Small Cities, Big Issues

Reconceiving Community in a Neoliberal Era

Christopher Walmsley, Terry Kading

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781771991650
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Small Canadian cities confront serious social issues as a result of the neoliberal economic restructuring practiced by both federal and provincial governments since the 1980s. Drastic spending reductions and ongoing restraint in social assistance, income supports, and the provision of affordable housing, combined with the offloading of social responsibilities onto municipalities, has contributed to the generalization of social issues once chiefly associated with Canada's largest urban centres. As the investigations in this volume illustrate, while some communities responded to these issues with inclusionary and progressive actions others were more exclusionary and reactive—revealing forms of discrimination, exclusion, and "othering" in the implementation of practices and policies. Importantly, however their investigations reveal a broad range of responses to the social issues they face. No matter the process and results of the proposed solutions, what the contributors uncovered were distinctive attributes of the small city as it struggles to confront increasingly complex social issues.If local governments accept a social agenda as part of its responsibilities, the contributors to Small Cities, Big Issues believe that small cities can succeed in reconceiving community based on the ideals of acceptance, accommodation, and inclusion.

Part I

Displacement, Isolation, and the Other

1 Homelessness in Small Cities

The Abdication of Federal Responsibility

Terry Kading and Christopher Walmsley

Homelessness. We see it in our parks, on our streets, and in our alleys. But these are just the public faces of the issue. Homelessness also hides in tents and beneath bridges; it sleeps in shelters and eats in soup kitchens. Sometimes it moves from couch to couch, bouncing between friends and family members. Sometimes homelessness is born in the middle of the night as a woman flees from violence, or on a cold afternoon after the EI runs out and the rent is late. (HAP Steering Committee 2010, 3)

Homelessness has become a standard feature of Canada’s urban landscape. That people should be obliged to live on the streets is inexcusable in a wealthy country, one capable of providing housing for the entire population. In a country of long and extremely frigid winters, continuing to tolerate homelessness is fundamentally inhumane. Although, over roughly the past two decades, measures have been undertaken by both the federal and provincial governments to address homelessness, these have so far proved inadequate to solve the problem, particularly in the face of other trends in government that work to exacerbate it. From the standpoint of public policy, homelessness is one result of the triumph of a neoliberal market ideology, with its fixation on minimizing public expenditures, in part through the privatization of social services. As has long been recognized, however, in the absence of public subsidies, no incentive exists for the private sector to build low-cost housing, which is precisely why the federal government originally intervened in the housing market. Simply put, the private sector typically shows little interest in manufacturing products (including houses) or providing services for people who cannot afford to purchase them at standard market rates.

It is also well established that the costs of homelessness far outweigh the costs of providing adequate shelter to individuals in need. In testimony provided in June 2007 to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science, and Technology, Kim Kerr, then the executive director of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Residents’ Association, commented: “People should be pushed to do something simply out of humanity, but if you want to talk about money, it costs $48,000 a year to leave someone on the street. It costs $28,000 a year to house them. That argument has been around for a long time. It does not seem to make any difference” (Canada, Parliament, Senate 2009, 107). Estimates of the cost differential vary, of course, depending on time and place. In 2008, for example, researchers at Simon Fraser University concluded that it costs BC taxpayers at least $55,000 per year to allow an adult with severe addictions and/or mental illness to remain on the streets, as opposed to $37,000 to provide such an individual with adequate housing and support services (Patterson et al. 2008, 10–11). Among the costs of homelessness are increased demands on health care services (often emergency ones), expenses related to the construction and operation of temporary shelters, and additional burdens on police forces and the legal system, many consequent on local bylaws that attempt to criminalize the homeless. But these are merely the quantifiable costs: the human costs are incalculable.

Yet, despite these realities, federal funding for national homelessness initiatives has steadily dwindled over the years, a trend reversed only in the March 2017 budget, with its announcement of a new National Housing Strategy. In addition, in order to access funding, individual municipalities have been expected to develop and then implement a local “homelessness plan.” Communities have, in other words, been compelled to enter directly into the complexities of social planning and health policy—areas in which higher levels of government have historically assumed leadership. Small cities have limited financial resources, however, and they often lack the planning expertise required to formulate and implement effective strategies. Moreover, their jurisdictional authority is limited.

In comparison to small cities, major urban centres, some of which boast long-established social planning departments, generally have considerable experience with housing policy, as well as a greater array of options for generating new streams of revenue. They are thus in a somewhat better position to undertake homelessness initiatives—although even they have been unable to reverse the situation.1 Quite apart from their relatively limited capacities and resources, however, local municipalities also have less flexibility and autonomy than larger cities: they are obliged to rely more heavily on the largesse and the good will of federal and provincial governments in order to make substantive inroads in addressing homelessness. This dependence introduces a highly unpredictable variable into the planning process in small cities, no matter how committed the local government may be to addressing the long-term needs of the homeless population. As a result of this contingency, whether one is attempting to evaluate a small city in contrast to larger urban centres or simply in terms of the effectiveness of its own initiatives, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions simply by looking at statistical outcomes, such as the degree of decline observed in the rate of homelessness over a given period.

In other words, to be meaningful, evaluations of relative success or failure must take into account the context within which specific responses are situated. The immediate sources of homelessness, the magnitude and demographics of the homeless population, and the local political, social, and economic forces that influence attempts at solutions—all these play a role in outcomes. In addition to estimating numbers, homeless counts, which now occur on a fairly regular basis, provide profiles of the homeless population in specific small cities. Municipal reports and planning documents, media coverage, and interviews with city planners also offer insights into local circumstances and constraints, as well as into the scale of gains. At the same time, one must recognize that neither large cities nor small ones can be expected to resolve the underlying causes of homelessness, responsibility for which resides elsewhere. In the words of one recent study, “Municipalities require a strategic federal response that addresses the underlying structural causes of poverty, precarious housing and homelessness” (Adamo et al. 2016, 4). The reason that local governments now find themselves on the front line of the homelessness issue is, in short, rooted in policies devised and pursued by higher levels of government.

In what follows, we examine the origins of the homelessness crisis in Canada and its impact on small cities. We focus, in particular, on four small cities in British Columbia—Kamloops, Kelowna, Nanaimo, and Prince George—all of which have been obliged to embark on social planning initiatives in the face of growing homeless populations. By reflecting on these local responses, we hope to shed light on the consequences of the broader devolution of responsibility onto municipal governments, which are now held accountable for developing solutions to social problems not ultimately of their own creation.

Homelessness Policy in Canada: From National Programs to Local Initiatives

The increasingly visible presence of homeless individuals on the streets of cities and towns across Canada is not something over which we as a nation have had no control. Rather, the rising rates of homelessness are a result of deliberate policy changes instituted over the past several decades by the federal government, as well as by provincial administrations. Writing at the turn of the millennium, Barbara Murphy (2000, 19) succinctly summed up the main determinants of homelessness:

At the root of homelessness is poverty and the shocking reality that we are now tolerating a level of poverty that leaves so many without a roof over their head. Beyond the root cause of poverty we also tolerate a housing situation in our cities that provides little or no accommodation the poor can afford. The formula is simple—combine a growing number of poor and a growing number of expensive housing units and we have people on the streets. Add to this a failure to recognize that the mentally ill cannot manage on their own, economically or with even the simplest of life’s demands, and we have even more people on the streets.

As Murphy implies, without a shift both in public attitudes and in housing policy, the problem of homelessness will continue to grow, as indeed it has. Social and economic forces have cooperated to generate what Richard Florida (2017) calls “a crisis of gentrification, rising inequality and increasingly unaffordable urban housing,” with rising prices far outstripping income growth (see Demographia 2017, 19–22). This situation has been exacerbated by efforts to reduce spending at both the federal and provincial levels, consequent on the entrenchment of neoliberal principles of fiscal management. As we will see, in government circles, the result has been broad disagreement, underscored by attitudes of intransigence, regarding who should be held responsible for the provision of adequate housing, let alone for the growing homeless population.

With respect to housing, this lack of consensus in part reflects the division of power laid out in Canada’s constitution. The Constitution Act, 1867 (Canada, Department of Justice 2012), established the basic jurisdictional domains of the federal government and the provinces. Section 92 granted provincial legislatures the exclusive right to make laws concerning the “property and civil rights” of those residing within the province. Houses qualify as “property,” and, in a broad interpretation of “civil rights,” the provision of social services that provide support to individuals and households in dire need was originally assumed to fall within provincial jurisdiction. At the same time, as was clear from section 91, the federal government was responsible for the regulation of commerce, banking, and credit—that is, for matters relevant to the purchase of homes through mortgages as well as to financing for their construction. In addition, the federal government has always retained the constitutional power to take action on issues of national concern.

The passage, in 1937, of the Home Improvement Loans Guarantee Act, followed, in 1938, by the first National Housing Act, signalled the entry of the federal government into the realm of housing policy. This role was further solidified immediately after World War II, with the creation of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).2 In the early postwar period, federal policies favoured the middle class, in hopes of fostering a dynamic that would indirectly address the housing needs of low-income earners. Describing the period as “a time of federal leadership,” Barbara Carroll (2002, 73) notes that “primary emphasis was placed on the provision of single-family detached owner-occupied housing for middle-income families, under the assumption that low-income problems could be solved through filtering. That is, the middle-income groups who moved to the suburbs would vacate smaller, older, cheaper housing closer to the urban core, making it available for low-income groups.”

During the 1950s and 1960s, the federal and provincial governments also pushed an aggressive urban renewal strategy, targeting Canada’s largest urban centres. Urban renewal programs entailed the construction of high-density housing to compensate for the dislocations associated with so-called slum clearance. The resulting public housing projects served to stigmatize the poor, however, by relegating them to cheaply constructed apartment blocks located in areas where their occupants were unlikely to intrude on the lives of middle- to upper-income home owners or undermine property values. Even with that, these large public housing initiatives generated numerous complaints and would lose support by the late 1960s. Despite their evident failings, however, such projects, which significantly expanded the role of federal and provincial governments in the provision of low-income housing, established a stock of publicly owned land, especially in larger cities, while they also created a base of housing expertise at both levels of government (Murphy 2000, 96–98; Layton 2008, 263–65).

The 1969 Report of the Federal Task Force on Housing and Urban Development (Hellyer 1969) is generally credited with ending the practice of “slum clearance” and redirecting efforts towards alternative approaches to the provision of affordable housing. One such approach was “mixed-income” housing. As Murphy (2000, 98–99) explains,

Rather than ghettos of low-income residents, small-scale projects that housed residents with a range of incomes were to receive federal funding in the form of 100 percent mortgage assistance. These mixed-income projects were provided by non-profit or cooperative housing corporations which assigned a quarter of the project units to low-income tenants in exchange for the 100 percent loans. The federal government subsidized the rents of low-income tenants and, in effect, subsidized the rents of all income groups in these projects by paying the difference between what tenants paid and actual costs. Not only were projects smaller and better designed to accommodate their predominantly middle-class residents, but mixed-income housing also got around the problem of neighbourhood resistance.

As Murphy (2000, 99) notes, such housing projects became very popular in the mid-1970s, with the total number of units rising from 1,500 in 1973 to 22,000 in 1978, even if only a fraction of these units were intended for low-income residents. Under the leadership of Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal government also followed through on a promise made in 1974 to fund a million new housing starts within the next four years, with an emphasis on the creation of low-income housing (Coutts 2000, 190, 234). While no explicit commitment existed to providing shelter for all, federal-provincial cost-sharing arrangements were making progress in addressing multiple shortcomings in both housing and social assistance.

This momentum was, however, short-lived in the face of broader economic and budgetary problems that started to emerge in the late 1970s and persisted throughout the 1980s. The multiplicity of programs, as well as the heavy subsidies required to achieve results for low-income earners, made housing an area particularly vulnerable to death by a thousand cuts, cuts that were gradually introduced by the federal government over a period of roughly a decade. Cuts to housing programs began in November 1984, not long after the election of Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government, with a $217.8 million reduction in federal funding for housing development and rehabilitation (Layton 2008, 233). In 1985, federal policies changed so that financial assistance was available only for residents of low-income housing, thereby ending subsidies to low-income residents of mixed-income projects. Although social housing projects funded through cost-sharing arrangements had benefited low-income residents, the late 1980s brought cutbacks to these programs, with the number of new units falling from more than 20,000 in 1987 to under 7,000 in 1993 (Murphy 2000, 99–100). In 1993, the Mulroney government cancelled funding for new nonprofit or cooperative housing projects and capped federal expenditures on social housing at $2 billion annually. Jack Layton (2008, 233) calculates that, during the decade of Conservative rule, from 1984 to 1993, federal cuts to housing programs totalled some $1.8 billion.

The trend towards federal withdrawal from housing initiatives continued after the Liberals came to power in November 1993, under the leadership of Jean Chrétien. The 1996 federal budget, prepared by finance minister Paul Martin, announced a thirty-year plan to end federal funding for housing by gradually downloading existing federal housing programs onto the provinces and territories, with the intention of reducing the federal contribution from its current level of $1.7 billion to zero by the end of the period (Shapcott 2007, 9–10). Although this process of downloading entailed extensive negotiations between the federal government and the provinces, “the architects of this withdrawal turned their backs on towns and cities, none of which were represented in any of the inter-governmental discussions that led to the devolution of Canada’s housing projects” (Duffy, Royer, and Beresford 2014, 22). During the 1990s, provincial governments replicated the federal retreat from public and subsidized housing—but, in this case, there was no “organized devolution,” no process of provincial-municipal negotiation (22). Once again, cities were basically not consulted.

By the end of the decade, only a very small number of new public housing units were being built in Canada, given that the subsidies needed to promote the construction of low-income...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Displacement, Isolation, and the Other
• Part II Building Community
• Conclusion: The Way Forward
• List of Contributors