![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
It took 50+ years of federal housing policy and municipal planning to transform Canada into a homeownership society. Over the past three decades, these efforts also coincided with significant periods of public austerity that curtailed social expenditures, especially in terms of social housing. Thus, as homeownership became “locked-in” as the dominant form of tenure, housing vulnerability became further entrenched. From the 1990s until the present day, government action to end housing vulnerability has remained at an impasse. We call this development pathway the housing vulnerability deadlock to draw attention to the interplay of economic and political mechanisms that have impeded government action. In this article, we describe the mechanisms constituting this deadlock and reflect on the prospects of breaking out of it.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. According to CMHC (Citation2022b), “A household is in core housing need if its housing is below one or more of the adequacy, suitability and affordability standards, and it would have to spend 30% or more of its before-tax household income to access local housing that meets all three standards.”
2. We are drawing on Hulchanski’s (Citation2006, 222) definition of housing system which can be understood as “a method of ensuring (or not) that enough good-quality housing is built, that there is a fair housing allocation system, and that the stock of housing is properly maintained.”