RESEARCH CLUSTER 3
Co-Leads: Ren Thomas (Dalhousie) and Ricardo Tranjan (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives)
Building upon housing financialization research, urban socio-spatial segregation studies, and human-rights-centred approaches, this cluster asks: What practices promote a rights-based approach to housing? How can we reform and redesign housing policies to provide real choice to households? What new financial arrangements might facilitate more equitable investment, community ownership, and democratic control of housing? What types of social and supportive housing arrangements can meet the needs of equity-deserving groups? What policies are needed to enhance non-profit/community-based supportive housing?
Research Projects that are part of Research Cluster 3:
Project 3A: Policy Reform and Redesign to Desegregate Housing
The housing crisis has augmented segregation processes, with many vulnerable individuals living in high-risk congregate living settings, including group homes and shelters. Refugees to Canada often find themselves forced to live in temporary shelters upon arrival, often within a concentrated group of shelters and susceptible to COVID-19 outbreaks. This is not their choice. Many people, particularly refugees and people with disabilities, are placed by agencies in unsuitable temporary or institutionalized congregate situations such as group homes that do not enable personal control, temporary hotel-based shelters, or long-term care institutional settings. These living situations can reduce access to employment and social support and impede the ability to live an independent life. This project will examine current spatial, funding, and policy configurations for social and congregate housing, including data on racialized and disabled communities. We will conduct policy analyses and explore the lived experiences of youth and adults in congregate housing through interviews and focus groups in four case-study communities. We will identify opportunities for new policy and legislation to support alternative independent and collective living arrangements. We will analyze best practice models of inclusive planning, policy, and funding supports in Canada and internationally, and we will connect with policymakers to make policy recommendations to transform the delivery of congregate housing.
Project 3B: Transforming Investment Behaviour in Real Estate
Policies at upper levels of government have spurred the financialization of housing through ‘innovations’ in mortgage securitization and the legal infrastructure for the creation of REITs and similar financial entities. Pension funds – in the public and private sectors – have become a major funder of these innovations by purchasing financial securities. This project will explore the form and extent of investments in real estate and how this investment has promoted specific practices, such as the purchase of rental buildings in neighbourhoods with more new immigrants and racialized households and landlord business models based on high turnover (eviction). We will statistically examine – using multivariate methods – the extent of investment in real estate by various entities and their effects on rents, land values, and evictions (leveraging the findings generated in Cluster 1: Housing Precarity along with data provided by the Evictions Lab). We will engage in policy analyses that compare the practices of Canadian financial entities, including pension funds, to international models of best practice in the real estate and pension fund sectors that have used an EDI lens to identify those practices which, if applied in Canada, would create more equitable impacts. Based on our findings, we will develop responsible and equitable investing recommendations to promote inclusive rental housing and lending practices and minimize adverse effects on racialized people, lone parents, lower-income households, and other vulnerable groups. Currently, little is known about the nature and extent of these investments, and many pension fund managers are not even aware of the effects of their investments, so this study addresses a significant research gap. Our project will create a set of written guidelines for responsible, inclusive investing that will benefit all Canadians.