Silver Buckshot

Reading a story in the media about housing in Canada leads to an inescapable conclusion: something is very wrong with our housing system. The promise of homeownership is broken, rents are out of reach for all but the wealthiest households, and government-funded housing solutions have not decreased the number of Canadians in core housing need. The alternatives to homeownership have been depicted as undesirable alternatives for decades, but the private housing market will never be able to provide units that are affordable to a significant share of households. There are thousands of people experiencing homelessness across the country. We are losing rental units to demolition or redevelopment faster than we can build new ones.

If you’re like me, you’re tired of hearing about the state of Canadian housing. Reading mainstream media—or worse, social media—it’s easy to believe that this is a wicked problem, so complex that it’s virtually unsolvable. We are victims of unaffordability, financialization, neoliberalism, and displacement, and can only numbly observe as things get worse. We are told there aren’t enough resources, enough capital, enough of anything. And yet…solutions are being implemented all across the country.Somehow.

Silver Buckshot is about how organizations are building housing that is about people, not about profit. It is about every person who is volunteering their time to educate their peers, building capacity among other organizations, and developing new approaches to scale up production of affordable housing. It is about the abundance of small, incremental changes that are leading to a paradigm shift in the way we think about safe, high quality, affordable housing in Canada.

This book is self-published and I will donate 30% of the royalties to local housing charities/non-profits in each city where I have an event. You can order a version with 10 colour title pages from me, or else order the black and white version from Amazon. Amazon sales launched July 10th and were already #1 in Regional Planning Policies on the third day! Follow me here or on LinkedIn to see if I’m coming to an event in your city!