Affordable Housing+ Solutions Lab
Solutions in an effort to shift the affordable housing baseline
This project entitled Affordable Housing+ Solutions Lab received funding from the National Housing Strategy under the CMHC Solutions Labs, however, the views expressed are the personal views of the author and CMHC accepts no responsibility for them.
Why Affordable Housing+?
The Affordable Housing+ Solutions Lab was set up to explore how affordable housing might become a more meaningful tool to break down barriers that perpetuate cyclical poverty. Our hypothesis is that many existing programs, systems, and funding streams unintentionally create dependencies or limit the ability of individuals or households to make changes, take risks, or build up informal social support networks.
We know that we need to think about the whole system of housing: government, philanthropy, health, education, finance, food, transportation and community. To better understand this in our local context, we went to the true experts: people working in and living with housing need in our city of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.
What did we do?
Over the course of 12 months we spoke to close to 100 individuals from over 40 different local organizations connected to local affordable housing. As the project started just as the COVID pandemic created social havoc, our planned discussions and workshops moved to virtual. This impacted our vision for immersive ethnographic studies of what it is truly like to live with unmet housing needs in St. John's. However, as government restrictions lessened we were able to chat in doorways with more than 20 individuals currently living in subsidized housing.
We also immersed ourselves in neighbourhoods run by local housing providers to get a sense of how these places might be the same or different from other areas with home ownership or market rental tenures. Just looking at aerial maps pointed out a stark characteristic: most affordable housing in the city had very little vegetation, and those that did were predominantly covered in ill-cared-for grass.
These conversations, combined with our observations and research, led to a collection of ideas about what ideal, holistic, affordable housing can be. Everyone we spoke to had clear visions of successful, thriving, and empowering neighbourhoods. This led to an incredible amount of input from our local community that we wanted to format in a way that would be helpful for us to use to create an innovative new affordable housing business model, while also one that would be relevant to our wide collection of stakeholders.
This website is a prototype, part of the Solutions Lab process, to see the extent to which this information might be helpful locally, regionally, and nationally, as well as how we can improve on it. Below is a simplified version of the "Framework for Holistic Community" that we developed in St. John's to reflect the various components needed to create a holistic, affordable, empowerment-focused community (the full version of the St. John's 9-Pillars Logic Model can be found if you scroll to the bottom of this site).
Who is this information for?
The Affordable Housing+ Solutions Lab was set up to explore how affordable housing might become a more meaningful tool to break down barriers that perpetuate cyclical poverty. Our hypothesis is that many existing programs, systems, and funding streams unintentionally create dependencies or limit the ability of individuals or households to make changes, take risks, or build up informal social support networks.
We know that we need to think about the whole system of housing: government, philanthropy, health, education, finance, food, transportation and community. To better understand this in our local context, we went to the true experts: people working in and living with housing need in our city of St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.
How to use the Framework for Holistic Community?
As a checklist for planning and implementing new affordable housing communities
As an evaluation tool to better understand the strengths and gaps in existing affordable housing
As an ecosystem mapping tool to allow organizations to find other local groups who they can help or who can help them fill gaps
This original reason we started researching what makes holistic affordable housing was to inform our Affordable Housing+ business model. This framework, as a checklist, allowed us to quickly scan the components, pick out areas where organizations are already doing amazing work, and highlight areas where we should focus the new business model.
We also gave the checklist to a local affordable community-led housing project to see how useful it was for them.
Existing housing providers in our testing sessions were interested in how this framework could help them evaluate their own affordable housing models, to find where they excelled and where they might be able to be more holistic.
Funding agents also suggested that a checklist could be helpful in comparing applications for how holistically they consider the issue of housing and innovation.
This original reason we started researching what makes holistic affordable housing was to inform our Affordable Housing+ business model. This framework, as a checklist, allowed us to quickly scan the components, pick out areas where organizations are already doing amazing work, and highlight areas where we should focus the new business model.
We also gave the checklist to a local affordable community-led housing project to see how useful it was for them.