cultural norms valorizing homeownership, many women acted to lock in a fixed housing price or sought to retain their owned homes post-divorce or at the point of widowhood to retain a sense of control and financial possibility. Surprisingly, debt did not much challenge this perception of homeownership as security, even when debt grew eating into equity or when debt repayment ate into income preventing financial savings and even leading to a struggle to afford daily living. Implicit is a comparison to other forms of housing tenure, especially market rental. Through their lens, and often with direct experience of the rental market, including eviction, home owning is the only means through which to achieve secure housing, in the sense of housing they have, are likely to keep long term, and through which they experience the emotional wellbeing of physical comfort and safety, relative autonomy in housing decisions, and sustained connection to valued objects, memories, relationships, and lifeways. These ties and the perceived threats of not owning a home combined to make any risks in homeownership, particularly with housing debt, seem small. The dream of homeownership, including its many contradictions and risks, permeates our housing policy. From the period of neoliberal withdrawal to the current promises made in new government programs and pronouncements, homeownership, despite its extremely high costs, including the costs of purchase and of interest payments, remains a major emotional-cultural-financial goal among households and policy makers. And, the more its goal is embedded in policy, the more it is embedded in individual dreams and vice versa. However, could there be another way? The experiences of the unattached women in this study indicate yes. Homeownership takes on a foundational set of emotional-financial meanings in two conditions: no other source of financial security and no other source of housing stability. Yet, homeownership is not the only way to provide these things. This paper will conclude with alternative policies that may expand the possibility of security to a broader range of people.

Julia Woodhall-Melnik, University of New Brunswick

The Meaning of Home: A review of a complex concept

In the housing literature, the concept of home differs from a physical structure of a house. Home refers to the socioemotional relationships that exist within a house structure, connection to place and an overall sense of belonging and wellbeing. Historically, home has been viewed as a positive place wherein occupants recharge and benefit from the privacy and the stability of place. More recently, feminist scholars grapple with the problematic nature of home for women, as it can be a place of danger, damage, and servitude. This creates a black and white dichotomy within the literature on home, wherein home is viewed as either bad or good. This presentation presents the findings of a literature review on the development of the concept of home over the past decade. The findings indicate that the concept of home is much greyer than initially presented and is too complex to be discussed as a binary. The implications of the development of a more complex and fluid concept to define home on housing scholarship and practice are discussed. This presentation concludes with a discussion of future areas of research that may contribute to the further development of the concept of home.

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