Still Renovating Reviewed in Ontario Planning Journal

In the January/February 2017 issue of the Ontario Planning Journal, Noreen Dunphy reviews Greg Suttor’s new release Still Renovating: A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy.

Below is an excerpt taken from the review. The full review can be viewed online, on page 16 of the Ontario Planning Journal.

Reviewed by Noreen Dunphy

Spanning the period from the 1940s to the present, this history is focused on Canada’s social housing—public, non-profit and co-operative housing—and the policies and programs that were created, changed, abandoned or maintained on life-support for potential future revival. It is not a study of overall affordable housing needs, or the other programs and levers of government policy that have affected and subsidized market rental housing, affordable ownership and rehabilitation of aging housing stock.

This comprehensive account positions social housing policy within the broader context of changing political forces and thinking on social policy and the role of the state, as they in turn were affected by economic and fiscal considerations amid the changes brought by rapid urbanization and growing housing needs.

The author, Greg Suttor, currently a housing researcher at the Wellesley Institute in Toronto, was previously with the City of Toronto as a housing policy analyst and researcher.

Suttor focuses on six key turning points over the last 70 years, when social housing policy, funding and the roles played by the three levels of government changed significantly, identifying the mid-’60s to the mid-’90s as the “social housing prime period.” These 30 years saw high, sustained levels of social housing production (first public housing and then nonprofit and co-operative housing) not reached before or since. After federal and then Ontario funding for new social housing was terminated in the ’90s, and housing responsibilities were devolved to the provinces, the recent tentative federal re-engagement has resulted in production levels of about 1/3 that of the “prime period.”

Read the full review (page 16).

Still Renovating
A History of Canadian Social Housing Policy

By Greg Suttor

A necessary look at how public, non-profit, and co-operative housing flourished and faded.