Thanks to Jean Swanson for drawing to my attention a new report from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities called Mending Canada’s frayed social safety net: The role of municipal governments. The report looks at key social indicators in 24 Canadian municipalities, and contains some stark findings for Vancouver. Jean summarizes these in a blog post [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Housing & homelessness'
Vancouver’s poverty rate leads country
April 5th, 2010 · Seth Klein · 2 Comments · Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
BC’s Urban Housing (Un)affordability
January 25th, 2010 · Iglika Ivanova · 4 Comments · Agriculture, Environment, resources & sustainability, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
A new study published today by the Frontier Institute for Public Policy finds that Vancouver has the most unaffordable urban housing market not just in Canada, but in all of Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. This conclusion is based on a very simple, yet effective measure of housing affordability: [...]
A Modest Proposal
January 23rd, 2010 · Marjorie Griffin Cohen · 2 Comments · Environment, resources & sustainability, Housing & homelessness
At some point before long, Haiti is going to be rebuilt. It occurs to me that we in BC have available wood to help in the effort. Most things are built of concrete there because there simply isn’t any wood. Rebuilding out of concrete will be massively expensive and massively polluting. And, as Premier Campbell [...]
Tags: Haiti·pine beetle wood
Housing Solutions
January 2nd, 2010 · Seth Klein · No Comments · Housing & homelessness
Just wanted to give our blog readers a plug for an excellent collection on housing solutions. Some of you have likely been following the Tyee’s excellent series of articles on housing and homelessness, written by Monte Paulsen. Now the Tyee has put that whole series together in a single pdf collection. You can find it [...]
Tags: homelessness·housing
Poverty and BC’s high cost of housing
December 7th, 2009 · Marc Lee · 2 Comments · Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
BC Stats put out a release on poverty lines as they relate to BC, with an important finding: BC’s dubious position as having the highest poverty rates in Canada may in fact be worse than the statistics show. This finding is buried in the piece and the title, “Low Income Cut-Offs a Poor Measure of [...]
Tags:
The catch-22 of low-income benefits that are phased out quickly
October 9th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · 8 Comments · Children & youth, Employment & labour, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Provincial budget & finance, Taxes, Women
My friend Emily is a single mom. She works full time for a salary that keeps her and her child above the poverty line but doesn’t allow for much more. Her income is low enough that she qualifies for temporary relief from paying her student loans (which are massive even though she is yet to [...]
Docs call for more attention to addiction
April 8th, 2009 · Keith Reynolds · No Comments · BC Election 2009, Health care, Housing & homelessness
The BC Medical Association released an important report at the end of March. The Vancouver Sun gave it good coverage, but overall it didn’t get the attention it deserved. Stepping Forward: Improving Addiction Care in BC raises a lot of issues worth talking about in an election. The report estimates there are 400,000 British Columbians [...]
Tags: addiction·health care costs
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words
March 27th, 2009 · Shannon Daub · No Comments · BC Election 2009, Children & youth, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
Or twenty thousand as the case may be. The CCPA published a number of major studies in recent years about BC’s unacceptably high levels of poverty and homelessness, as well as provincial welfare policies that contribute to hardship and homelessness. These issues are brought to life in a series of narrated slideshows created for the [...]
Tags: homelessness·poverty·welfare
Food as a right of citizenship
March 19th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · No Comments · BC Election 2009, Housing & homelessness, Municipalities, Poverty, inequality & welfare
I came across an interesting piece in YES! Magazine about a city in Brazil that took an innovative approach to poverty reduction and practically ended hunger by adopting a food-as-a-right policy. Belo Horizonte, the fourth largest city in Brazil, has a population of 2.5 million people, slightly larger than the Lower Mainland. The city grappled [...]
Tags: food security·poverty
Well, now that Alberta is doing it …
March 17th, 2009 · Marc Lee · 2 Comments · BC Election 2009, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
You could say that BC is more than a little sweet on Alberta. We love their individualistic, tax-cutting, tar-sanding grit. Can’t get enough of it. We even signed a silly economic agreement called TILMA (the BC-Alberta Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement) so we could be more like them. If Alberta went and ran massive [...]
Tags: homelessness·housing·poverty·TILMA
