“New Housing Alternatives for a Socially-Just, Post-Covid Urban Canada” is a $2.5 M seven-year Partnership Grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), led by Alan Walks and Susannah Bunce (both at University of Toronto). Having received a one-year Partnership Development Grant in 2023, we are launching the seven-year grant in 2024, looking at ways to decommodify, definancialize, desegregate, and decolonize the Canadian housing system. There are over 60 individual researchers and community partner organizations working on this grant, many of them leaders in the field. We’ll focus on four areas of research:
- Housing precarity: evictions, rent increases, landlord practices, homelessness, and encampments
- Alternative housing arrangements: community-led housing initiatives, e.g., community land trusts, co-operative housing, co-housing, and eco-villages
- Reform and redesign of housing policy, processes, and governance: existing congregate settings, pension funds’ financing of private-sector and public-sector housing development
- Rethinking urban land and tenure: land claims, land-back movements, and condo tenure and social housing tenure
For the first two years, I’ll be co-leading (with Ricardo Tranjan, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) Research Cluster 3 on reforming and redesigning housing policies, processes, and governance. RC1 will be co-led by Julie Mah (University of Toronto) and Jeremy Wildeman (Canadian Centre for Housing Rights), RC2 by Susannah Bunce and Nat Pace (Canadian Community Land Trust Network), and RC4 by Heather Dorries (University of Toronto) and Maggie Low (University of British Columbia). We plan to rotate RC leads every two years.
Follow our website for the latest updates on the project!