Housing the Homeless and Poor: New Partnerships Among the Private, Public, and Third Sectors

Randall White, a political scientist, is also a Toronto-based economic
consultant and author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to Senate
Reform in Canada.

Housing the Homeless and Poor presents seven papers originally delivered
at a symposium sponsored by the Canadian Real Estate Association and the
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in 1987. The papers are
introduced and concluded by essays from the co-editors, both well-known
contributors to the Canadian housing literature, who teach at York
University in Toronto.

As the editors note, “homelessness” in the narrowest sense is not
as great a problem in Canada as in the United States. Yet in both
countries the evolution of housing-market and other social trends in the
1960s and 1970s, along with changes in government policies during the
1980s, have conspired to put new kinds of people out on the street. The
extreme difficulties of having no fixed address have become a new focus
for the broader, more traditional concerns of social housing policy.

One of the essays deals with recent American experience in
Massachusetts. The others all focus on the Canadian scene. The
Massachusetts piece implicitly illustrates how the policy environment is
still quite different north of the undefended border.

As its subtitle suggests, the volume sees the solution to homelessness
in Canada in new collaborations among government, the real estate
industry, and charitable and nonprofit “third-sector” or
“nongovernment” community organizations.

At the same time, the authors take pains to set the homelessness issue
in the broader context of social housing policy trends at large. The
most enduring value of the book probably lies in its reportage on how
social housing policy debate in Canada has changed during the past
decade.

In this sense Housing the Homeless and Poor forms a policy companion to
John Miron’s recent statistical study of Canadian housing markets,
Housing in Postwar Canada. Both books make clear that the housing issue
in Canada today, like so much else, is not what it was a generation ago.