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 [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Housing & homelessness'
Housing Solutions
January 2nd, 2010 · Seth Klein · Comments Off · Housing & homelessness
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 · Comments Off · 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 · Comments Off · 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 · Comments Off · 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
UN raps our housing record
March 11th, 2009 · Seth Klein · Comments Off · BC Election 2009, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
In mid February, a report was released that received very little attention, but should have: The report of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing’s Mission to Canada (hat tip to Jean Swanson for drawing the final report to my attention; it can be found here; just scroll down to the “Mission to Canada”.) The [...]
Tags: Aboriginal·Downtown Eastside·homelessness·housing·Olympics·poverty·UN
Nailing down homeless targets
March 9th, 2009 · Seth Klein · Comments Off · BC Election 2009, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare
Kudos to BC’s Auditor General for his report on homelessness last week. John Doyle’s report raised numerous concerns, including that the provincial government lacks solid numbers on how many homeless people there are in BC, who they are, and most importantly, he found that the province does not have a clear and comprehensive action plan, [...]
Tags: homelessness·housing·poverty
Talk of addressing homelessness in Throne Speech remains just that
February 17th, 2009 · Iglika Ivanova · Comments Off · BC Election 2009, Housing & homelessness, Poverty, inequality & welfare, Provincial budget & finance
Yesterday’s Throne Speech got me excited with its promise of finally addressing homelessness in BC. Like everyone else, I expected the economy to be the main focus of the document and was not surprised to hear that the government is planning to create jobs through ramping up infrastructure spending. But then I got to page [...]
