Canadian Social Housing: Policy Evolution and Impacts on the Housing System and Urban Space

The social housing system is analysed as an element of the evolving welfare state, housing system, and urban space, focusing on a 1965-1995 prime period in Canada, Ontario and Toronto. The theoretical concerns pertain to welfare state evolution and impacts. These include: in policy change, the relation between institutional continuity, structural factors, and political forces; in the housing system, decommodification in a liberal-welfare regime in shifting eras; and in urban space, the structuring of social mix by socio-tenure segregation. The policy history, using archival sources, interviews, and reinterpreted secondary literature, is the first detailed overview all turning points including the critical junctures of the mid-1960s and mid-1990s. Its structured narrative analyses the reshaping of policy by the political-economic context, housing market and urban development factors, ideas, and specific events. The housing system analysis reviews impacts in production, housing mix, rents paid, mobility (choice), and the value of rent-geared-to-income (RGI) assistance as a social transfer. The spatial analysis uses administrative and census data to analyse, for Greater Toronto 1971-1996, the evolving locations of low-income RGI tenants vis-Ă -vis low-income market renters and all households. The close relation of social housing policy change to critical junctures in welfare state evolution is confirmed, but also the large impact of housing market conditions and urban development agendas; shifting ideas; and particular political actors and events. Social housing accounted for about 10 percent of production, while RGI reduced rents to under 40 percent of market levels for almost 40 percent of low-income renters, and accounted for about one-fifth of their residential mobility. The thirty-year social housing prime created a mixed economy of urban development, its non-market housing sector altering urban space and mitigating the low-end extremes of inequality: comparable to what Canada's then `mid-Atlantic' welfare state effected generally in that era.Ph.D